Uncategorized
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Shout Out: The Dress
Did your election night party cheer or gasp when Michelle Obama strode out on stage in her bold black and red dress? Was there a collective pause among your friends and family or were people too overjoyed to care when watching history in the making? Folks across the Web have been debating the pros and…
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A Thank You Note to White Voters
While dodging those pigs I said would fly before a black man got elected president, I got to thinking about just who black folks had to thank for Barack Obama’s historic achievement. Obama and his brilliant staff are, of course, at the top of the list for mounting what was arguably the best presidential campaign…
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Why White Comics Don't Get Barack
A black president. Now that’s funny! So why are so many political satirists crying about how unamusing the Obama presidency will be? The standard reasoning is that, unlike Bush, McCain, Palin, the Clintons or even Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama is “too perfect” and does not provide material for good jokes. But the inability of “Saturday…
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Why Black Comics Must Get Barack
Fade back to 1983. Reaganomics has black America in a stranglehold, unemployment is running rampant, and my sisters and I have snuck into the basement after lights out to watch Eddie Murphy, clad in a skintight red leather outfit, tell dirty jokes. Eddie says he saw Jesse Jackson working out at the gym now that…
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Soul Men: Off Key
In an ideal world, you’d turn the camera on Bernie Mac and just let him do his thing, unhampered by the vagaries of script and plot, of character development and narrative cohesion. The Mac Man was at his best when he could riff, all bug-eyes and righteous apoplexy, whipping himself into a crescendo of carefully…
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The Football Giants
It’s not a surprise, but this point needs to be stressed: The NFL is not big on continuity. Just look at the NFC. After 10 weeks of the season, last year the top teams were clear; Dallas, Green Bay, Tampa Bay and Seattle were the class of the conference. Each was a team with enough…
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Obama's Missing Fur Coat
We were supposed to see a fur coat in this election. It was supposed to come out at an inopportune moment, the way Frank Lucas’ (Denzel Washington) garish chinchilla did at the Ali-Frazier fight in American Gangster. It tipped everyone off that the customarily low-profile and buttoned-down Lucas was the guy they thought he was…
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In Our Lifetime
A new dawn of American leadership is at hand. President-elect Barack Obama We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose…
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Michelle Obama: First Lady of the United States
The first first lady to enter my consciousness was Rosalynn. I was 13 at the time. She was 50, the child of a farmer, the wife of a former governor, the mother of three. I could not relate to her, exactly—she was older than my mother and white and from a deeper kind of South…