Category: Articles

  • Rupert Murdoch implies Obama is not ‘real black president’ in tweet praising Ben Carson The Guardian 2015-10-07 Ben Jacobs, Political Reporter Media mogul says Republican contender could ‘properly address the racial divide’ in tweets criticising Obama’s record in office Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has suggested that Barack Obama was not a “real black” president in…

  • Illicit Labor: MacArthur’s Mistress and Imperial Intimacies Radical History Review Volume 2015, Number 123 (October 2015) pages 87-114 DOI: 10.1215/01636545-3088168 Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Associate Professor of American Studies University of Hawaii, Mānoa This essay examines a brief affair between General Douglas MacArthur and a mixed-race Filipina vaudeville actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper. It focuses on…

  • Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi review – serious issues, fairytale narrative The Guardian 2015-10-04 Anthony Cummins Oyeyemi, Helen, Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Press, 2014) Oyeyemi’s fifth novel finds her treating the horrors of racism in 1950s America with gentle, magical style Helen Oyeyemi, a Granta best of young British novelist,…

  • Artist Favianna Rodriguez makes bold, sparkling works that light up a room even as they reveal dark cul­tural inequities.

  • Ten black composers whose works deserve to be heard more often The Guardian 2015-06-02 John Lewis English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Photograph: Unknown/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS The newly formed Chineke orchestra aims to include a work by a composer of ethnicity in each of its concert programmes. John Lewis looks at some of the neglected writers whose…

  • Obama has vastly changed the face of the federal bureaucracy The Washington Post 2015-09-20 Juliet Eilperin, White House Bureau Chief Friday afternoon announcements in Washington are usually aimed at attracting as little attention as possible, but last Friday was different. President Obama’s decision to nominate Eric Fanning — an openly gay man — to head…

  • Betty Blake, 80, is the mother of retired tennis star James Blake. Betty, who is white and grew up in England, talks about raising two sons who are black.

  • Whither ‘non-racialism’: the ‘new’ South Africa turns twenty-one Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 38, Issue 13, 2015 pages 2167-2174 DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1058511 Deborah Posel, Professor of Sociology Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa This brief essay reflects on the meaning and significance of ‘non-racialism’ in South Africa’s recent…

  • Garifuna: The Young Black Latino Exodus You’ve Never Heard About Fusion 2014-06-04 Jasmine Garsd Honduran migrants passing through Mexico often carry only the bare essentials: cash, some clothes and a cell phone, if they can afford one. Gustavo Morales stands out among the migrant population here in Tequixquiac, a hot, dusty little town right outside…

  • To Be Black And Boricua La Respuesta 2015-09-17 At this year’s Afro-Latino Festival of New York, La Respuesta teamed up with Project Bronx, the community-focused web series, for an exciting video collaboration. We spoke with festival attendees, artists, and vendors about a theme central to the festival’s focus. For the past 3 years, the Afro-Latino…