Tag: New York Times

  • What was race anyway? That’s the big question Miss Anne’s actions raised. If race was simply a myth or fiction, could one reimagine racial identity as something based on affiliation rather than blood? Some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance asked much the same thing. In Nella Larsen’s “Passing” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography…

  • Art Review: In the New World, Trappings of a New Social Order The New York Times 2013-09-19 Karen Rosenberg ‘Behind Closed Doors’ Regards Spanish Colonial Art “Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898,” at the Brooklyn Museum, leaves us in the strange position of marveling at the opulence of domestic life in…

  • Uptown Girls Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2013-09-22 Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History Princeton University Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan Illustrated. 505 pp. Harper. Time hasn’t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. As philanthropists and activists, authors…

  • Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind The New York Times 2013-09-16 James Dao, Military and Veterans Affairs Reporter SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father. He re-enlisted, hoping to…

  • Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form The New York Times 2013-09-14 Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their…

  • Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension The New York Times 2013-09-11 Michael Barbaro, Political Writer The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened. Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.…

  • De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff The New York Times 2013-09-10 David M. Halbfinger, Reporter David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes…

  • Norma Storch Is Dead at 81; Subject of TV Documentary The New York Times 2003-09-21 Douglas Martin Norma Storch, a white woman whose decision to have her 4-year-old mixed-race daughter raised by a black couple became the subject of an Emmy Award-winning documentary made by the daughter in adulthood, died on Aug. 28 at her…

  • The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative…

  • Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’ The New York Times 2013-09-01 George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania “Man, I almost blew you away!” Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late…