Comic-book creators have grappled with how to handle race for decades — but don’t expect this summer’s superhero flicks to reflect that struggle.
Gene Demby
Gene Demby is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. He blogs at PostBourgie.
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Rethinking the Pro Tempore Rules.
I’m on record as being less than thrilled with the eulogizing of Robert Byrd, whose major accomplishments as a senator seem to have involved funneling money back to West Virginia and holding down his seat for a really, really long time. The length of his tenure placed him third in line for the presidency as […]
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“Acting White.”
Over at The New Republic, John McWhorter lavishes praise on Stuart Buck‘s book, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, which probably isn’t terribly surprising. The thrust of Buck’s book — that blacks lag in educational outcomes because of a dysfunctional pathology that demonizes academic excellence — has been McWhorter’s pet cause for years. The […]
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The Unbearable Whiteness of Bending.
As much as I enjoyed Avatar: The Last Airbender, the excellent and popular animated epic that aired on Nickelodeon a few years ago, I’m viewing the premiere of its movie adaptation tomorrow with serious apprehension, and not simply because it’s being helmed by M. Night Shyamalan. The television show is set in a deeply imagined […]
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Sprinkle Some Brown on it.
Along with his fellow Republicans, Jeff Sessions spent much of the first day of Elena Kagan‘s confirmation hearings weirdly taking aim at the storied judicial career of Thurgood Marshall. Why? Because Marshall was an enemy of originalists, and the senators wanted to portray Kagan, who clerked for him, as cut from the same ideological cloth. […]
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Shutting the Rubber Rooms.
Yesterday, New York City finally shuttered its notorious “rubber rooms,” the Kafkaesque solution devised by officials to deal with teachers who were deemed unfit to remain in classrooms but, armed with tenure, were essentially unfireable. Suspended teachers could only be dismissed from their jobs after a protracted appeals process that could stretch on for months […]
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Welcome Gene Demby, Guest Blogger for the Week.
Please welcome Gene Demby, who will be guest-blogging for TAPPED this week: Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Gene Demby, the founder of a blog called PostBourgie. PB was founded because I found that so many online discussions about the issues affecting “black life” in America — education, crime, family, the towering wackness […]