Politics

It’s not a good week for Alpha Kappa Alpha. For starters, the group’s national president, Barbara McKinzie, may be forced out following allegations that, among other “financial misdeeds,” she “used the organization’s money to commission a $900,000 ‘living legacy wax figure’ of herself,” as reported in the Washington Business Journal. And then there was the…

“Yo, I start to flinch as I try not to say it;But my lips is like the ooh-wop as I start to spray it…” – Q-Tip If a white woman can have a crush on Obama, then I hope a biracial man can have a crush on The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck, because she’s doing a…

While on a seven-country tour this week, dignified and presidential images of Barack Obama have replaced last week’s cartoon image of him as a fist-bumping, flag-burning terrorist. This isn’t the first time that questions of Obama’s patriotism and loyalty have been raised, then quieted, by an inspiring speech or image. Throughout this presidential election, Obama…

In Black in America, CNN’s four-hour-long series premiering this week, we learn some facts that may be news to viewers, including:— The prolific, loquacious Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson has a younger brother who is serving a life sentence for murder.— A fresh-faced, 18-year-old black single mother in the Bronx does not have the virus…

Albert Murray was the as-told-to author of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (1985). He first met Basie in the 1970s, though he’d followed Basie’s band since the 30s. In 1958, he wrote this about Basie to Ralph Ellison. (It was published in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert…

CINCINNATI—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will be 100 years old next year, and judging from the 3,000 or so folks who showed up for the organization’s convention in Cincinnati last week, so will many of its members. Though the nation’s largest and most important civil rights organization now boasts about 35,000…

Maybe it was that we had just come through a humiliating week of watching a parade of white, male senators talk down to a highly accomplished Latina federal appellate court judge and nominee to the United States Supreme Court, but I wasn’t feeling President Obama’s “tough love” message to the NAACP national convention. Obama delivered…

CINCINNATI—If any candidate for president ever demonstrated that he had guts, it was John McCain when he dared to appear before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s unlikely that the Arizona senator has faced a crowd so skeptical since he confronted his torturers in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp during the…

Depending on whom you ask, the July 21 cover of The New Yorker has become cause for outrage, confusion and partisan glee. Given the flare-ups surrounding race and representation that have rocked the 2008 presidential race, it’s easy to treat the satirical cover—of a be-turbaned Barack and a be-afroed Michelle Obama—and other “racialist” images of…