"I'm trying to get to a point where I accept that marriage may never happen for me."
Audrey belongs to the most unmarried group of people in the U.S.: black women. Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor to well-off suburban professionals.
African-American Professor of Law Ralph Richard Banks has an intriguing solution:
Interracial marriage.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Aug 7, 2011 -
183 comments
Melvin Van Peebles made a documentary called Classified X in 1998, about the portrayal of black people throughout the history of American cinema. You can see it on YT in six parts:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6. Apologies for the low video quality.
posted by Dim Siawns
on Nov 30, 2010 -
19 comments
The Jackie Robinson of architecture. An orphaned African American boy from downtown Los Angeles,
Paul Revere Williams wanted to be an architect, and when he mentioned his career goal the high school guidance counselor ”stared at me with as much astonishment as he would have had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars...
Whoever heard of a Negro being an architect?”. Therefore, Williams learned to read and draw upside down -- he knew that white clients would not sit next to him --
graduated from USC and in 1924 became the first certified African American architect west of the Mississippi. In a
50-year long extraordinary career, he designed landmarks like the
Theme restaurant at
Los Angeles International Airport (with
Welton Becket), the
LA County Courthouse, the
Hollywood YMCA,
Saks Fifth Avenue in
Beverly Hills, restored the Beverly Hills Hotel. Some of his most interesting buildings, like the
La Concha Motel in
Las Vegas have either been
razed to the
ground or, like the "
Batman house", aka
160 S San Rafael mansion in Pasadena, have been destroyed by fire. Now, Williams' historic
Morris Landau House has been
cut into 21 separate pieces and sits in a Santa Clarita storage yard,
rotting away. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jul 2, 2006 -
25 comments
Otis Granville Clark is a wonder. At 102, the former butler of Joan Crawford - who served Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin - still drives, lives on his own and twice a week attends church in his home city of Tulsa, Oklahoma... Today his blue eyes have gone milky but they still sparkle, his wiry frame remains agile, and his most painful memories are still fresh - even after 83 years. Coiled on the edge of an understuffed sofa, Clark leans back and screws his eyes tight to summon up "that day". It remains the most vivid of his life... Historians call the firestorm that convulsed Tulsa from the evening of May 31 into the afternoon of June 1 the single worst event in the history of American race relations. To most Tulsans it is simply "the riot". But the carnage had nothing in common with the mass protests of Chicago, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s or the urban violence that laid siege to Los Angeles in 1992 after the white police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. The 1921 Tulsa race riot owes its name to an older American tradition, to the days when white mobs, with the consent of local authorities, dared to rid themselves of their black neighbours. The endeavour was an opportunity "to run the Negro out of Tulsa". Burnt Offerings .See also The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 or the tale of the lost city or another The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. See also Frequently Asked Questions from the Tulsa Reparations Coalition. Previous post by
allaboutgeorge re: Tulsa Race Riot Reparations on March 1, 2001 .
posted by y2karl
on Feb 22, 2005 -
172 comments
African-American == Black? Several high-school students at a predominantly white (well, predominantly NOT black) Nebraska high school were disciplined for a campaign to get 16-year-old student Trevor Richards awarded the school's annual "Distinguished African-American Student" award. Richards is from South Africa, now lives in America (not sure if he's a citizen, the CNN story isn't clear), but here's the catch: he's white.
posted by Bluecoat93
on Jan 23, 2004 -
111 comments
How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back As a white guy with a young kid, I worry about how the often gleefully violent, misogynist rap music he may choose to listen to could affect him. Maybe that's a racist thing for a white boy to say, but when a black scholar like
John H. McWhorter says it, maybe it's worth considering.
posted by kgasmart
on Aug 6, 2003 -
97 comments
Talking the talk: An interview with John McWhorter Speaking of
linguistics and whatnot, I've been thumbing through the new-look
East Bay Express. I read this, and I feel like
McWhorter's never gotten over some black people wrongly labeling him as an Oreo cookie (never had someone assure him, in response to epithets like those, that there are 35 million ways of being African-American -- and that many of them involve fluency in "totally ass-kicking SWE," to reference
David Foster Wallace's essay on Bryan Garner's new usage book in Harper's a couple of months ago).
I appreciate his iconoclasm (hell, like myself, he voted for Nader) and I'm willing to concede points of his basic argument and that I agree with him on some (the whole "niggardly" thing; the Ebonics controversy) points.
But after reading this, I wound up feeling irritated with him -- and especially put off by allowing himself to be
misrespresented marketed as a conservative and, despite his vaunted speaking ability and academic credentials, his inability to get his points across in the media.
posted by allaboutgeorge
on Jul 6, 2001 -
13 comments
