Month: January 2017

  • Katherine Johnson, Va. woman at center of ‘Hidden Figures,’ calls calculation ‘piece of cake’ CBS 6, WTVR-TV Richmond Virginia 2017-01-13 HAMPTON, Va. — It is the untold story that has been hidden in Hampton for decades. The box office hit “Hidden Figures” highlights the black female mathematicians at NASA who’s brain power helped launch the first…

  • Britain’s black history has been shamefully whitewashed The Spectator 2017-01-14 Hakim Adi, Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom Author David Olusoga (Photo: Getty) I have been researching and writing about black British history for over 30 years but never before have I been…

  • Exclusive: Watch Salena Godden’s ‘Under the Pier’ The State Of The Arts 2017-01-10 Christy Cooney Leeds, United Kingdom Spoken word artist Salena Godden has kicked of 2017 with the release of a video for ‘Under the Pier’, a piece from her 2016 album LIVEwire. Shot on location in Hastings, East Sussex in November 2016, the video was filmed, directed, and…

  • Farewell to the chief The Times of London 2017-01-15 Trevor Phillips April 22, 2013: the president pauses for a moment of silence in honour of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings PETE SOUZA After eight years in the White House, Barack Obama relinquishes the top job this Friday. Trevor Phillips criticises his legacy on…

  • How Black America Saw Obama The New York Times 2017-01-14 Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. I stood in Grant Park on election night 2008, along with more than 200,000 other people, and watched as a man I’d known as a fellow member of a Chicago church, a man I’d worked…

  • Meet the Afro-Mexicans connecting to their African roots through dance Ventures Africa 2017-01-05 Iroegbu Chinaemerem Oti “Based on your culture, history, and traditions, do you consider yourself Black, meaning Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant?” – MEXICO’S 2015 Intercensal Survey The sound of Bata drums filled the air as girls, with printed scarfs tied around their waists and white…

  • No Racial Barrier Left to Break (Except All of Them) The New York Times 2017-01-14 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy, HKS Suzanne Young Murray Professor Harvard Kennedy School Harvard University We can’t create a more just nation simply by dressing up institutions in more shades of brown. Now we must…

  • The Boyden affair just got murkier: Salutin The Toronto Star 2017-01-13 Rick Salutin Celebrated author agrees to select interviews, insists he never embellished or lied about his heritage, but also offered platitudes versus confronting precise criticisms I found Joseph Boyden’s interview Wednesday on CBC — in a word rarely called for — unctuous. He surfaced…

  • Full interview: Joseph Boyden on his heritage CBC Radio 2017-01-11 Jesse Kinos-Goodin Author Joseph Boyden addresses the recent controversy surrounding his Indigenous ancestral claims. (Penguin) “A small part of me is Indigenous, but it’s a big part of who I am.” Is Joseph Boyden really Indigenous? It’s a question a lot of people have been…

  • A Blaxican’s Journey through Fresno’s Racial Landscape Tropics Of Meta: historiography for the masses 2017-01-13 Raymond A. Rey In the summer of 1973, DJ Kool Herc tried something new on the turntables: by extending the beat, breaking and scratching the record, he allowed people to dance longer and entertained them with his rhymes as an MC.…