After hearing so much ballyhoo, I finally broke down and started watching Game of Thrones. As usual, I am late to the party (GOT premiered in 2011). My wife has long refused to watch it, but I finally caved, so…
White supremacists are hell-bent on repeating history
Mark Wingfield recently wrote an article reporting on the defeat of a Black pastor who had served for 17 years on a public school board in Houston. The defeat was orchestrated by right-wing white parents opposed to Critical Race Theory and…
A few notes on Kenny G, the history of jazz and being tone deaf to how we got here
“John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, their technique was phenomenal, but that music was never heartfelt for me, so, when I went out and gigged, it wasn’t anything that I wanted to emulate.” So said Kenneth Gorelick, the much-beloved, and much-maligned,…
Seeing ghosts may cause us to settle accounts long overdue
I sent my children to Scarowinds last week, and I do not feel at all guilty about it. Scarowinds is the end-of-season hurrah for Charlotte’s theme park, Carowinds. Staff dress up in Halloween costumes, the park stays open late, and…
Who’s behind the nationwide attacks on local school boards over Critical Race Theory?
School boards across America are under attack by conservative parents whose fears of woke liberalism are being stoked by national organizations affiliated with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, as well as Fox News and other conservative media outlets. The…
The history of Haiti you probably don’t know
Recent news coverage of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing asylum-seekers from Haiti who tried to enter the United States at Del Rio, Texas, is disturbing. The images harken back to a time when white slave patrols used horses…
How the oldest American lie sustains our racial malaise
I have spent 50 years teaching college students from coast to coast and points in between, and while much has changed over the course of those 50 years, one thing has remained unchanged: the students’ abysmal ignorance of the negative…
Learning to sit with generational grief
I sat in bed staring at my laptop, the dozens of Google tabs detailing the journey I’d been on. Books were buried in my comforter, creating a type of literary war zone. My ojeras (the bags under my eyes) decorated…
Knowing our history does not make us anti-American
“Denial is not a river in Egypt.” I used to hear that sarcastic and humorous pun without really understanding it. After reading too much news for the last year, I understand it too well now. If you’re as slow as…