Articles By: George Davis

George Davis’ nonfiction novel, Until We Got Here: From "We Shall Overcome” to "Yes We Can" will be published in 2010. He has taught at Columbia, Colgate and Yale universities and is professor emeritus in creative writing at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University. He is author of the bestseller, Black Life in Corporate America, and the novel, Coming Home, upon which the Jane Fonda Vietnam War film is loosely based. He has been a writer and editor for Essence and Black Enterprise magazines, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

The State of the Union may be better than we think

Grading Obama's Second Year --With the voting pubic his job approval is less than 50% but, in my view, he still earns an A+ for spiritual intelligence. Suppose Barack Obama is “A Magic Negro,” as some of his detractors saw and quickly ridiculed so that “thinking” people would not look...

January 24th, 2011 | Featured, State of the Union, US | Read More

Be still and know that God is you

When we peer into the unknown our eyes are watching God, novelist Zora Neale Hurston might say. As I said my friend, the Miami businessman, Dave Williams, sees things differently than other people. He says this is because he is a space alien. He said that black folk did not come out to vote in the 2010...

November 5th, 2010 | Politics | Read More

Race, lies, and videotape

Is “post-racialism” and “racism denial” in America related to the much more widely studied and deadly virus, “genocide denial,” only less sever? Wikipedia states: “Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy...

August 10th, 2010 | Talk About Race | Read More

Obama’s black paradox and our own

He’s damned fortunate if we don’t and damned fortunate if we do allow that he is black. We received some crazy responses by email, by phone, and as online comments to our blog post, “Could Obama dare to say that some people attack him because he’s black?” on Race Talk a week ago. Racial...

June 30th, 2010 | Featured, Politics | Read More

Obama is black but he’d better not say so

Against blatant racism there are weapons and white allies; against stealth racism, not so many. It is now politically incorrect to call anyone a racist, even if they are. But how can you tell anymore? Those who used to be identifiable as black racists now have white friends and white racists have...

June 11th, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More

The last Black people in America, Part II

Originally posted on Psychology Today Does the election of Barack Obama mark a major shift in the Western World from the Faustian dream of always having more? Remember old Dr. Faust, the mad genius who was driven by an insatiable striving for worldly knowledge, power, and wealth, even at the cost...

April 19th, 2010 | Talk About Race | Read More

The last white people in America, part II

In early 2009, groups composed of the most tattered refugees from John McCain’s 2008 Presidential election defeat gathered in various places around the country. Those of us who were willing to admit the truth, knew all along the Teabaggers, as these groups came to be called, were not protesting...

March 26th, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More

The Last Black People in America, Part I

What do you do when who you are is a very difficult, but very valuable, way to be? I went to a party in North Carolina last November to celebrate the 80th birthday of the widow of a black former sharecropper. She had raised 13 children after her husband died almost 40 years ago. I was invited by her...

February 26th, 2010 | Culture | Read More

State of the Union: Rumble young man rumble

My friend, the Miami businessman, Dave Williams, sees things differently than other people. He says this is because he is a space alien. “Muhammad Ali would have been proud of our President last night,” Dave said. I fastened my seat belt for a trip into outer space. “Obama did the rope-a-dope all...

February 2nd, 2010 | Featured, State of the Union | Read More

A Martin Luther King Needs a Malcolm X

Unforgiveness as National Policy There is a problem with the kind of forgiveness as national policy that I described in a blog post back in November: There are many things African Americans bring to the American cultural mix that has emerged in the new century. African Americans themselves often say...

January 23rd, 2010 | Talk About Race | Read More

Spiritually Liberal, Socially Conservative, Part II

Read: Spiritually Liberal, Socially Conservative, Part I I remember a while back film director Quentin Tarantino said he was blacker than Spike Lee, I assumed it was because he uses the term motherf–er in his movies more often than Spike Lee does in his movies. “With the aestheticized violence,...

January 18th, 2010 | Culture | Read More

Black like me, white like thee

The BCS football championship was a great American non-racial moment With the news of a professional basketball player, Gilbert Arenas, bringing a gun into the Washington Wizard locker room, and various college football and basketball player being suspended for various levels of misbehavior, a lot of...

January 9th, 2010 | Talk About Race | Read More

Spiritually liberal, socially conservative

Did Barack Obama lie to us, or did we lie to ourselves? Originally published on January 6, 2010 in Psychology Today Back in the early 1970s, I interviewed a young Jewish woman, Sara Levy (a pseudonym), whose family was totally, I mean totally, committed to the Black Liberation Struggle of the 1960s....

January 8th, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More

Grading President Obama’s freshman year as President

I have seen several grades for the first year of Barack Obama’s Presidency. Whenever I see a grade of “C”, I think that the grader has not marked on a curve that takes into account the difficulty of his particular test. Back when I used to grade work in my narrative writing courses...

January 4th, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More