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Social Justice

Cuban Hip Hop and Anti-Racist Activism

I was sitting with the Afrocentric rapstress Magia López Cabrera in her modest Havana walk-up in June when Cuba’s prominent black-history scholar Tomás Fernández Robaina showed up for a café con leche. It felt like the Cuban equivalent of Cornel West dropping in on Queen Latifah.

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Building a Poem on the Border, Not a Wall/
Construir un Poema a la Frontera, No un Muro

When the discussion warms up in Andrea Cote-Botero’s graduate seminar, English and Spanish flow freely, just as they do amid the afternoon foot traffic across the nearby Ciudad Juárez border.

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College Board Launches African Diaspora Curriculum

Explores the first-ever national high school curriculum on Black studies. 

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Can Therapy Help White People Work on Race Issues?

Some therapists are guiding white clients to explore their racial prejudice, shame, anger and isolation, and then carry their insights into anti-racist action.

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The College-Town Racial Achievement Gap

I studied high schools in Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Ann Arbor (where I graduated a generation ago) to learn why school racial inequality, as measured by achievement test scores, is so disproportionately large in socially progressive college towns. 

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Challenging the Stigma of an All-Black School: The Selma High Story

Spending a month at Selma High in Alabama offered me a research opportunity to question the prevailing assumption that an all-Black public school is a failure because it embodies the shameful collapse of the post-1954 integration promise. My investigative question was whether such a school can leverage its racially unified character to help students develop their identities and strengthen their learning.

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Fractured Affinities in the African Diaspora: A Conversation with Louis Chude-Sokei

Spending a month at Selma High in Alabama offered me a research opportunity to question the prevailing assumption that an all-Black public school is a failure because it embodies the shameful collapse of the post-1954 integration promise. My investigative question was whether such a school can leverage its racially unified character to help students develop their identities and strengthen their learning.

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A Curriculum of Love

Where is the schoolhouse door that opens to the divine realm of dreams, the contours of grief, the light of intuition, the sense of connection to the rivers? Perhaps love and the inner life do not seem like subjects students could possibly explore at a desk, on a computer, or in a lab.

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When the NFL’s Gay Teammate Comes Out

Inside the locker room of a professional sports team somewhere in America, a player may well be struggling to decide whether he is ready to come out publicly as a gay man. No professional male athlete active in the country’s four prime-time team sports–football, baseball, basketball and hockey–ever has.

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Mending a Torn Psychic Fabric: Torture and Tikkun Olam

Supporting the emerging work of the torture treatment movement challenges the belief that individual citizens have no power to address the grave injury of torture inflicted beyond our borders.

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Teaching Even 100 Hours a Week Leaves Children Behind

Two weeks after a year of urban high school teaching, I sat down to calculate how many hours a week it would take to leave no child behind. That’s no child out of 150, since last year I taught five classes a day, averaging 30 students a class.

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Students Can Share in the MLK-Marcus Garvey Legacy

Virtually no U.S. student could tell you that King visited Jamaica in 1965 and publicly extolled your great national hero, Marcus Garvey. Laying a wreath on the leader’s grave, King declared, “Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United States to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.” 

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Language Justice and Jamaican Patois (podcast)

Patois is the Jamaican language of everyday life and has global cachet through dancehall music. But it suffers the stigma of being inferior to English. Is the government’s unwillingness to recognize it as an official national language a form of discrimination?

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Join this Historic Moment in Cuban-U.S. Relations

At the end of a morning visit to Havana’s Julio Mella Middle School four weeks ago, I exchanged books with a teacher. She gave me a worn copy of an American history text and I gave her a book of Alice Walker poems. 

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Culture

Why I Love Alicia Keys Without Mascara

I love Alicia’s uninhibited sexuality, but I love more this new, subtly intimate expression, like we might be standing together in the same room reflecting on our lives.

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The Olympic Sprint Sensations of Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago, a twin island nation of 1.3 million people off the coast of Venezuela, is known more for high-intensity soca music and blowout Carnivals. But it is slowly building its Olympic brand to emerge from the leggy shadows of its higher-profile rivals, Jamaica and the U.S.

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New Orleans Musical Recovery After Katrina: The Story of the Soul Rebels Brass Band

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, the band members from the Soul Rebels Brass Band, who were dispersed from Texas to South Carolina and beyond, made a pledge over their cell phones to keep their weekly Thursday night gigs at Le Bon Temps Roulé.

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Traveling Mexico City’s Body by Metro

Speeding on a packed rush-hour Metrobus from La Bombilla (Lightbulb) station for Chilpancingo (Wasp), I suddenly imagined myself as one of countless urban particles carrying this city’s vital energies. 

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Claiming One’s Space in Lagos

The women slide through stalled traffic, balancing on their colorful headscarves baskets of plantains for sale, or groundnuts or shampoo flasks.

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Detroit Still Has Its Vibe

On a front lawn off Detroit’s Jefferson Avenue, 11-year-old Tania displays dolls dressed in colorful, hand-designed African fashions. “My grandmother buys them and gets fabric to make the outfits,” Tania says, reporting that on this day, sales are up with spillover traffic from the free Jazzin’ on Jefferson festival. 

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A San Francisco Marine Mammal Excursion

A sea otter floating beside your kayak in Monterey Bay demonstrates a deft technique for cracking open a gaper clam. 

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A Harlem Heritage Tour

If you drop in to New York for a weekend, here’s how to tap into Harlem’s rich black heritage, which begins at the mecca of African American music, the Apollo Theater.

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Obama’s White House Dream: Basketball Replaces Bowling

Barack Obama has been openly fantasizing in the press for months now about replacing the White House bowling alley with a basketball court…

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Literary Criticism

Two Authors Explore Afro-Dominican New York

Like their upbeat, New York-bred authors, the novels Neruda on the Park and Halsey Street converse like sisterly companions.

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Racial Consciousness in Literary Criticism: A National Book Critics Circle Panel Discussion

I am the moderator for a conversation with book critics, editors and creative writers about what it means to be a racially-conscious book critic and what intellectual and personal preparation work racially-conscious critics need to do.

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Reporting on Race and Education:
University of Cape Town Centre for Film and Media Studies Lecture

A presentation of my journalism on race equity in education, Africana curriculum and journalistic practice questions that arise in the reporting process.

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On Interracial Love: Why Baldwin’s Another Country Still Matters

Another Country does not celebrate interracial love; it suggests only its fragile possibility, showing a racial America stripped bare, often literally. But the essential and enduring promise for these wounded characters is that, despite their defenses and denials, they speak and they witness each other’s wrenching racial truths. Their tense dialogues on race, layered with explorations of gay sexuality, remain radical nearly 60 years later.

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How Tariq Trotter of the Roots Built a Life-affirming Philosophy
Review of Black Thought’s Hip-Hop Memoir The Upcycled Self

Across three decades as philosophical frontman for the Roots, Tariq Trotter (a.k.a. Black Thought) has composed such an expansive catalogue of keen social commentary and gritty introspection that his verse constitutes a biography in itself.

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Reckoning With a White Terrorist Forebear
Review of Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman

When white mobs in New Orleans massacred over two hundred African Americans on July 30, 1866, among the marauders was embittered white militia member Constant Lecorgne.

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The Racial Truth Long-hidden Inside a Music Archive
Review of Brendan Slocumb’s Symphony of Secrets

Imagine that the single most influential piece of modern American music — a tour de force that spans classical, opera, Indigenous, Latin, folk, jazz and blues — was not, as claimed, the work of a White man but stolen from a homeless Black woman with a mental disability.

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Recasting the Frontier Narrative
Review of Victor LaValle’s Lone Women

Readers of Victor LaValle’s horror-tinged novels are used to careening across a New York City seeded with supernatural creatures.

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A Road Atlas for Self-Reckoning:
Review of Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us

Human beings are autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. 

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Poetry as an Act of Survival: A Conversation With Safiya Sinclair

The night Safiya Sinclair first openly opposes her abusive father and the Rastafari strictures in which he has confined their family for years, she stands alone on a porch and watches a specter rise in the nighttime chill.

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Queer Nigerians Rewrite the Body

They both silently imagine a first kiss while flirting cautiously in the open air of an empty stadium. But in Nigeria, sometimes a shuttered room is the only place queer boys can dare to become men.

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“An Ancestry’s Worth of Broken Hearts”
Review of Tiphanie Yanique’s Monster in the Middle

A novel that careens magically across the American landscape, shifting ingeniously between literary styles, as it charts the trail of impaired loves in two uprooted families.

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On The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: A Conversation With Deesha Philyaw

In the multi-generational ensemble of women who narrate Deesha Philyaw’s story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) teenage Jael most deftly poses the core existential question—Can you suck dicks and still be saved?”

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On Warsan Shire’s Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

Via the body, she wrenches us into sensuous and traumatic narratives that express hunger for love, rage at violation, the turmoil of illness, and an exquisite wish for restoration.

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Dismantling the Carceral System in Metaphor: A Review of Redaction

Inside his backpack at Yale Law School, as he aimed to become a public defender, 17 years after being imprisoned for a carjacking he committed at age 16, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts kept a sheaf of handwritten letters penned by an executed man named Glenn McGinnis.

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The Social Solitude of Adrienne Rich: A Conversation With Ed Pavlić

While Ed Pavlic’s recently published study of Adrienne Rich’s poetry numbers about 200 pages, their 12-year weekly correspondence lasting until Rich’s death in 2012 amounts to much more.

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Nigerian Fiction Reenvisions the Masculine

Three millennial writers probe inner male conflict while the patriarch Achebe looks on.

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On the First Lesbian Memoir From Nigeria:
A Conversation With Unoma Azuah

Embracing My Shadow is an inspiring testimony suffused in sensuality that illustrates how a young woman can find oases of erotic joy even amidst a severely homophobic society.

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A Conversation on Racially Conscious Literary Criticism

Journalism, it is often said, is the first draft of history…

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Honoring Street-Level New Orleans:
A Conversation With Maurice Carlos Ruffin

A discussion on literary forebears, gentrification, racial divides, lonely trumpets, kids who gotta grow up before their time and Nola-speak.

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The Art of Death: A Conversation With Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat writes about death, even the most brutal, with a lyricism that reminds us of a primal paradox—within the deepest violence and loss, the life-force reasserts itself. 

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An Army of Spiritual Teachers: A Conversation With Alice Walker

I’m sure it wasn’t coincidental, when I phoned Alice Walker at her northern California home in August, to find her gardening. Flowers are perhaps the most common motif in her fifty-year catalog of poetry.

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Treading the Colombian Border Between Memory and Magic: A Conversation With Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Days after a bicycle crash that would erase her memory for two months, Ingrid Rojas Contreras answered her phone and heard the voice of a woman she presumably didn’t know, but who sounded oddly familiar—her mother.

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The State of the African Poetry Book Fund: A Conversation With Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes

The co-editors of the only international press devoted exclusively to publishing African poetry discuss their vision.

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Cross-Cultural Romance With Global Itinerary: A Conversation With Sarah Ladipo Manyika

Working from her recently re-issued novel In  Dependence, we considered different ways that Nigerian, British, and American readers may experience the complex interplay of race, culture, nationality and history.

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The Craft of the Bilingual Writer

Eight prominent bilingual US writers, including Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez, discuss how they approach their dual-language craft as they navigate identity between a childhood lived in one tongue and adulthood lived in another.

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We Are the Colonizers and the Colonized:
A Conversation on Cultural Appropriation With Paisley Rekdal

In the United States, where contemporary fiction often explores deep questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, writers who fashion characters outside their identities invariably surface deep questions about who has the power to shape public narratives of identity, putting any artist with vision into vulnerable territory.

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When Inner and Outer Realms of Race Collide:
Review of Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke

Ed Pavlić is driving I-85 through South Carolina in a rainstorm when he hears the NPR report of yet another racist murder.

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A Chicana Daughter Fragments Vietnam-era Trauma:
Review of Deborah Paredez’ Year of the Dog

At first, I didn’t recognize the girl’s elongated arm. The photo is cropped at the shoulder and there is no visible face.

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When the West Bank Walls Closed In:
Review of Raja Shehadeh’s Memoir Palestinian Walks

A Palestinian man searches for connection with the soil as Israeli West Bank settlements close in, all viewed from the level of the wildflowers and wadis.

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McCall’s debut novel explores Black-white tensions as the Atlanta neighborhood where Martin Luther King grew up is gentrified.
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Memoir

Smoothing the Serpent’s Tooth (Best American Essays 2017 Notable Selection)

One day in the last few weeks of his life, when he was having frequent coughing spasms, my father and I explicated Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71.

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The Return of Marvin Gaye

“What, you’re wondering if I’ll keep this up for my second half century?” I said, scanning the circle. I had no words to answer the question truthfully. There was too much love in the room. At that point I was considering killing myself before I reached 51, maybe with a vial of Phenobarbital.

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The Enumerated Catalog of Joy

Stitching these lists together convinces me I can capture the full fabric of my life, a testament of my essence. I want to believe that joy can be enumerated, grief segmented, and love classified. I want a life that is lyrical, and also measurable.

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A Story of the Letter N

Anyone searching for my parents in a telephone directory would likely overlook the spelling difference between my mother’s and father’s surnames.

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Poetry

“Mask”

Performance at Bogobiri House open mic, Lagos, Nigeria, June 22, 2022

I too fell prey to the delusion /

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“From the Soil”

On the prison rooftop Mandela /

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“Neruda’s Last Question”

Tea leaves patient in a samovar, coconut milk /

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“Falluja”

That unswerving trek inward after the air campaign /

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“Balloon”

Rainbow-striped above the neighborhood /

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“Sleeveless in the Subway”

Bless a steam hot concrete day /

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“Einstein’s Third Equation”

A finger pressed against my eye /

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“Cave For the Generations”

Hiding comsumption in the beard /

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