the articles
``Don't stand up and eat in here,'' my mother's family says, ``you'll make the house poor.''
We sat down to my great-grandmother's rich and salty food, cooked soft so that old and young could digest everything. We sat all over the little house across the street from mine: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the backyard. In our ongoing attempts to ward off poverty, women avoided setting their pocketbooks on the floor, and male and female adults were careful not to admire too openly the children they were filling with ``brain food.'' It was inviting ill fortune, like bragging prematurely about a fertile, green field of rice. So they'd look at us growing strong and healthy, suck their teeth, and say: ``Bad rice.''...
The Dinner Hour. The Evening Meals of My Youth Served Up Nightly Lessons in Life and Family.What Will Happen With The Next Generation
Inquirer Magazine, September 6, 1998
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As a kid growing up in the 1960s, I had a shining vision of integration. It was Martin King's vision: little black and little white children holding hands, playing and running together in the sunshine. Our own white neighbors had moved out in a rush, with the man across the street telling my mother before he sold his house to my grandmother: 'I pity you blacks. Everywhere you go, you pay high and sell low.' Still, I watched the marches and believed the vision, as naive and comforting as the 'It's morning again in America' TV spots 20 years later, all journey's end, and no journey...
The Children's Crusade: The journeys of a black prep school graduate. Newsweek, November 4, 1991
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I don't know exactly what Lisa Williamson, the self-named rap -tivist' Sister Souljah, said before and after the killing-white-quote that Governor Clinton condemned, and that TV shows and newspapers and magazines, including this one, reacted to ever since. I do not know exactly what she meant, although friends have paraphrased for me her explanation on ' Today' show. But I do know that the whole incident strikes an old, resonant chord in American racial relations. You can tell by the language we're using like blunt instruments, language that's trying to do many things at once. As always, black and white America are trying to make each other understand - to explain, score, dominate, manipulate, control, provoke, apologize and dis...
As Plain As Black and White
Newsweek, November 4, 1991
