You have to choose, you can’t have both. This one or that one, that or the other, think about it and then pick a side. Or maybe you don’t even have to think about it. Maybe, as in the new novel “Laws of Annihilation” by Eriq La Salle, the decision was made decades ago. […]
You’re sorry, deeply sorry, sincere in your apology, and it won’t happen again. You had a chance to think about your transgressions and you were wrong. What can you do or say to make things better? How can you properly make amends? As in the new book “The Reformatory” by Tananarive Due, how long should you pay for something you didn’t do? […]
It doesn’t even look right. It’s a mess, which isn’t how you expected it to be. No, you should’ve turned around the minute you saw it, walked out the door, and denied all responsibility but now you’re involved. And in the new memoir “I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here” by Jonathan Conyers, making things good is going to take some work. […]
Seen in isolation, recent problems at HBCUs, Medgar Evers College in New York City and Barber-Scotia College in North Carolina can be easily viewed within the context of the problems all higher education students are having with see-sawing enrollment and continuing pandemic problems. And if you wanted to add the conflict that Nikole Hannah-Jones had with the Board of Trustees at the predominately white University of North Carolina, that could be just seen as a rogue board controlled by political conservatives. So, it can be easy to write race out of this dialogue, or at least downplay it. […]
What is immediately essential for me about Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ lengthy epistle to his son is that “past is prologue.” […]
Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966-2009
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