Month: July 2016

  • Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth. We mark each other by complexion. We assign meaningless stereotypes to people according to skin color. We adore and fear and hate people on the basis of how light or dark they are. Race,…

  • “I think the media does a great job of wanting to silo who we are as Americans… They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the immigrant issue, that’s the African-American issue, that’s the Asian issue.’ No, it’s us. And until we understand that we have a vested interest in all these different topics we can’t actually come together…

  • Racism twists and distorts everything The Washington Post 2016-07-08 Darryl Fears, National Enviromental Reporter For three straight mornings, I’ve eaten breakfast sprinkled with madness. Throughout this week that started with July 4, I’ve woken to horrible news that was tough to swallow. Like everyone else, I watched videos that captured the nation’s racial angst —…

  • NYC AfroLatino Fest Comes at an Important Time Sounds and Colours 2016-07-05 Gina Vergel It seems the fourth edition of AfroLatinoFest in New York City comes at a crucial time. A survey by the Pew Research Center, released in March, points to a disconnect in how some Afro-Latinos living in the United States report their…

  • Colorblindness is not Progressive: a Review of “The Color of Water” The Tempest 2016-06-11 Maya Williams We should make it clear that the concept of colorblindness isn’t just a white perspective to have or to talk about. The Color of Water: a Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother (1995) tells the story of a…

  • 5 Steps Latinos Can Take to Combat Anti-Blackness Remezcla 2016-07-09 Andrew S. Vargas We are all reeling from the events of this past week. The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police have become an all-too-familiar narrative in our public life, but each time we are confronted with these images it dredges…

  • “Yes We Can” Barack Obama’s Proverbial Rhetoric Peter Lang Publishing 2009 352 pages Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-0668-2 Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-0667 Wolfgang Mieder, Professor of German and Folklore University of Vermont As President Barack Obama outlined his promise for change during the presidential campaign, he made effective use of proverbs and proverbial phrases, and invented many quotable…

  • Blackness cannot be taken away from us. Biraciality cannot be taken away from us. They exist as tangibly as our skin, made from Europe and Africa. We are the colonizer and the colonized. We are the oppressor and the oppressed. We bleed for our brothers and sisters. We carry on our backs the weight of…

  • Obama’s Delicate Balance on Issue of Race and Policing The New York Times 2017-07-08 Mark Landler, White House Correspondent Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent WARSAW — As Air Force One headed for Europe on Thursday afternoon, President Obama holed up in the plane’s office editing a Facebook post meant to express his anguish at…

  • While my first instinct was to celebrate Jesse Williams’ recent Humanitarian Award from BET, my second instinct, which came just seconds later, was to brace myself for the backlash.