Shortly after the election, Katherine Rosman, writing for The Wall Street Journal, talked about a party she’d attended as a freelance writer, before she’d joined the esteemed newspaper, and about her chance meeting that night with a politician from the Midwest.
On a warm weekday evening in 2003, a group that can fairly be described as representative of the media elite gathered at one if its favored venues: the garden behind the Manhattan apartment of journalists Tina Brown and Harold Evans.
The occasion was the publication of “The Clinton Wars,” by Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton. Editors from the New Yorker and the New York Times were in attendance along with media figures like Steven Brill and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner. The guests mingled and sipped wine. Even Clinton showed up, instantly becoming the epicenter of attention. …
Standing by myself I noticed, on the periphery of the party, a man looking as awkward and out-of-place as I felt. I approached him and introduced myself. He was an Illinois state senator who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was African American, one of a few black people in attendance.
You Negroes have got to stop making up holidays. In this short, author Carleen Brice (Orange Mint and Honey, right), creator of the “National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month,” half-dryly outlines her philosophy; invites white and Asian readers to try “new” Black writers in that happy corner of the bookstore where we’re typically segregated (for our own good, of course); and briefly wrestles with the presumptions of a prospective client, above. There’s even a blog.
While her YouTube’s tone is just a tad too gleefully “post-racial,” quote-unquote-unquote-unquote, for my tastes, Brice’s underlying point is eminently sensible, and, no, white people, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope don’t count.
As reported by the Associated Press, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin-Laden’s No. 2 man, has released a video—”al-Qaeda’s first response to Obama’s victory”—in which he
called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — “house Negroes.”
Notes one Black female writer in Salon.com, on January 20th, Michelle Obama will not only become America’s premiere Black First Lady, but she’ll also be the first to shake what our Mama (Africa) gave her: An authentic, 3-dimensional, fully-realized butt.
Take a look at some of the best American ones, below, after the jump. It’s interesting: When you check out a whole bunch, and see the designs, you can kind of detect which papers were inspired (e.g., the Hartford Courant, of all places), and which were just phoning it in. Also, actually, I think Will Smith was right, on Oprah, today: The Chicago Sun-Times did a cool cover, but, man, the Philly Daily News kinda came wit’ it.
