Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.
A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'
One of the most troubling things about the term 'fake news' is that it has become a force field against accusations you don't like.
Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery.
I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible?
Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South.
Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'
The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.
I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.
Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic.
We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code.
Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution.
What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view.