A Beautiful Day
This morning’s sustained exhilaration has been tempered somewhat by the remnants of intolerance as it appears California has narrowly passed Proposition 8, stripping gay couples of the right to marry, largely on the strength of opposition from blacks who voted for it by more than a 2:1 margin. Arizona and Florida passed similar bans, the
Apology Unnecessary
There’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot happening over at Montclair State University thanks to a “controversial” episode of the Keith Knight comic strip, The K Chronicles, that was published last week in the student newspaper, the Montclarion, and included the word “nigger”. Twice! Well, kind of… Seemingly lost on most of those
The Most Fantastic Genre
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGqSRtDbEw] PopCultureShock posted this great little clip about the new Blue Beetle — Mexican-American Jaime Reyes — and Junot Diaz’ Oscar Wao, wherein Diaz notes: “The most fantastic genre can’t keep up, or refuses to keep up, with how much our country has changed. And so people can dream about aliens, and they can dream
Ignorance is Bliss
Call me a latte-sipping elitist if you want*, but there are some truly stupid people in this country. Even worse, they’re willfully stupid! Via Ben Smith’s “Things Americans Believe”: 10% of Americans believe [Barack] Obama’s a Muslim … 22% believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance. 30% believe Saddam had weapons of
Lucky to be Black
I really am trying to lower my political caloric intake right now — and, for the most part, have, thanks to a hectic few days of dealing with the adventures of buying a house — but the events of the past week have simply been unavoidable and difficult to let go unremarked upon. The posts I haven’t written this week would
Go see Liberty City
I went to see Liberty City last night, April Yvette Thompson’s multi-layered, one-person account of her upbringing in the infamous Miami neighborhood during the chaotic 70s, told against a backdrop of the rise and fall of the Black Power movement, the Crack epidemic and the Liberty City Riots that led to Miami being declared a disaster area, literally and figuratively. Co-written
About the Farrakhan moment
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=nJkU1e-_r3w] The lowlight of tonight’s debate was, without question I think, when Tim Russert referenced Louis Farrakhan’s “endorsement” of Barack Obama this past weekend, asking if he accepted his support, and after Obama clearly and completely denounced Farrakhan’s past statements about Jews and Judaism as “unacceptable and reprehensible” and defended his own record on Jewish issues and U.S.-Israel relations,
When politics gets personal for Latinos
In reality, politics are without question a very personal matter but, partly due to the media’s focus on the horserace aspect of elections and partly due to the candidates often allowing themselves to be defined by labels (or at the least, trying to marginalize their opponents with them), most political debate occurs from a safe, impersonal distance.
Random Thought on Race
Barack Obama is half black, half white and was raised mostly in Hawaii and Indonesia, but is considered by most to be the “black” candidate. I’m half Puerto Rican and, depending on who’s telling the story, probably a quarter black and a quarter white, and was raised in and around New York City. If I ran for President,
Processing South Carolina
In my most optimistic guesses about tonight’s result, I wasn’t expecting anything close to the 2-1 thumping Obama gave Clinton tonight. The Clintons are already trying to characterize it as a black thing (Bill goes so far as to invoke Jesse Jackson) but it is so very clearly much more than that. To put it in