The confirmation of Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative voices to be added to the [Supreme] Court in recent memory, carr...ies a sobering message for the African- American community.... As he begins to make his mark upon the lives of African Americans, we must acknowledge that his successful nomination is due in no small measure to the support he received from black Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not all black women have silently acquiesced in sexism and misogyny within the African-American community. Indeed, many writer...s, activists, and other women have voiced their opposition and paid the price: they have been ostracized and branded as either man- haters or pawns of white feminists, two of the more predictable modes of disciplining and discrediting black feminists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a colored woman or a Negro woman. Either one is OK. People dislike those words now. Today these use this term African America...n. It wouldn't occur to me to use that. I prefer to think of myself as an American, that's all!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman.... Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If "heavy metal" was the Anglo-American contribution to low culture, then "rap" was the African-American donation. And if "metal" ...came from the garage where Junior had been sent with his guitar and extension cord, then rap came from the street where young blacks played the only instruments they could afford--the mouth organ and the foot drum. Rap is performed in street clothes; metal in elaborate costumes of leather and fringe. In metal, the volume carries the aggression; in rap it is the words. Both are rife with adolescent misogyny, homophobia, and threats of violence. They are rude, bawdy, boastful, with a kind of "in your face" aggression (called "attitude") characteristic of insecure masculinity. Both musical forms were unique, however, in that they produced platinum records with little radio exposure. They found their audience on MTV.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the g...reatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all t...he undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs... from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... black progress and progress for women are inextricably linked in contemporary American politics, and ... each group suffers wh...en it fails to grasp the dimensions of the other's struggle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »