5,913 words

In my life, I have encountered people who enjoy watching bad movies. I don’t mean that they have bad taste in movies, but that they revel in watching objectively terrible, often low-budget movies in an MST3K sort of way. I guess they find something endearing about the amateurish charm.

I mean, knock yourself out. But I’ve never quite understood this. (more…)

1,215 words

Six black people have been found dead, hanging from trees, during the month of June so far. They were all ruled as suicides by local police. Black people refuse to believe that’s true, of course. The circumstances of these deaths too closely resemble the lynchings of yesteryear, right down to the surrounding social turmoil and the highly public spectacle of the corpses. (more…)

2,148 words

The shooting of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, made national headlines after a video of the incident surfaced last week. Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was “jogging” near Brunswick, Georgia, when he was confronted by two white men, Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael, who were arrested on May 7. The incident has, unsurprisingly, received extensive coverage, (more…)

Edward Williams Clay, America, 1841.

2,701 words

Thomas Nelson Page
The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904

After the Civil War, the defeated South needed a champion. It needed someone who could articulate the rationale behind the lost Southern cause in such a way that would allow for the reincorporation of the former Confederacy back into the Union without alienating its former enemies. (more…)

1,751 words

Emmett Till was killed more than sixty years ago, but he’s a hotter property than ever. Scarcely a year goes by without yet another book or documentary recounting the tale of the hefty black youth from Chicago who got beaten and shot in Mississippi in 1955, for the mild transgression of “whistling at”—and physically molesting—a young white woman in a country store. (more…)