Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A collection of personal letters, photos and papers from civil rights icon Rosa Parks is being made public for the first time. (Published Tuesday, Feb 3, 2015) Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, reflected later on how it felt to be treated less than equal and once feistily…
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis easily swept the 2014 Grammy Awards, racking up wins in multiple rap categories at a ceremony that has historically been blind to the cultural impact of many revered hip-hop artists.Critics argued that even in 2014, it still took a white rapper like Macklemore to achieve this, while Kendrick Lamar left without…
On June 30th, 1974, Alberta Williams King was gunned down while she played the organ for the “Lord’s Prayer” at Ebenezer Baptist Church. As a Christian civil rights activist, she was assassinated…just like her son, Martin Luther King, Jr. But most people remember only one. Until a month ago, I was one of those people….
Today in People Are Horrible, comedian Kamau Bell was accused of pan-handling from his own wife and her friends because he is black and she is white. Stereotypes, come on down! Earlier this week, Bell went to a restaurant called Elmwood Cafe in Berkeley, California for a birthday breakfast with his wife, Dr. Melissa Hudson…
It’s a blue, cold Thursday in January and I’m walking down Rugby Road on the first night of fraternity rush at the University of Virginia, brushing past groups of identical gossiping boys in matching preppy outfits: fleeces, checked oxfords, khakis, boots. “Excuse me,” they say politely when our coats touch, then turn back to each…
I was really looking forward to Jonathan Chait’s essay in New York magazine about the inanity of social media outrage culture and the danger of letting angry name-calling and base grievance-mongering settle debates. And Chait, that cuddly old reactionary, hit it out of the park. The reaction on social media was, how do you say, “not at all…
Updated Sunday, Jan. 25, 6:35 p.m.: The Yale Police Department is conducting an internal investigation of an incident in which a New York Times columnist’s son was stopped by police, who were seeking a burglary suspect, according to the Yale Daily Mail. The paper says college students had described a tall, African-American male wearing a black…
close shareTools Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint! This is how my son remembers it: He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to…
Race and gender politics at this year’s Golden Globes took an unexpected range of twists and turns. First, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler shamelessly mocked the many rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Given that there has been a significant strain of public resistance among some African-Americans to the racial politics of a group of…
DeRay McKesson, a Minneapolis school administrator, has been interviewed by the Washington Post, Reuters, and The Atlantic, and gained more than 61,000 Twitter followers over the past five months. It’s all thanks to his frequent bursts of 140-character insight about the #blacklivesmatter movement, which sprung up after police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, a black 18 year old,…