Tag: The New Yorker

  • Defying the Stereotype of the Broken Black Family The New Yorker 2015-10-12 Lucy McKeon For his series “Father Figure,” begun in 2011, the photographer Zun Lee created quiet and tender portraits of black fathers with their children: one kisses the tiny hand of his baby while riding the subway; another goofs around at bedtime, his…

  • Othello’s Daughter The New Yorker 2013-07-29 Alex Ross, Music Critic Aldridge, circa 1865, and his daughter Luranah, a singer, in an undated image. Credit Photographs by Billy Rose Theatre Division / The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Mccormick Library of Special Collections / Northwestern University Library The rich legacy of Ira Aldridge,…

  • Charleston and the Age of Obama The New Yorker 2015-06-19 David Remnick, Editor Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write…

  • The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like [Walter] White or [Louis T.] Wright (or, for that matter, [Rachel] Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery.…

  • Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who has for some years identified as black. She wasn’t lying about who she is. She was lying about a lie.

  • I had always understood my ancestry to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion?

  • An Overlooked Classic About the Comedy of Race The New Yorker 2015-05-07 Danzy Senna Illustration by Roman Muradov The first time I read Fran Ross’s hilarious, badass novel, “Oreo,” I was living on Fort Greene Place, in Brooklyn, in a community of people I thought of as “the dreadlocked élite.” It was the late nineteen-nineties,…

  • The Joshua Generation The New Yorker 2008-11-17 David Remnick, Editor Race and the campaign of Barack Obama. Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on…

  • Brother from Another Mother The New Yorker 2015-02-23 Zadie Smith Key and Peele’s chameleon comedy. The wigs on “Key and Peele” are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labelled—“Short Black/Brown, Human,” “Long Black, Human”—they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters…

  • Sweetness The New Yorker 2015-02-09 Issue Toni Morrison It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was…