If you happen to be an employer, a First
Amendment absolutist or a trash-talking loser, life became a bit more difficult last week.
That's because the California Supreme Court forbade the future
use of racial slurs in a workplace that has already been found by a court to be a hostile
environment… more
In
an Indianapolis speech called The Duty of Hope last week, candidate George W. Bush
unveiled a palette of proposals to fill in the details of his heretofore fuzzy outline of
"compassionate conservatism." The capstone of his plan is a pledge of $8 billion
in tax incentives to increase donations to faith-based… more
Typically, white
visitors to my home are visibly upset by my Mammy memorabilia. Disgusted, riveted and
confused, they stand before my big-lipped, bug-eyed, watermelon-eating, sassy Sambos and
try to think of something to say that won't get them in trouble. There are dish-towel
holders, cookie jars, salt-and-pepper shakers, doorstops, figurines, paper fans… more
My 18-year-old niece, Carlie, tried
to bond with me recently by showing me her new outfits for my approval. Everything was
see-through, thigh-high or skin-tight. Not only was I shocked, I was frightened. It was
all I could do not to spank her, the way you might swat a child caught playing with a
… more
"Ok, this one," the
detective says as we pull slowly past a neat clapboard house in a run-down neighborhood.
"Vietnamese guy is out watering his bushes. Knucklehead comes up, whips it out, gets
to peeing right on them. Vietnamese guy yells at him." The detective narrates calmly,
eyes both on the road… more
Heading through Harlem in a LaGuardia-bound
cab early one 1989 morning, Harvard urban anthropologist Katherine Newman did something
remarkable. She observed the infamous neighborhood, symbolic of decline and hopelessness
in the popular psyche, and let its reality displace the convenient conventional wisdom.
Rather than just one of the many "inner-city enclaves my… more
Black people take secret -- and unwarranted -- comfort
in the fact that mass killers tend to be white.
Blacks have always known that white folks are crazy. Whenever
news breaks of yet another bizarre massacre or hideous chain-saw-and-cannibalism-type
crime, we call each other from our cubicles and whisper conspiratorially something like,
… more
Vince Passaro became a pariah of magazine journalism for his August 1998 Harper's
essay, "Who'll stop the drain?" detailing his descent into $63,000 worth of
debt on a $100,000 annual income. Fire and brimstone letters poured in. How
dare he not be ashamed? How dare he write about insolvency and poor decision-making
and yielding to temptation as if it were ... common? This is America -- we don't
discuss our… more
There can't be a women's studies syllabus anywhere in
reconstructed America without at least one book by bell hooks. Her first, the 1981 Ain't
I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism is among America's most influential works.
Prolific, outspoken, and fearless, hooks is that rare black woman intellectual thought of
in the same breath with Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates. Given her importance to my two
… more
