Uncategorized
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MSG — Still Bad For You
For years, adding MSG to food was about as common, and acceptable, as adding a dash of salt. But as people became more health conscious and gained better access to nutritional information, they began to make the connection between their skull-splitting migraine and the previous night’s Chinese takeout. The discovery of MSG’s unpleasant side effects…
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Making Paper
For most of its 200-year history, the art of paper-doll making has not been flattering to black folks. Prior to the mid-1950s, white illustrators and publishers generally drew the rare black paper doll in menial or supporting roles, often as an appendage to a white family. Mimicking popular culture, images of picaninnies, sambos, mammies, butlers…
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Maybe Lou Dobbs is Right
It’s easy to ignore the ho-hum routines in a city like Washington, D.C.—a town that hosts conferences and conventions of some sort every single day, four or five times a day, it seems. But a town-hall meeting at this week’s 30th Annual Conference and Exposition of the National Black MBA Association offered timely insight into…
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All Together NOW!
The National Organization for Women’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama ordinarily would not be such a big deal. Even though the organization endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primaries, it makes sense that the group would channel its energy to the Democratic nominee. Still, with all the tension around gender and race that spilled over during…
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Jim Crow — The Remix
The Republican Party has finally found the outer edge of political cynicism; it’s located in Macomb County, Mich. Operatives there have figured out an upside to the foreclosure crisis roiling black neighborhoods: It enables mass voter-registration challenges and thereby offers a powerful opportunity to suppress the vote in Democrat-leaning districts. An enterprising journalist for the…
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Ready to Serve
I am ready! When asked, I will not blink! Ladies and gentlemen, I humbly submit to you the next vice president of these United States, moi. Hey, a week ago, that would have been ludicrous and laughable. But in the wake of Gov. Sarah Palin’s titanic interview on ABC last week, this doesn’t seem that…
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Mixed Income, Mixed Results
A few weeks after I moved into my condo in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, I saw a group of black men—ages from 20s to 50s—standing in front of my building. As I unloaded my groceries, I introduced myself as the new gal on the block. They seemed genuinely shocked at the neighborly…
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The R in Revelation
You can learn a lot when you spend seven years under indictment for child-molestation charges, and then get acquitted at trial. Just ask R. Kelly, who sat down with BET on Tuesday night for his first television interview since he was acquitted of all the charges against him in June. Touré, BET’s lollipop-froed correspondent, gently…
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No Boys Allowed
These are interesting times for women of a certain age.Not only has much of the presidential campaign season centered on the concerns of women voters, but Hollywood appears to have discovered us, too. Since last spring, feature film versions of Sex in the City and Mamma Mia! have scored millions at the box office, a development…
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The World in His Hands
Now that we’re in the home stretch of an unexpectedly competitive presidential race, it’s easy to get caught in the weeds of poll numbers and day-to-day horserace analysis. Who’s ahead today? Was that an exploitable gaffe? Was that advertisement a lie? These are the questions dominating news rooms, chat rooms and many living rooms across…