Washington Heights: That was where I’d found my kind of party people, that 25-to-35-year-old posse of race-conscious black professionals and community organizers whose politics are Pan-Afrikanist (if not just pro-black)
August 20, 2020
The five stories in this issue do not presume to represent the New York black experience in total. What they do presume to capture are the encounters five black writers had with people in several of New York's black communities.
August 19, 2020
“If there’s any legacy of ’60s Black Nationalism I find ennobling and empowering, it’s that movement’s Pan-Afrikanist embrace of Black folk everywhere as brother and sister.”
June 19, 2020
“X is dead, long live X. He’s like the Elvis of Black pop politics — a real piece of Afro-Americana. That’s why Spike’s logo is branded with an American flag. Malcolm couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”
May 28, 2020
“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmodernist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”
May 25, 2020
The coming age of the post-nationalist black aesthetic.
January 10, 2020
“For contemporary Afro-American professionals and intellectuals, the Harlem of legend is at best a Utopian cultural myth.”
December 6, 2019
“He was the most financially successful Black visual artist in history and — depending on whether you listened to his admirers or detractors — either a genius, an idiot savant, or an overblown, overpriced fraud.”
July 29, 2019
"Always dug Run-D.M.C. because they dressed like they weren't ashamed to be identified with the stone B-boys"
March 25, 2019
“The black Woody Allen, a camera-wielding Sharpton, a gifted charlatan, an inspiration, a generous sort, a media hound (or barker)”
February 22, 2019