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Touré's latest book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?, was named a New York Times notable book of 2011
Some religious leaders are struggling with President Obama’s support for gay marriage but not the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In a statement released shortly after Obama’s announcement Jackson said, “If Dr. King and our civil rights movement have taught us anything, it’s the fundamental principle that all people deserve equal protection under the law. LGBT people deserve [...]
They say the arc of history bends toward justice. If that’s true, then as a nation, we’re having a hard time bending on the issue of gay rights. But this week will be remembered as a historic turning point, because President Obama threw political caution to the wind and came out as the man who [...]
The wind of revolution is beginning to blow through the halls of justice. It’s a small breeze now and the impact of what many consider one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century still weighs heavily, but in North Carolina something called the Racial Justice Act is suggesting that a change is [...]
The story reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare, where the law seems to turn its back on someone in a way that would make Josef K. from The Trial say, Damn, I thought I had it bad. Marissa Alexander was a 31-year-old, 5-ft. 2-in. mother of three, her baby just 9 days old, living in Jacksonville, [...]
After a recent event where I spoke about racial identity, a white woman sidled up to me, leaned in close so no one near us could hear, and said, “I’m racist.” Many people would be repelled. I was entranced. Here was someone who could tell me first hand how the racist mind worked. Social scientists [...]
If you found the Trayvon Martin situation frightening, then you should find the story out of Tulsa to be a nightmare. A pair of white men, one of them angry about the murder of his father by a black man two years ago, drove through the Tulsa night early on Friday, shooting blacks at random. [...]
The battle around the Trayvon Martin case is threatening to rip America apart, damage its soul and underline the fact that there are two Americas, separate and unequal. That’s why America needs its journalists to do their best in this moment to help America function justly. But when journalists become advocates for a perspective, does [...]
Barack Obama is not a black leader. He’s a leader who’s black. This is not an insignificant distinction. In order to become President, he had to promise to be President for all the people and not be someone who would be a special friend to the black community, and he has lived up to that [...]
1. It’s unlikely but possible that you could get killed today. Or any day. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Black maleness is a potentially fatal condition. I tell you that not to scare you but because knowing that could save your life. There are people who will look at you and see a villain [...]
The narrative is well-worn like a shoe with a hole: the modern athlete lacks the political spine that previous generations showed. The Black American athlete in particular has historically been a revolutionary figure, demanding rights, challenging norms, reshaping America like activists in shorts. I’m talking about Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad [...]
For some reason, Andrew Breitbart loved to hate me. He named himself the executive producer of a fictional TV show he called That Broccoli’s Racist! The show’s host was me. The undergirding idea was to discredit the continuing existence of racism by saying “People like Touré will call anything racist, even a vegetable.” I found [...]
A book titled How to Be Black throws down a delicious gauntlet. It tells you the author is deeply concerned with blackness but is going to be irreverent about our sacred identity and just might give up the secrets of our religion. Make no mistake: blackness is, for some, religious. There are sacraments, saints and [...]
One of my favorite parts of the Jeremy Lin story is his victory over stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is the idea that we are all aware of the stereotypes that exist about our demographic group and we try to avoid fulfilling those pre-existing notions. We prefer to think of ourselves as individuals and feeling trapped [...]
The death of Whitney Houston has inspired some soul-searching in the music world. “I’m obsessed with why our heroes are not making it past 50,” Questlove told me on the Grammy red carpet as I interviewed him for Fuse. He sounded alarmed and said he now knows he must make changes in his life and [...]
One of Christopher Hitchens’ finest moments as a journalist came when he allowed himself to be waterboarded for the purpose of writing about torture. What courage. That was the George Plimpton, participatory-writer ethic taken to an amazing extreme. I would like to think I would do the same. I once seriously considered smoking crack just [...]
The past is the present. It hangs in the cultural air all around us like fog clouding our ability to build a unique now. What we have instead is a moment consisting of some modern elements and samples of previous eras and their aesthetics, like a moment playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes rather than [...]
Every Martin Luther King day I swell with pride as we celebrate an extraordinary black American and remember King’s magnanimous ideals. But I also hear a voice in my mind saying, “I wonder if there’ll ever be a holiday celebrating another black American?” Is there just one black American who merits a holiday? The bulk [...]
This week, one of the greatest love songs in hip-hop history was released, a song that made some cry. Hip-hop has not always dealt as well with the deeper emotions of the mature soul as the blues, jazz and soul music. But hip-hop has a grownup wing now and is becoming more comfortable with deep [...]
The words we coalesce around as a society say so much about who we are. The language is a mirror that reflects our collective soul. Right now we are a nation marked by class divisions that have only grown deeper and more entrenched since we realized the great recession was the new normal. There is [...]
There’s a small act of rebellion that I indulge in whenever I’m on an airplane. I don’t turn off my iPhone or iPod during takeoff and landing. And if I’m tucked away in a window seat where the flight attendants can’t see me, I actually use them. Emails and texts start coming in as the [...]
