Category Archives: Black Culture
Why Black Voters Should Be Mad at Obama (and themselves)

I’ve spent the past several days absorbing commentary via social media and NPR about President Obama’s views on same-sex marriage…

The Bachelor and American Inclusion (my post on ebony.com)

My first post on Ebony.com went live there on April 25. It starts: The recent class action lawsuit against ABC…

Movies aren’t miracles

I have long believed that film has the ability to change the world.  I wrote in my 2002 and 2004…

Pick your paternalism poison
photo: purity rings from overstock.com

In his column, “America’s obsession with missing white women,” Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts asserts that the incessant news coverage of…

At school with the boss’s kids

One day at the grade school That had been ordered To desegregate only, Virginia saw the red clutch bag On…

Paying respect to The Help
photo: my great-aunt in her day work uniform with the children she kept

  I’ve grown up attending wakes and funerals for people of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations.  At these sad memorials…

In Defense of The Help

UPDATE 8/29/2011: I’ve seen the movie—with my grandmother and other women of her generation who were ‘The Help’—and after a…

Defining Oprah
Still from Oprah's Farewell Spectacular

  The Oprah Winfrey Show episode that serves as a defining moment for me is one I didn’t see, and…

Why black men should see Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

If you’ve ever gone to a Tyler Perry play or movie and returned home feeling like you paid to see black men receive a collective slap in the face, this play is your answer. There’s no light-skinned, and/or blue-collar hero saving the abused woman from the evil dark-skinned and/or professional man. No choir will sing. There will be no weddings and no one will come to Jesus at the end.

Lady in Redbone Afropuff’s changes to “For Colored Girls”

Seven drastic changes that would make the film, “For Colored Girls,” (ahem) better. Yeah, I said it.

Context explains colored folks’ reactions to “For Colored Girls”

Is “For Colored Girls” offensive? Divisive? Poorly written? All of the above? Depends on the context. However, critiquing the film in the context of traditional film school storytelling rules explains why the movie generates such polarizing reactions.

Black snobs and trained filmmakers may love Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls”
colored-girls-cast via rap-up.com

I want to see Tyler Perry’s, For Colored Girls. I want to see a Tyler Perry movie, and it makes me feel all weird on my snooty intellectual insides. I’ve never hated Perry for reaching out to a neglected audience. I’ve simply been annoyed that work so flawed received such popular acclaim.

Let’s get loud
Michael and Janet Jackson stills from "Scream"

I knew before I looked that these voices belonged to young black males. And I wanted to tell them not to be so loud. What would white people think of us?

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