As we approach the 50th anniversary of Alex Haley’s novel Roots, we are not merely commemorating a book and a subsequent television event, we are revisiting a cultural earthquake. Before the bright lights of Hollywood casting calls in 1976 —…
The lies my country taught me
When I was 12 years old, growing up in the 1950s, I gathered every Saturday with hundreds of kids my age at the downtown theater in my West Texas town where the silver screen fed us lies that passed for…
The shame is mine: ‘Roots’ 2016
This week I was one among the millions who watched A&E’s powerful and devastating “re-imagination” of the epic miniseries Roots, brought to the small screen for a new audience against the not-so-new backdrop of this, the latest iteration of the…