Remembering the sucker-punches that “the Cos” delivered to their cause, there is no shortage of blacks who today are basking in the afterglow of a race traitor getting his comeuppance for trafficking in the worst Amos-n-Andy racial tropes.
With a cartoonish bigot in the White House, state terror that is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, and epochal inequality, there is, as of old, a whiff of insanity in white Americans’ racial attitudes, a hint of a nation coming unglued, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
INDIANAPOLIS -- Were it not, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick’s deft direction, the fight scene in the 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus might well have been laughable rather than iconic. At nearly six-feet-four-inches tall, the African gladiator Draba, played by the former pro football star, Woody Strode, towered over Kirk Douglas’s eponymous
It is an opportune time to put the spotlight on white supremacy in relation to King’s legacy now, as Donald Trump and his Republican Party pursue an extreme right-wing agenda that is emboldening open racism and bigotry.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. left behind a legacy of courage and clarity in the face of racial and economic injustice. It has been five decades since the world lost this visionary—the preeminent leader of the Civil Rights Movement—but his words and actions continue to inspire the fight for democracy and racial equality today. However, since
The dynamism and interracial character of last week’s March For Our Lives rallies provides further evidence that American workers have a chance of challenging the wealthy for a bigger piece of the pie only when they put their tribal differences aside to fight together.
WASHINGTON -- Google the name “Tallulah Bankhead” and you will be regaled (or mortified if your mores tend to the Victorian) with tales of the actor’s libertine appetites, her breakout performance in the Hitchcock classic Lifeboat, or her half-camp, half-vamp villainess in the 1960s Batman television series. Wikipedia references her patrician mien
Barack Obama has inspired a coterie of black writers who have largely foregone reportage and robust interrogation for a kind of anger management, in an apparent attempt to reassure African-Americans that, despite losing more of their wealth than at any time in history, everything is swell.
WASHINGTON (Analysis) -- Shortly after a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder for the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, the celebrated African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in
“The point for me,” said one 41-year-old African-American who works in Silicon Valley, “is that black people in America can trust no one but each other. This world means us harm and nobody has our back; you’d have to be a fool to believe otherwise.”
Forty years ago last fall, the late Richard Pryor took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl for a gay rights fundraiser and delivered what was perhaps the most incendiary monologue of a career that was both famously -- and literally -- combustible. What the audience of 17,000 mostly gay, white men anticipated was to be regaled by the
If Trump’s election represents the flashpoint that deepened tribal divisions 391 miles due south in another college town — Charlottesville, Virginia — then conversely, it triggered a profound soul-searching here in Titusville, leading to an urban renewal project aimed at refurbishing hearts and minds.
TITUSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA -- Shoehorned between the state line and the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania’s northwest corner, the city of Titusville is as red as America gets, a place where virtually every one of its 5,601 residents identified his or her race as “white” on the 2010 U.S. Census, and a few storefront windows, rather
