Family Archives

What’s good, everyone? Sorry for the late roundup. I’m subbing for blackink, who just upped and moved to the A and is still getting settled in. Some stuff to turn over as you go about your day… It’s kind of a moot point now, but this chart, via Ezra Klein, shows how much folks would Read More

In her book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy, Candice M. Jenkins writes extensively about “the salvific wish,” — “a desire to protect African American culture and persons against pathologizing stereotypes of sexuality and domesticity… a concern with heteronormative propriety that has dominated the black cultural imaginary and representations of black middle-class life in Read More

cross-posted from TAPPED. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that younger women had fewer children in 2008, probably because of the recession. Doctors suspect, of course, that younger women probably delayed childbirth for financial reasons. Meanwhile, the birth rate continued to rise for women in their 40s. (It has been rising Read More

By now you’ve probably read Jill Scott‘s comments in Essence on the ‘wince’ she feels when she sees black men married to white women. She didn’t say anything most of us hadn’t heard before, and the conversation went the way these things tend to go. But I wanted to point to some of the reactions Read More

*What the new health care law does right away,  and how it addresses income inequality. (Here’s a calculator to see how it affects you, specifically.) Insurers will probably still try to raise premiums. Republicans said they’d run on repealing the healthcare law, but some of them are getting skittish. Democrats go on the offensive. Jonathan Chait ethers Read More

“I just don’t think it makes much sense,” he shrugged. “His college is paid for; he can go anywhere he wants to go, anywhere in the state. I’m not dishing out forty-two thousand dollars so that–” “It’s not going to cost him forty-two thousand dollars! It’s not going to cost you anything. He’s paying for Read More

Like many black people, I grew up grinning at punchlines from black comedians about how creatively they beat their kids. I also grew up with a mom who, like many black moms, kept a mean set of belts hanging on the wall beside her bedroom closet. I basically understand Alisa’s point here: In urban environments Read More

The phone calls started early. The mass text messages. Do you know anybody there? Yes, so-and-so can’t find their father. Damn. Her? Her grandmother landed the day the earthquake hit. How is she? She says that she doesn’t feel like her grandmother is dead. Me? My mother’s cousins are missing. Sorry, I gotta go. I Read More

In an aside in her essay of Elizabeth Gilbert‘s latest, Ariel Levy muses on the volatile definition of marriage. For contemporary political purposes, marriage is often depicted as a timeless and unchanging institution; actually, it has been enormously elastic throughout history and across cultures. In nineteenth-century China, it was perfectly acceptable for a young woman Read More

One of the most frustrating things about intra-race conversations around interracial dating, and particularly dating between black men and white women, is that there is this pervasive belief that it is impossible to both be a “proud” black person and date “outside the race.”  Or put another way, black people with non-black partners are often accused of betraying Read More

Previous Next