Because of last year’s election results, it can be inferred that the majority of residents in 25 of 50 states believe that diversity trainings and the study of institutional racism constitute “Radical Left,” anti-American, spiteful propaganda that demonizes America and Americans as irredeemably racist. They’ve arrived at this conclusion because they and the conservative politicians […]
When Chris Rock, pontificating at Kanye West’s ye listening party at West’s ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, claimed that “hip-hop music is the first artform created by free Black men,” he was right, so long as we understand “free” in this case to mean “not enslaved.” But while hip-hop may have been the first artform free
A few days ago, an Uber driver I had on the way home from work told me that “The older you get, the more your doctor tells you to laugh—so I laugh a lot!” It was the eighteenth of June. I had learned earlier that the White House made Juneteenth a federal holiday, and, since
Reflections on My First Federally Recognized Juneteenth Read More »
What does it say about the state of American politics that over four months after the end of the previous presidential administration, which was panned internationally, brought for the first time ever to two separate impeachment trials, and overwhelmingly regarded as perhaps the most morally reprehensible, dishonest, illegitimate, and unintelligently managed four years in recent
In \”A Treatise on Pessimism\” from December, I said of a recent police murder: “The timing of this murder seems almost by design as if [the officer] and company wanted to reassure all who were drunk on the unrest and indignation that had become characteristic of 2020 that nothing had changed, and that he would
If Amanda Gorman is not the most famous poet in the United States right now, she is at least the most widely celebrated. The signs of this are virtually everywhere you look. Having been the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, a distinction she won in 2017 when she was only 19 years old, she was
Donald Trump’s four years as president taught us many things. Very few of these things are fun to remember. We learned that a sitting president can hit the links during a national and global health crisis without repercussion. We learned that, with enough members of a particular party in the United States Senate, a president
How a White Nationalist Sold White Nationalism as Nationalism Read More »
Though Black biographical films are by no means a novelty, their number has grown considerably alongside the twenty-first century’s explosion of platforms for and interest in Black media. For many years now, they have thrust well-known Black historical figures into the spotlight and, sometimes, achieved blockbuster status. The mid 2010s, for example, saw the late,
The culture of African Americans is unlike any other. All at once, it has survived centuries of violent adversity, it is renowned for how powerfully it can channel both joy and sorrow, it has become so accustomed to sorrow that it regularly mocks it, and for a sizeable portion of American history (and sometimes today),
HBO’s new four-part miniseries Allen v. Farrow has been on thousands of minds since the first episode’s release last Sunday. The series, which features appearances from actress Mia Farrow and all but two of her children, revisits a decades-old, world-famous dispute between Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen that began with Farrow and her adopted daughter
The Sooner the Better: Celebrity Offenses in the Digital Age Read More »
