Uncategorized
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Are All Those Your Kids? (the Sequel)
Nadya Suleman, the single, 33 year-old mother of 14 children conceived by in vitro fertilization, will probably get asked this a lot as soon as they’re all able to move out and about together. But you don’t have to be a mother of mega-multiples to get strangers’ questions—sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes not—as to whether the cluster…
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Are All Those Your Kids (the Sequel)
Nadya Suleman, the single, 33 year-old mother of 14 children conceived by in vitro fertilization, will probably get asked this a lot as soon as they’re all able to move out and about together. But you don’t have to be a mother of mega-multiples to get strangers’ questions—sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes not—as to whether the cluster…
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Covering a Century of Crisis
Throughout the Great Migration, The Crisis was a point of reference for blacks newly scattered across America. The Crisis was an early pioneer in challenging standards of beauty, featuring women of color on the front cover of hundreds of issues. The magazine also explored the role of colored soldiers in Europe during World War I.…
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Taking Post-Black Too Far?
A Duke University professor argues that white colleges need to drop ‘black student’ recruitment weekends that specifically target black high school students. “The effect of minority recruitment weekends renders all of these events as segregated as church on a Sunday morning,” Prof. Karla Holloway writes. “When we invite students to campus in effectively segregated groupings,…
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Nadya Suleman and the Food Stamps
I assume we’re all aware of Nadya Suleman. She’s the single California woman who, with the help of an unnamed fertility doctor, gave birth six children and then, surprise, octuplets. Well, the controversial doctor has been named. You know, the man who put Suleman and her babies at risk of death so he could experiment…
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Hold the Hyphen
Black Americans can bask in the glow of a newfound progressiveness this Black History Month. And our first black president also happens to be our first African-American president. Black and African-American—I can’t help dwelling on those two descriptors and the weight they carry in defining us. I’m brown, thank you. But I’ll settle for black.…
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Why We Still Need February
Black History Month has barely begun, but some columnists are calling for an end. It’s time, they say, to abolish the month-long observance because of—you guessed it—the election of Barack Obama. His presidency proves that African Americans are fully intertwined into the American experience. So why relegate our history to a month of “rote and…
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Smartest Guy in The Room
Just in case you missed it, the president of the United States wants you to know that the country is in an unprecedented crisis, “the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression,” and that he is on the job for you. To that end, a stern-faced and grave-toned President Obama went before the American…
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Nadya Suleman: 14 Children, No Job, No Partner
Many feminists seem to support Nadya Suleman’s right to have a total of 14 children without the benefit of a job or life partner: it’s her body, after all. Yeah…that’s fine and dandy for her—but what about the children involved? I’m not saying you need a man, ladies. But caring for kids (14!) isn’t the…
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Too Much Information!
As they teach us in kindergarten, sharing is good. Cookies. Crayons. Blankies. I’m all with it. But there is such a thing as too much sharing—especially when its in the form of information about you that I don’t really need to know. So in homage to that virally popular Facebook tag, wherein people share 25…