On several occasions I have heard it suggested that Americans of color, particularly Black Americans, tend to “overreact” when lamenting the state of race relations. It is said that they fail to acknowledge progress, are needlessly pessimistic, and are simply impossible to please. But, naturally, I’ve yet to hear such a charge be underpinned by …
On several occasions I have heard it suggested that Americans of color, particularly Black Americans, tend to “overreact” when lamenting the state of race relations. It is said that they fail to acknowledge progress, are needlessly pessimistic, and are simply impossible to please. But, naturally, I’ve yet to hear such a charge be underpinned by …
On several occasions I have heard it suggested that Americans of color, particularly Black Americans, tend to “overreact” when lamenting the state of race relations. It is said that they fail to acknowledge progress, are needlessly pessimistic, and are simply impossible to please. But, naturally, I’ve yet to hear such a charge be underpinned by …
The National Association for the Advancement of All People, or the NAAAP, declared Saturday that racism is officially over. NAAAP president Preston L. Christoffersen IV made the televised announcement with tears in his eyes, pronouncing triumphantly that “We did it.” Last month, Christoffersen and other NAAAP officials led the charge in getting Congress to pass …
In his 1957 lecture “Create Dangerously,” Nobel Prize-winning writer and philosopher Albert Camus spoke of a wise man who “always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.” In a time as interesting as ours, many of us may be doing …
On many occasions, I have heard American people of color suggest that white privilege and those who deny its existence are two major obstacles in the path to justice and equality. White privilege by itself—the perennial explanation (besides racism, which the term is nearly synonymous with) for why white Americans have less trouble with the …
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 …
