Ta-Nehisi says that Malcolm is his heart and King is his brain. I’d never really had the Malcolm obsession that seemed to enthrall so many of the folks I grew up with, particularly around the time that Spike Lee’s biopic dropped. (In the perhaps unavoidable commodification of Malcolm’s image, every other person in Philly seemed Read More
In his essay, “How Invisible Man Taught Me to See,” on The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog, Victor Lavalle explores, among many things, what it means to be a black writer with a burgeoning white audience. For him, it means resistance to instinctual conclusion-jumping and, unexpectedly, fulfilling the wish of Ellison’s underground narrator to become Read More
First things first: The Book of Eli is about religion. More specifically, The Book of Eli is about Christian religion. So those unnamed people Roger Ebert says are “attacking” it as “fundamentalist propaganda” kind of have a point. Like Ebert, I won’t tell you what the film’s titular book is: but Eli (Denzel Washington) starts Read More
Martin Luther King was never the saintly, beloved man in life that he has become in death. Ari Kelman over at Edge of the West gave us permission to re-run this fantastic post on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the sterilization of his image. The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as Read More
We’ll skip the fanfare, but we’ve finally done did it, y’all. PostBourgie: The Podcast. It’s got a little silliness, a lot of politics, and a few bad jokes (mine, mostly). Our first episode features Monica (you know her as quadmoniker), G.D., Jamelle, and me, your loving moderator, as we talk about the Harry Reid kerfuffle, Read More
Not only is this a fantastic video, it wins points for highlighting the single most frustrating thing about the abortion debate, namely, the fact that anti-abortion folks are the only people in the United States that can pick and choose what they want their tax dollars to support. If I, for example, tried to withhold Read More
At the risk of looking like that page in the back of Jet that tells you when Black people are gonna be on TV, here’s a shortlist of pick-ups and renewals of programs starring people of color: TNT has renewed Men of a Certain Age for a second season, after airing just five episodes. I’m Read More
By R.A.B. In March of last year, as Texas’ unemployment rate crept to 6.7% (pdf), Governor (and hater of Texans) Rick Perry (R) publicly rejected his state’s $555 billion share of federal unemployment assistance from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unemployment in his state now hovers at 8% (pdf). This year, Perry is back Read More
