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  • The Black Christmas Music Debate: If ‘Santa Baby’ Isn’t on Your List, Your List Is a Fraud

    I love Christmas … but I really love Christmas music. I’m the kind of guy who will start listening to the Yuletide classics immediately after Halloween—and only if I wait that long. While I love the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Christmas Time Is Here,” and I can appreciate Frank Sinatra’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,”…

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  • Frank’s Hot Sauce and 9 Other Black Thanksgiving Faux Pas That Will Earn You a Side Dish of Side Eye

    I have a complicated relationship with Thanksgiving. It has historically been framed as a day, every year, when we are gluttonous to celebrate the fact that white people were saved by Native Americans. Therefore, it is only fitting that Thanksgiving, like the word “n—ga,” has become one of the blackest things in America. As with…

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  • Obama Was the Most Disrespected President; So What Do We Call Trump?

    President Barack Obama was, arguably, the most disrespected president in history. First there were the questions about his birth certificate. Birthers, unaware that Hawaii joined the Union in 1959, were in the streets asking to see the certificate of the 44th president of the United States like a disgruntled man on the Maury Show. Then, during…

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  • Soundtrack for Survival: 10 Songs to Help You Through a Trump Presidency

    I was in the fourth grade when my white best friend told me a racist joke. “Why are black people so dark?” he asked a group of us at lunch, with a mischievous grin. I looked at him dumbfounded. I put down my milk box, wiped what had dribbled down from the corners of my…

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  • Why I'm Comfortable Being an Angry Black Man

    I was first called an angry black man while a student in college. We were in African-American History, and our professor, a white member of Omega Psi Phi (I say this only because in all my years of Greekdom, I have never come across another old-head Omega who was white; I can only imagine what…

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  • 50 Years Later: A Look Back at the Black Panther Party

    Fifty years ago, in October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobbly Seale had a brilliant idea. Initially conceived as a way to protect the black community against the oppressive presence and indiscriminate violence of the police in Oakland, Calif., the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense evolved into a organization that advocated for revolutionary black…

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  • Review: The Birth of a Nation Isn't Strong Enough to Shake Director's Past

    Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers. The Birth of a Nation reminded me of Old Man Harris. He was a bluesman in the Mississippi Delta before he became the director of the men’s chorus at my childhood church. He claimed that he’d played with the likes of B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf before…

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  • Luke Cage: A Bulletproof Black Man in the Black Lives Matter Era

    To deal with my anger over the seemingly unending number of black men and women killed at the hands of those tasked with the duty to serve and protect, I often play N.W.A’s “F—k tha Police” to cope—except I don’t play it loud. I’m afraid the boys in blue (not the Crips; I’m cool with…

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  • What Do You Really Know About the Dirty South? Atlanta Shows Ranked

    FX’s Atlanta is the rare black comedy that is beloved by both critics and audiences. The premiere  drew in over 3 million views, and the show has a 100 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. While it evokes the surrealism of Twin Peaks, the stoner humor of Dazed and Confused, and the ethos and sound…

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  • We Need a New National Anthem; Here Are 10 Folks Who Could Do It

    Despite going to graduate school in the discipline, my greatest education in philosophy happened at the barbershop. Old Man James, my barber since I was in elementary school, once hipped me to some game about the tension between blackness and patriotism in America. “Y’all still singing the national anthem in school, young blood?” he once…

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Lawrence Ware is a professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University and co-director of the Center for Africana Studies.


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