Uncategorized
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The New Tavis Smiley, Beware!
A talent show is underway to select Tavis Smiley’s replacement on “The Tom Joyner Morning Show.” It was inevitable that this process would come down to a series of on-air, laugh-out-loud challenges rivaling American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance? Perhaps it’s the spirit of equal opportunity or the clarity of competition, but…
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The Cost of Silence
Tonight is Michelle Obama’s night at the Democratic Convention. She will reintroduce herself to America, try to convince us that she and her family, especially her husband, are just like us and worthy of our support. Expect her to be phenomenal. Expect her to be attacked, as well. Republicans and their surrogates have already tried…
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Michelle's Neighborhood
The great Toni Morrison once said in an interview that whenever she bumped up against some incident of racial exclusion or insult as a child, her father would shield his daughter’s tender heart by reminding her, “You don’t live in that neighborhood. That is not your home.” When Michelle Obama takes the stage as the…
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A Troubling Reminder
There are moments in Trouble the Water, the searing new documentary on Hurricane Katrina, particularly in the hours before the hurricane lands, when you think the central character, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, just doesn’t get it. She’s got her video camera trained on her Ninth Ward block, playfully interrogating everybody about what they’re gonna do when…
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The Beautiful 'Black List'
HBO’s newest documentary The Black List is a lot like the imagined coffee table book that inspired it—super-sized with lots of pictures meant to incite conversation. The film’s images rotate like a Who’s Who in Black America. Did you know that Slash from Guns N’ Roses was black? Or that the former president of Planned…
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Remembering Stephanie
Journalists like me rarely admit to liking people in the news. But I have no qualms or shame in admitting that I shed huge, salty tears after hearing that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the Democratic Ohio congresswoman, died Wednesday from a brain aneurysm. She was 58, and she was my friend. I came to know…
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TV One-Dimensional
On a recent broadcast of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” the host launched into his opening monologue with customary snark. But instead of riffing on a celebrity, he detoured and took on Johnathan Rodgers, the CEO and president of the black cable network TV One. Rodgers had recently announced that his channel planned to…
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The Confessions of Lauryn Hill
It’s funny how money change a situation Miscommunication leads to complication My emancipation don’t fit your equation… Some wan’ play young Lauryn like she dumb —Lauryn Hill, “Lost Ones” —Scroll back a decade, and there was Lauryn Hill—top of the world, Ma!—clutching five Grammys and sending shoutouts to her babies, thanking them for not spilling…
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An Analog Girl in a Digital World
The Roots opened up with their hip-hop jazz riffs and stirring interludes of saxophones and drums when a big-boned woman whispered in a throaty voice: So when the analog girl in a digital world gonna come out? The lights dimmed. A medley of Badu hits played, taking me back to all the places I lived…
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A Dying Breed
Ragan Henry, a little-known African-American pioneer in media ownership who quietly amassed a small empire of 60 television and radio stations between the early 1970s and 1990, died late last month in Philadelphia with as little fanfare as he had lived. He was 74. Henry’s death should be an item of conversation for anyone who…