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I'd Rather Laugh At Your Poll Numbers Than The Recession
At a time when generic Kool-Aid and syrup sandwiches are reaching all-time-high levels of popularity, does anyone want to hear jokes about the state of the economy? I would think not, which is why Governor Rick Perry might want to kiss a roll of duct tape if plans to make his bid for re-election successful.…
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61st Primetime Emmys and the Lack of Black
The 61st Primetime Emmys aired last night. And no, I’m not going to complain about the lack of black award winners or nominees. I’m not even going to go ballistic about how television is getting whiter, or less urban, or less colorful as they say in an aggressively more whitening Hollywood. Hey, at least director Millicent…
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Michelle Obama on Health Care
The first lady is talking health care, trying to rally the ladies to get on the horn to their congressmen and make a change. I guess it couldn’t hurt, but I wonder if there is too much confusion around the president’s message on reform to disperse different messengers. That is, I wonder if we shouldn’t…
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Life After Cosby
It was the sort of well-orchestrated send-off that was not at all shy about its intentions. On April 30, 1992, the last episode of NBC’s groundbreaking comedy The Cosby Show was aired, and it was clear the producers and writers of the landmark institution were aiming for a smile-inducing tear-jerker. After eight-years, Cosby was finally…
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Clair Huxtable & Me
I will never forget Thursday nights at Washington & Lee University law school in Lexington, Va., in the fall of 1991-spring 1992. Laura, Ronda, Charlene and I would all gather at Laura’s apartment and watch The Cosby Show and A Different World. We blocked out this time religiously so that we could have a study and…
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Taking Back the House—The On-Screen and Real-Life Politics of Bill Cosby
Nostalgic recollections of The Cosby Show place Cliff Huxtable—Cosby’s duck-walking, sandwich-loving, mugging alter ego—as the smiling patriarch of a well-adjusted nuclear family with two professional incomes in a Brooklyn brownstone barricaded away from the first stirrings of the crack era. It was gently political: “There were no “whitey” call-outs à la George Jefferson, no power-to-the-people…
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Black Folks Behaving Badly
It used to be that black folks as a people did not behave badly in public. You all know what I mean. You have been in the grocery store and watched in shock as children of another “hue” lay on the floor, acted out, and talked back to their parents. It used to be that we…
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The Huxtables Changed Not Television or Politics—But the Idea of Black Family
It’s not like this was the first time we got to see black folks, professional black folks, representing up there on the little screen. After all, in the late ‘60s, we had Diahann Carroll, all classy restraint as widowed nurse Julia. Even Bill Cosby played a Rhodes scholar in I Spy back in ’65. And…
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Jimmy Carter's Difficult Truth
One of the prerogatives of advanced age is the right to say things that others can’t or won’t. For many people of advanced age, the decision to speak truth becomes non-negotiable, and elision is replaced by a determined and consistent effort to tell it like it is. This can explain the inappropriate uncle at Thanksgiving…
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The Problem with 'Good Hair'
As I settled comfortably into the movie theater with my popcorn, I anxiously awaited the previews for the documentary, The September Issue. My comfort quickly turned to shock and disappointment when the mostly white audience began dying laughing at the trailer for Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, which debuts on Oct. 9. As the celebrities…