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The intersection of race, culture, and politics
Red Tails is without a doubt the most expensive ABC after school special ever made. I went home after seeing it and immediately downloaded A Soldier’s Story from Amazon to flush Red Tail’s god awful dialogue out of my head. I guess I’m supposed to be pleased that George Lucas poured over $100 ...
All I can say is thank you to the readers who suggested that I pick up 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I loved it. But it wasn’t because of the language, especially since it was a translation. And it wasn’t because of the dialogue, because there wasn’t very much, or the point of view, since it alternated ...
After all the media drama and the newspaper headlines and the cable news show hoopla over Newt Gingrich’s massive win in the South Carolina GOP primary last week has finally died down, the mathematical facts have remained the same—Mitt Romney still has accumulated 5 more total delegates than ...
Barack Obama looked like he enjoys being the president of the United States last night. There was a lot that could have been improved upon in his third State of the Union address, which I have already begun mentally referring to as his “kitchen sink” speech, since everything but the kitchen sink ...
S. rarely says much about current events when we get up in the morning. But today she was visibly agitated over the visual of the group, comprised largely of white men, who stood up and clapped when Newt Gingrich angrily put the CNN debate moderator in his place last night. If Gingrich’s goal was ...
I saw Melissa Harris Perry deliver the keynote speech for King Week at Emory University this past Tuesday. Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University, the new host of an unnamed MSNBC weekend show that debuts next month, and a columnist for The Nation magazine. There is ...
After watching a Republican presidential debate, I often look for something factual to read as an antidote to all of the distortions and lies the candidates spew about the Obama administration. Last night, I was fortunate enough to come across an excellent article by Andrew Sullivan over at the ...
The overarching metanarrative that always comes to mind when I think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is not race but justice. I am a little ambivalent about the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, when some of the people who will take the time today to publicly revere the life of this dead national ...
Mitt Romney has run an Obama style campaign with a NASA space launch level of attention to detail. By comparison, most of Romney’s opponents, who insist that they are the “real” conservatives remaining in the field, seem to be organized just well enough to become the student body president at a ...
Rick Santorum gives me the impression that if he was on Mars, campaigning for the Martian vote, he would still find a way to blame black Americans for taking the tax dollars of white Americans. I don’t know what kind of constituencies Santorum is used to representing, but out here in real America ...
Rick Santorum gives me the impression that if he was on Mars, campaigning for the Martian vote, he would still find a way to blame black Americans for taking the tax dollars of white Americans. I don’t know what kind of constituencies Santorum is used to representing, but out here in real America ...
To call Rick Santorum a spectacularly awful presidential candidate would actually be too kind. As the Don Quixote of the Republican Party, Candidate Thou Shalt Not insists on tilting at windmills that ceased to exist long ago. Newsflash to the Santorum campaign—the GOP is selecting a presidential ...
“Yeah, so Rick Santorum is winning this thing,” my buddy said last night. “So why doesn’t he just go ahead and run for governor of Iowa?” If this were boxing, Santorum would have earned a technical knockout over Romney by 1 am EST. The sound Santorum is hearing right now is not the buzz of ...
The America I live in is not 90% white. The America I live in does not have more hogs than people. The American I live in does not have 60% of the electorate who describe themselves as evangelical Christians. While I can understand the media’s need for nostalgia, and our own American reverence for ...
A buddy of mine told me yesterday that his youngest son, who is all of five years old, walked up to him on Christmas morning and said “Dad, we never see you reading so we got you some books.” I had to laugh, because the boy was right—his father’s reading is confined to emails, product ...