Book cover
22 January 2017

I constantly remind the students in my African American history classes that if you are poor and white in America, especially if you are rural or southern, the only difference is that you are not black. We have long known that poor...

Book cover
16 January 2017

Most Americans never learned that there was slavery in the northern United States. Half of all slave voyages docked in tiny Rhode Island, and slave owner James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island was said to be the second...

Black women in old fashioned clothes like they are celebrating
04 January 2017

Hidden Figures tells a fact-based story so fascinating that you wonder why it hasn’t been told until now. Of course, if it had been, they would have had to change the title.

“Hidden Figures” refers to complex mathematical...

Woman in a yellow dress and man in a shirt and tie dancing wildly
24 December 2016

La La Land is the most exhilarating film of the year. That becomes obvious before the title credit even appears.   

Opening on the scene of a backed-up Los Angeles freeway, the camera eventually settles on a woman who...

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck, left) has a difficult relationship with nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) in Manchester by the Sea.
06 December 2016

As a critic, I’ve always been amused when dissenting readers ask the clichéd question, “Did we even see the same movie?” So it’s ironic to realize I’m having the same response to reviews of Manchester by the Sea.

It’s not just...

Boy standing on beach
11 November 2016

If I told you Moonlight is about an African-American boy growing up in a world of drugs and poverty, you’d probably begin to form an image of the film in your mind. And that image probably would be wrong.

Director/...

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