Community Checkup

For some time now the black community has been bemoaning the lack of involvement of black fathers in the lives of their children. A recent Newsweek article spoke to this issue in the context of discussing a new book, “The Beautiful Struggle” (which looks very interesting) as well as a recent study on the topic.  [...]

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Everyone’s going bananas over the Vogue cover with LeBron and Gisele and the King Kong image it conjures up. Those who take issue with it say that the cover perpetuates negative stereotypes of black men as aggressive and animalistic. Then there’s the complaint over the stereotype of successful black men’s preference for white [...]

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A mini “TechCheck”…
A frequent commenter on this site, JJ, recently wrote me asking if there was any data to show how much blacks agree with some of the frequently mentioned views of Reverend Wright. I thought it was a pretty interesting question given the back-and-forth in the press and blogosphere lately about how how [...]

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Pat Buchanan has some issues with Obama’s race speech which he expresses in a piece titled, “A Brief for Whitey.” Apparently he feels like the discussion on race has been too one-sided and he wants black people to begin to listen to the white perspective (a group that he refers to as the “Silent Majority,” [...]

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Halfway through, I already knew that this was the greatest speech on race that I had ever heard a politician deliver. Truly historic. The way he placed the issues in historical, individual, and universal contexts was really unprecedented in the world of politics. He used an issue which marred his reputation (his [...]

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Bloggingheads.tv has a pretty interesting conversation on their site between Randall Kennedy and John McWhorter, two authors who have had some pretty strong disagreements in the past (well, at least one). It’s a great video to watch because of the format of discussion. It’s not set up as a debate for the two [...]

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Can black culture be defined?
We’ve had some discussion on this topic in the earlier “sellout” post and here is part 2. Again, a piece by McWhorter touching on the issue of the “fluidity and complexity” of cultural definitions. This time he attempts to put some parameters on the definition:
What is black culture? Definitions [...]

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A sellout, or Uncle Tom, is one of the worst insults that can be levied towards a black person by another black person. I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but being called a sellout was one the times that angered me the most. I remember thinking, “Who does he [...]

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My article in The Philadelphia Inquirer…
Debate through a hip-hop lens
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Movie trailers are great for sparking the imagination. Believe it or not, as I watched the trailer to The Great Debaters, a movie based on a true story of how a debate team from a small black college defeated a top-ranked white debate team, [...]

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I was made aware of this video a couple of months ago but resisted writing on it since I did not want to give it any more air play than it was receiving at the time. But now that the film is out and is all over the blogosphere and newspapers, I don’t think [...]

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