By Gerald Early
Ahmad Jamal Remembered
I was probably in my last year of high school when I bought an Ahmad Jamal album called Extensions. I bought it only because it was in a remainder bin and cost ninety-nine cents. The title seemed intriguing, and here was someone I thought that I ought to like or ought to learn to like since so many people around me did.
Black History Month Note 1: Let’s Talk About Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters did not initially have any grand ambitions for herself, certainly not to be in show business. Her first forays into the world of formal employment were hotel and kitchen work, typical for a lower-class Black woman with a spotty education.
Why American Politics Are Sometimes Seriously Unserious
Let us take the recent case in point of Missouri Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush who, during last week’s Republican comedy of errors entitled “choosing a new House Speaker,” called Florida Republican Congressman Bryon Donalds “a prop” when he was nominated for the Speakership and at one point received sixteen votes and even, in the giddiness of the moment, voted for himself.
Wakanda Forever is a Bad Film but an Important One
One of the ironies of Afrofuturism is that it is less concerned with the future than it is the mythological reconstruction of a past that would enable Blacks to see themselves differently in the present. Whether the idealizations of Wakanda are ultimately debilitating or liberating for the Black mind and its struggles with persistent racial persecution and the enfeebling belief in Black inferiority is open to debate.
Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, November Edition
Blacks got syphilis and Whites got polio, or so it was said. Naturally, the racist practices of the White medical establishment led to polio being underdiagnosed and undetected among Blacks. The differential susceptibility theory was, in part, a way to flatter Whites—more advanced races got polio—and to justify the unequal distribution of medical resources.