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Zimbabwe: No Quick Solutions, No Easy Answers
On Saturday, the citizens of the African nation of Zimbabwe will go to the polls and cast their votes for president and other offices. Zimbabwe has been embroiled in such economic and political strife that much of the country is without life’s basic necessities. The standing president, Robert Mugabe, has been a controversial figure in…
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Much Ado About the N-Word
After a flurry of jabs, feints, and ripostes last year—all signifying nothing—I had hoped the Nigger Wars had finally died down. In the words of The Abstract, it all goes in cycles and whenever the intellect of the black talking class is taxed, they inevitably point to some irrelevant cultural phenomenon as the source of…
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Is Clinton Getting a Pass on Race?
After Barack Obama’s historic and uplifting call for the nation to “move beyond race,” I had hoped the campaign would return to some of the real issues — the economy, health care, education, and the war. My hopes notwithstanding, race remains an insidious subtext to the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ironically, our civil…
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Give These Jersey Girls a Break
Bit by bit, I’m becoming a fan of the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights women’s basketball team and Don Imus has nothing to do with it. Blame the NCAA. Every year when they pick their field of 64 for the women’s basketball championship, the selection committee figures out a way to slight Rutgers. The Scarlet Knights…
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Why I Don't Like StuffWhitePeopleLike
By now you’ve likely been forwarded the link three, maybe four times. The nation may be divided by the war in Iraq, the Democratic Party may be lumbering towards a Denver apocalypse, mortgage-meltdown tent cities may be springing up while lenders collapse, but, look on the bright side: At least everyone loves Stuff White People…
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History Lived, Lessons Learned
Most of us are dead. But five of us are not. We are among the 20 African American women chosen by a group of educators and black history experts to be featured in a traveling exhibition called “Freedom’s Sisters.” And on a Friday night in mid-March at the Cincinnati Museum Center, the five of us…
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That's Why I'm a Linebacker
I hate her. I’ve never seen her before, and don’t know her, but I don’t need to. I see what she looks like. I see what she’s wearing. I see who she’s with. That tells me everything I need to know. She can’t be trusted—her kind never can—and all she wants is to push her…
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New Orleans — Food. Art. Culture.
Mike Molina, one of my buddies from Xavier, composed this poem to open up my “Mardi Gras (Phat Tuesday)” menu in Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. Hurricane Katrina devastated the city less than six months later. Down in New Orleans Saffron skies chase down the sun Another sultry day is done Heat seasoned…
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Rev. Wright and the Easter Bunny
Last June, on assignment covering religion for the Washington Post, I found myself at the National Press Club, where a group of religious leaders were meeting to craft a social justice agenda for the 2008 elections. Among those at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Legislative Conference was a minister named Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man with…
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Addressing and Undressing the Race Problem
As a journalist, I do not publicly endorse candidates. So, as the black South Africans who had never been allowed to vote in their lives said when the finally could in 1994: My vote is my secret. But as I listened to all the commentary before, and after Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race, among…