Politics

We all know by now that Barack Obama made history last Tuesday night.But so did Victoria Middlebrook. For all the momentous change at the top in this election year, it comes as a result of a triumphant change at the bottom. Obama rode a wave of reform created by millions of people like Middlebrook. Middlebrook,…

The landslide election of Barack Obama represents something extraordinary—but not just because our president-elect has brown skin. What is equally extraordinary is the rainbow-colored, mass movement that consolidated itself to catapult him into the White House. Even as we celebrate the phenomenon that is Obama, let us not lose sight of an even bigger phenomenon—that…

Did your election night party cheer or gasp when Michelle Obama strode out on stage in her bold black and red dress? Was there a collective pause among your friends and family or were people too overjoyed to care when watching history in the making? Folks across the Web have been debating the pros and…

While dodging those pigs I said would fly before a black man got elected president, I got to thinking about just who black folks had to thank for Barack Obama’s historic achievement. Obama and his brilliant staff are, of course, at the top of the list for mounting what was arguably the best presidential campaign…

A black president. Now that’s funny! So why are so many political satirists crying about how unamusing the Obama presidency will be? The standard reasoning is that, unlike Bush, McCain, Palin, the Clintons or even Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama is “too perfect” and does not provide material for good jokes. But the inability of “Saturday…

Fade back to 1983. Reaganomics has black America in a stranglehold, unemployment is running rampant, and my sisters and I have snuck into the basement after lights out to watch Eddie Murphy, clad in a skintight red leather outfit, tell dirty jokes. Eddie says he saw Jesse Jackson working out at the gym now that…

We were supposed to see a fur coat in this election. It was supposed to come out at an inopportune moment, the way Frank Lucas’ (Denzel Washington) garish chinchilla did at the Ali-Frazier fight in American Gangster. It tipped everyone off that the customarily low-profile and buttoned-down Lucas was the guy they thought he was…

Black people aren’t the only ones worried about embarrassing themselves now that Obama is president-elect. Here are a few pointers for white people. 1. Don’t personally congratulate all your black friends. Black people are not a sports team, and Obama did not win the Super Bowl. 2. Don’t declare that you “never thought you’d see…

The first first lady to enter my consciousness was Rosalynn. I was 13 at the time. She was 50, the child of a farmer, the wife of a former governor, the mother of three. I could not relate to her, exactly—she was older than my mother and white and from a deeper kind of South…