On James Baldwin
I had no idea why I was so absorbed in James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, but everyone else in the car knew. My father had been driving for so long he gripped the wheel with paper towels. It was...
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Dancing Miss
Underwood & Underwood/CorbisBillie Holiday, 1938 Darryl Pinckney remembers Elizabeth Hardwick’s portrait of Billie Holiday, which first appeared in the March 4, 1976 issue of The New York Review,...
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Looking Harlem in the Eye
Van Vechten Trust/Eakins Press FoundationCarl Van Vechten: Ethel Waters, 1932 Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), enthusiast of Modernism and ally of the Harlem Renaissance, had a swell time while the...
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The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ramsay de Give/The New York Times/ReduxTa-Nehisi Coates, New York City, 2012 In Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” a poem published in 1936, a narrator speaks for those who struggle—the...
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Elite Black & Quite Different
Alexander PinesMargo Jefferson at Columbia University, New York City, September 2015 The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his...
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Blacks & Jews Entangled
New DirectionsFran Ross, from the frontispiece to her novel Oreo Google wasn’t around when Oreo was first published in 1974. You are hit with Greek mythology and Yiddish right away and just the look of...
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Black Lives and the Police
Black people in America have been under surveillance ever since the seventeenth century, when enslaved Africans were forced to labor in the tobacco and rice fields of the South. Colonial law quickly...
View ArticleBlacks, Jews, and Palestine
To the Editors: Is it intentional, misprint, or oversight that Darryl Pinckney refers to the special status of Palestinian sufferance in 1973 as a cause of black–Jewish enmity [“Blacks & Jews...
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On the Election—IV
Jessica T. Mathews Judging from the lack of attention to foreign policy in this campaign, one might conclude that few security challenges loom. Other than immigration policy (more a domestic than an...
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Laughing to Keep from Crying
Gregg DelmanPaul Beatty, New York City, April 2015; photograph by Gregg Delman Nothing is sacred. Paul Beatty as an African-American satirist is like his great predecessor Ishmael Reed in his...
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The Genius of Blackness
Birmingham Museum of Art/Sean PathasemaKerry James Marshall: School of Beauty, School of Culture, 107 7/8 x 157 7/8 inches, 2012 Two things hit the viewer pretty soon into the Met Breuer’s exhibition...
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Under the Spell of James Baldwin
Nancy CramptonJames Baldwin, New York City, 1976; photograph by Nancy Crampton When James Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, he was seen as a spent force, a witness for the civil rights...
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Moon Over Miami
David Bornfriend/A24Jharrel Jerome and Ashton Sanders as the teenagers Kevin and Chiron in Moonlight The Oscar-winning film Moonlight gives an impression throughout of being tinged with the color blue....
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Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
Dominique NabokovRobert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books, early 1980s Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing...
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Catching Up to James Baldwin
Emily Raboteau‘Know Your Rights!’; mural by Nelson Rivas, aka Cekis, Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan. Commissioned in 2009 by the People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability,...
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The Harlem He Knew
Beinecke Library, Yale University/Van Vechten TrustClaude McKay, July 1941; photograph by Carl Van Vechten Claude McKay has one of the most interesting life stories of the Harlem Renaissance writers,...
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The Trickster’s Art
The New Museum, New York/Corvi-Mora, London/Jack Shainman Gallery, New YorkLynette Yiadom-Boakye: The Matters, 2016 A few years back I ran into Camille Brewer, a black American curator of contemporary...
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The Passport of Whiteness
Enri Canaj/Magnum PhotosAfrican migrants, Sicily, July 17, 2017 “I don’t know anything about immigration.” “You live with an immigrant,” my boyfriend said. “But I think of you as an Englishman in New...
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Master Class
Dominique NabokovElizabeth Hardwick, New York City, 1991 Come again, Professor Hardwick said, doing that seesaw dance with her shoulders, as if to say, get a load of him. I’d no idea what she was...
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Black Lives Matter
Kara Walker/Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New YorkKara Walker: Brand X (Slave Market Painting), oil stick on canvas, 78 1/8 x 127 1/2 inches, 2017 Constance Cary Harrison, first seamstress of the...
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