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Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about.
By James BaldwinMarch 2011February 2011Laws bind us. But it is important to remember the law is only what is popular. Not what’s right or wrong.
Marilyn Manson
Washington, D.C., after a conference: / we head into the urban night / led by the jive-talking white ghetto boy / raised in black foster homes, / bent on showing us the town.
By Dane CervineFebruary 2011The phone rang just after Felonise had hung up the white clothes in the backyard. It was late October, and the laundry swayed in the California wind that blew hot and gentle from the moment the sun came up out here in the orange groves outside Rio Seco: the dish towels, the sheets from the fold-out couch where her grandson Teeter had spent the night when his brother, Lafayette, went to a piano concert, and the white socks her daughter Cerise called “Peds,” the ones Felonise liked to wear at night around the house. Could wash them after one night. Cleaner than slippers.
By Susan StraightAugust 2010A long embrace, the look of freedom, a riderless horse
By Our ReadersJune 2010July 2009If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it’s just a drunk. If a Negro does, it’s the whole damn Negro race.
Bill Cosby
Some think that racism ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Those were important steps, because they made it illegal to engage in discrimination. But just because you’ve made something illegal doesn’t mean it no longer happens. No enforcement mechanisms existed for the Fair Housing Act until 1988, and evidence suggests there are still millions of cases of race-based housing discrimination every year.
By David CookJuly 2009A four-page letter, a broken microwave, a game of solitare
By Our ReadersJuly 2009Virginia and I were in an English-literature class together during my senior year at the State University of New York at Albany. She wore black-rimmed “cafe girl” glasses and had one of those bright, pale faces that slips back and forth from plain to attractive. Altogether her style was a mixture of grunge and hippie, and I found Virginia sexy as hell. During the week that we covered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, she and I united against the close-minded faction in class who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, comprehend how one man could love another. We chastised them on breaks and shouted them down during discussions. At the end of class one evening, Virginia discovered that I, too, liked getting high, and she smiled — her face alive with mischief — and counted off three words on her fingers: Suburban. Bitch. Cruise.
By Akhim Yuseff CabeyJuly 2009You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.
By James BaldwinJuly 2009Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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