Politics

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…

READ MORE VOTER STORIES Myles and Nina Bell West Chester, Ohio Miles: Barack Obama is a beast. I like what he stands for. He wants to help people. The gas prices are high; he’s trying to lower them. He’s going to make sure that more people get insurance and that everybody will be safe and…

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…

It isn’t often that you get to choose where to watch history in the making, but Election Night was that rare event that you could pick your perch. I chose Harlem as my perch. I don’t live there, but I work there once a week, tending to the cheese program at a wine bar—yes, a…