Monthly Archives: August 2009

Lifting Ev’ry Voice in Church

  Let me end this series of posts concerning racism in America on an up note.  This past Sunday I was singing in the Trinity Episcopal Church choir (in St. Mary’s City, Maryland) and we concluded the service with a rousing rendition of hymn 599, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the black […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Nuanced Race Talk Savaged by a Cleaver

Given the uptick in racist language and increased enrollment in white supremacist groups since Barack Obama’s election, I’m going to devote one or two more posts to racism in America and then give the subject a rest for a bit.  Today I want to return to my shift from southern race relations to northern when […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Redemption through Interracial Friendship

  I write today about the father of Andre Dubus III, whose House of Sand and Fog I looked at last week.  The elder Andre Dubus, now dead, is one of my favorite short story writers, and his novella Deaths at Sea came to my aid when I felt twisted and turned by racial tension.  I […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

How Racism Sullies Everything

If race has been the subject of these past two weeks of posting it is because, as a Sherrilyn Ifil article notes in the on-line publication Root, we are having a hard time talking about race this summer, what with the furor over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination and the Henry Louis Gates affair.  I haven’t […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Mockingbird’s Race Limitations

  An interesting Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker has complicated my views of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I posted on last week.  I now better understand why the book, while a comfort to me as a child going through the desegregation battles, proved so inadequate when I went […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Dying Miserably for Lack of Poetry

Today I want to thank Chris Kalb, whose artwork on this blog was installed yesterday.  And also to thank Discovering Oz, my son and his wife’s marketing company, which gave me the idea for setting up this website and blog and then helped me carry it out.   In the illustration you see before you, the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Is Obama an Allworthy or a Beowulf?

Like many supporters of health care reform, I am distressed by what I see as right-wing attempts to disrupt civil discussions on the matter.  Practically no one disputes that we are facing a financial crisis over health care costs and health care coverage.  My own 27-year-old son and his wife, who have just started a […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

“Even the Best” Whites Don’t Get Race

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that a noted poet once mentioned me in a poem critical of whites. The poet is Lucille Clifton, formerly a colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, now retired. The poem appeared in her book quilting. I’ll quote the poem and then give the backstory: note to my self it’s […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Sand and Fog in the Gates Affair

Police intimidation in House of Sand and Fog   The House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, came out in 1999, was a National Book Award finalist, became an Oprah selection, and was turned into a film.  I mention it here because it gets at the way that cultural differences and misunderstandings, combined with […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed