In March 2009, not even a full three months after President Barack Obama had been sworn into office, I wrote a blog entitled “Celebrating Obama as Head of Empire.” It flew under the radar for the most part except for my then small blogging audience that read and commented. It was a notion that I […]
Read more "We Do Big Things: Celebrating Obama as Head of Empire, Redux"Men lie; women lie; numbers don’t. Jay-Z famously made that quote in 2009 at the American Music Awards and it entered the pop cultural lexicon as a bellwether for truth and stark reality. This statement was made with regards to records sales; he was still able to move units in a day and age where […]
Read more "Jay-Z Was Wrong, Numbers Do Lie"On December 20, this country more or less quietly marked the sesquicentennial anniversary of the day South Carolina drafted secession papers and formally seceded from the United States of America in 1860. Their secession was ratified on December 24, four days later. At issue for them was the nebulous idea of states’ rights entangled with […]
Read more "A House Still Divided: 150 Years Since the March to the Civil War"Famously in recent memory, former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin made the declaration in 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans would still be a “chocolate city” to allay fears of New Orleans citizens displaced after the storm that white land grabbers and corporations were going to come in and […]
Read more "Vanishing Chocolate Cities: The Failure of the Black Middle Class"Yesterday, December 7th, President Barack Obama let it be known in his press conference that he was in favor of extending the Economic and Jobs Growth Tax Reconciliation Acts of 2001 and 2003 respectively, colloquially known as the “Bush tax cuts,” that were set to expire on December 31st. This was a highly controversial plan that […]
Read more "Premature Autopsies: The Obama Administration"I went to go see “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1” today at the local IMAX theatre. I figured that if I was going to spend $11 on a regular ticket at a downtown theatre that’s closest to me, I might as well go to see it in IMAX. So, I saw the […]
Read more "When Fantasy World Hits Home: A Social Gospel of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (and another novel I read as well)"[Editor’s note: The gross generalizations when using the blanket terms of “black women” or “black men” are not to be understood as engaging the stereotype of “all” and lumping everyone into broad categories. But for the sake of easy communication in an already lengthy blog post, please adjust your comprehension accordingly. That is to say, […]
Read more "For Black Male Intellectuals Who Have Considered Suicide When Black Women Were Too Much"Friday, November 5th signaled the end of a rough four days for many blacks here in America. The 2010 Midterm Elections. The Democrats took a “shellacking” to borrow the term used in Wednesday morning’s hour long press conference given by Barack Obama. Many governor’s mansions flipped over to the Republicans; the House of Representatives changed […]
Read more "Uppity Negro Network Newsbriefs: A Bad Week for Black Progressives"I know that’s a long title and certainly hyperbolic, but I think it addresses the gutted and eviscerated feeling that I experienced watching CNN’s Soledad O’Brien “Almighty Debt” a Black In America special. Granted I went into this third installment of the Black In America series with some serious preconceived notions. Rightly so I believe. […]
Read more "For Colored Persons Who Have Considered Suicide When Being “Black In America” Is Enough: An Uppity Negro Response to CNN’s Black In America III"On Wednesday, October 20, CNN.com posted a news article entitled “Black preachers who ‘whoop’ — minstrel or ministers?” that amongst the black churchy folk was a subject of tweets and Facebook status updates; many went so far as to link the news story to their Facebook pages engendering comments aptly defining the “whoop” (pronounced “hoop”) […]
Read more "Mainstream Media Gets It Wrong Again: The Black Church in American Culture"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 