Racism

Film Review: “Origin” — A Map of Human Suffering

January 20, 2024
Posted in , ,

The breadth and intimacy of “Origin”‘s vision — the personal becomes the historical — is stunning, a searing portrait of collective trauma and the dark ideas that propel it.

Read More

Book Review: “Soccer Grannies” — A Marvelous Book About an Amazing Woman

May 8, 2023
Posted in , ,

Nobody reading about Rebecca “Beka” Ntsanwisi, aka “Mama Beka,” can feel anything but good. This extraordinary South African woman has built a network of soccer teams made up of grandmothers throughout her country.

Read More

Film Review: Three Shorts Featuring Writer and Activist James Baldwin, Man of the Hour

March 24, 2023
Posted in , , ,

In these short films James Baldwin does not come off as a relaxed person, someone at ease with himself or quite comfortable in the world. You can feel the acute pain as he speaks.

Read More

Film Review: Wait for It… “Hold Your Fire”

September 30, 2022
Posted in , ,

At a time when the nation is taking stock of the failures of our history of urban policing and looking for some new approaches, the lessons of Hold Your Fire are needed more urgently than ever.

Read More

Book Review: The South – What Jim Crow Was and Wasn’t

May 9, 2022
Posted in , ,

We need to realize how important class is in order to understand how inequality can rise as Confederate monuments fall.

Read More

Author Interview: David Livingstone Smith on Dehumanization and “Making Monsters”

November 11, 2021
Posted in , , ,

“Making Monsters is a wake-up call. We need to seriously address the phenomenon of dehumanization if we are to have any hope of constraining it when things get really difficult.”

Read More

Film Review: Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq”—A Long and Sexy Sermon

December 4, 2015
Posted in , ,

Chi-Raq is a work of agitprop—preachy, strident, sentimental, even sacramental.

Read More

Stage Interview: Dramatist Jacqui Parker Talks About How Black Lives Matter: “A Crack in the Blue Wall”

November 4, 2015
Posted in , ,

“Theater producers do not want to make their audience members uncomfortable and talking about race makes folks uncomfortable.”

Read More

Theater Review: “appropriate” — Southern Gothic, Entertainingly Deconstructed

September 19, 2015
Posted in , ,

In appropriate, a talented young playwright turns mischievous literary homage into a work of exhilarating entertainment.

Read More

Music Commentary Series: Jazz and the Piano Concerto — The Zebra in the Room

May 22, 2015
Posted in , , , ,

Much more work could be done fertilizing the fields of cross-cultural music, sowing seeds collected from the great touchstones of American culture – innovation, integration, risk, reward.

Read More

Recent Posts