Tag: New York Times

  • And people bleach in Asia — lightening creams and lotions are as ubiquitous in drugstores in Seoul as eye shadow. They do it in Europe, despite the restrictions there on sales of hydroquinone. You can walk into any number of black beauty salons in London and find bleaching creams and lotions. But Africa? If you…

  • The Identity Politics of Whiteness The New York Times Magazine 2016-11-27 Laila Lalami Three years ago, I read “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to my daughter. She smiled as she heard about Huck’s mischief, his jokes, his dress-up games, but it was his relationship with the runaway slave Jim that intrigued her most. Huck and Jim…

  • For Interracial Couples, Growing Acceptance, With Some Exceptions The New York Times 2016-11-26 Brooke Lea Foster When I was a new mother living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2010, I often forgot that my infant son, Harper, didn’t look like me. As I pushed him around the neighborhood, I thought of him…

  • A multibillion-dollar industry of skin-whitening products dominates the West African beauty market, creating a world of mixed messages for the women who live there.

  • The End of the Postracial Myth The New York Times Magazine 2016-11-15 Nikole Hannah-Jones Pundits are quick to say that it couldn’t be about prejudice in states like Iowa, where Obama voters went for Trump. But racial anxiety is always close to the surface — and can easily be stoked. On a cold, clear night…

  • Half and Half Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2007-02-11 Bliss Broyard David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007). Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he…

  • Zadie Smith: By the Book The New York Times 2016-11-17 Zadie Smith Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki The author, most recently, of “Swing Time” says the best gift book she ever received was from her dying father, who “gave me his copy of ‘Ulysses,’ along with the confession he had never read it.” What books…

  • The Danger of a Dominant Identity The New York Times 2016-11-18 David Brooks Over the past few days we’ve seen what happens when you assign someone a single identity. Pollsters assumed that most Latinos would vote only as Latinos, and therefore against Donald Trump. But a surprising percentage voted for him. Pollsters assumed women would…

  • Review: In ‘Loving,’ They Loved. A Segregated Virginia Did Not Love Them Back. The New York Times 2016-11-03 Manohla Dargis, Movie Critic Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving in the Jeff Nichols film “Loving.” Credit Ben Rothstein/Focus Features There are few movies that speak to the American moment as movingly —…

  • I’m Not the Nanny: Multiracial Families and Colorism Book Review The New York Times 2016-11-03 Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of History Stanford University SAME FAMILY, DIFFERENT COLORS: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families By Lori L. Tharps 203 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95. In Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel “Caucasia,” two sisters — Cole and Birdie —…