Feature – Looking Our Racist History in the Eye. An exhibit about the civil rights movement in Nashville proves Faulkner was right: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.
A boy and his mother hold hands as they walk to school on the first day of desegregation in Nashville’s public schools, Sept. 9, 1957. An exhibit of photographs at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville shatters the civic myth that the city peacefully accepted racial integration. Nashville did not attack its own children with fire hoses, as Birmingham did. Tennessee did not call out the National Guard to integrate its universities, as Mississippi did. There is no “Bloody Sunday” in our history, as there is in the history of Selma, Ala. But our stories about the orderly desegregation of schools and the peaceful desegregation of lunch counters and the benign treatment of black people by the white people in power? That’s all a myth. Read more
Black Athletes Are Not Objects For Our Entertainment. It is an old dynamic, the attitude that black athletes (as well as black entertainers) should be seen and not heard, serving only as vessels of amusement for (mostly white) audiences. It speaks to a larger idea ― that there is a very particular “right” way to be a black athlete and that is to simply be a body performing a task, not a human with passions, opinions and causes. Read more
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’s’ racist lyrics reflect its slave owner author, Francis Scott Key. Francis Scott Key and Colin Kaepernick are perfect opposites in a drama of privilege versus protest in America. Key, an elite insider and author of the national anthem, helped a president down a dark path to defend slavery. Kaepernick, the outsider, is the former NFL quarterback banished from the realm for kneeling during the lofty victory song that Key wrote under a battle-stained sky in 1814. Read more
The Serena Williams cartoon, the Dallas shooting and the weapon of white femininity. Whatever you think of the merits of Williams’ on-court exchange with the umpire, the cartoon is part of a long line of caricatures reducing black bodies to grotesquerie to make a point about their unworthiness and threat. Especially their threat to white women, a sentiment that has long acted as the emotional fuel and structuring fiction of white supremacy and violence. Read more
NAACP Legal Defense Fund lays out Kavanaugh’s “extensive and troubling record” on civil rights. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, the LDF report concludes, “his jurisprudence will solidify the civil rights retrenchment with devastating consequences for the constitutional and legal protections of those who are most marginalized in our society for decades to come. We must oppose his confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Read more
Does Teacher Diversity Matter in Student Learning? Research shows that students, especially boys, benefit when teachers share their race or gender. Yet most teachers are white women. Read more
African-Americans and home schooling: ‘A way of freedom.’ More African-American families, particularly in the South, are home schooling because of the lack of black history in public school curriculums as well as the disproportionate disciplining of black students. Watch here
Can You Win an Election by Talking About Segregation? Chicago’s population is divided almost equally among African-Americans, Latinos and whites, and the geographic Balkanization allows segregation to infect neighborhoods with the graveness of a waterborne disease. Too many politicians, black and white, do not address the realities of segregation head on. It is as if speaking directly about this reality — vacant lots, boarded-up buildings and paltry economic investment in majority-black neighborhoods — will turn voters off or make even more real the reality that Chicagoans live every day. Read more
Quincy Jones Has Accomplished So Much That Even Netflix’s New Doc About Him Can’t Capture It All. At 85 years old, Quincy Jones is one of the most influential people in the history of recorded music, yet I would guess that, in 2018, many casual music fans would be hard-pressed to explain what exactly he actually did. Jones’ name has been legendary in music circles for more than half a century, but much of his résumé consists of terms and vocations that are now obsolete, at least as far as mainstream pop is concerned. Read more
Just Behind the Beat. Nate Chinen new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, is “A perfectly timed, well-tuned chronicle of the past, present, and future of jazz.” Chinen documents what happened after jazz lost its cultural dominance—its evolution in the past few decades into a much woolier, more various, and more relevant arena than most of the public might imagine. The author had a perfect perch to track that development as a New York Times jazz critic for more than a dozen years. Read more
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