Category: Guest Commentary

When in the fall of 2001 Harvard University President Lawrence Summers staged a confrontation with prominent African American Studies Professor Cornel West, browbeating him for what Summers characterized as spending too much time on political activism and spoken-word poetry, missing too many classes, and contributing to grade inflation, West was the one that ended leaving…

In his lifetime, Mr. Richard Gooden, a retired steel worker of 42 years, has been denied the right to vote twice by the State of Alabama. He was first deprived of his voting rights in the early 1960s during a dark period in Alabama’s history when Black voter registration was made virtually impossible by the…

Recently I was helping my mother clean out her closets and get rid of old boxes. During the flurry of trashing old papers and reliving cherished memories Mother came upon a postcard that her late sister, my favorite aunt, kept in her office when she was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The postcard…

I was loving the new Dave Chappelle’s Block Party movie until Wyclef Jean brought me quickly out of my emersion in hip-hop/comedic heaven with that old crippling false optimism offered to the young. He gave them more of that tired stuff about how you can’t “blame the White man,” “nothing is holding you back,” “work…

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died at the age of thirty-nine, on April 4, 1968, exactly one year after the same day he gave one of his most memorable speeches on April 4, 1967 at Harlem’s Riverside Church, calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. As we approach the thirty-ninth anniversary of this…

In coming semesters, this year’s winner of best picture at the Academy Awards likely will become one of the more frequently discussed films in American higher education. Because Paul Haggis’s Crash offers a convenient and generative entryway into myriad discourses swirling around the ever-interrogated category of race, many instructors and professors in the humanities and…

Nike continues its assault on the black community. Like a drug dealer, Nike promotes its products in as many places as possible; like the drug dealers’ wardrobe and their “bling,” Nike is shiny, even seductive in its presentation. Nike’s latest affront comes via another Michael Jordan commercial. In the commercial, young kids, primarily black are…

Slaves got the animal parts that their masters thought were unfit for whitefolks to eat. Pig intestines, it turned out, became an African American delicacy: chitlin’s. They also got the jobs unfit for white folks. Even after slavery ended, they have gotten jobs only after whites have had the first pickin’s. Unfortunately, there is no…

Every year, radio/tv commentator Tavis Smiley holds a forum that brings together “the best and the brightest” African-Americans from academia, political, economic and health care, to hold panel discussions on what’s wrong with Black America, and how we Black Americans should go about fixing it. This is a good gesture, if we truly believe it…

In assessing the political right’s performance over the last twenty years, different conclusions can be drawn. Based on the most basic facts, the right has failed in every area except one. This single success, however, as the right’s continuing dominance attests, is the most important in any struggle for political power: the steady production and…