Crossposted from Colorlines Magazine Web Exclusive With a title as bold as Race, I was prepared for this play to go where no performance had before. Director David Mamet described his production as “a play about lies,” including the hidden truth that “there has always been, at the very least, a little bit of [...]
Continue reading …“Clarity” is one of my favorite John Mayer songs, and given the troubling comments in his forthcoming interview with Playboy Magazine, a little clarity is what we all need. Mayer’s broad cross-over appeal has been construed by some as a “hood pass.” Laudably if inelegantly, he rejects such a notion: “If I really had a [...]
Continue reading …An Open Poem Response to Smokey Robinson Smokey Robinson’s original poem There’s no shame in taking on another new name Because each new identity increases our game Sojourner Truth Frederick Douglass Ntozake, Amiri B. Malcolm X, Martin Luther and Assata, you see? But you don’t understand That the swapping must be Unless you want us [...]
Continue reading …“I know that [Lionel Richie] has been asked like 150-something times to redo ‘We Are the World’ and he said no to everything until this Haiti thing happened. The moment he saw that it happened he was like, OK, ‘We Are the World.’ And to be one of the people they called to have fresh [...]
Continue reading …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, the influence of African American culture [...]
Continue reading …—who is she and where is she going? Over the past few weeks there has been an obsessive-like focus on the fact that many professional (accomplished) black women remain unmarried and childless well into their 40s. ABC, 20/20, The New York Times, and MSNBC have all spotlighted this topic. There can be no doubt that [...]
Continue reading …After seeing the movie with the same title, I will never think of Chante Moore’s chart topping 1990’s song, “Precious,” quite the same, ever again. The movie Precious left me feeling deeply wounded, confused and horrified that there are actually fellow citizens among us who live lives similar to the film, every day of their [...]
Continue reading …I always take a good look around me before any movie starts. The night I went to see Precious, I saw friends, lovers, mother-daughter looking duos. I saw a lot of women – maybe 50% women of color, of those mostly Black, and several there alone like me. When the previews finally ended and the [...]
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