Blog

Taking "Bad Teacher" to School

...full text also available at Truthdig and Cultural Weekly

   

Let’s be honest. Teachers don’t get into the profession for the money. Nowadays they don’t get into the profession for respect either. So why do they do it? Or, as it was put to Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) in “Bad Teacher”: “What has to go so horribly wrong in life that you end up educating middle school children?”


Giving Loving Day It's Due

...full text also available at Truthdig
...featured article on Fuse.tv


   

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been invited to commemorate or at least think about Loving Day this year. And with good reason. In 1958, newlyweds Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were indicted on charges of violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages and were banished from their home state. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law in 1967.


Power-Mad Men Have Their Moment

...full text also available at Truthdig

   

Here we go again. From popular culture to global politics to religion, the rise of mad masculinity is reaching new heights. A few months back we were entertained by Charlie Sheen’s and Chris Brown’s bad behavior. Now, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Catholic Church and Libyan troops are under fire for misogyny and/or sexual abuse. Recent events have led Time Magazine and others to ask an important, if ineloquent, question: Why are some men such pigs?


Common, Controversy and Coverage

...full text also available at Huffington Post and Brave New World

About a week ago Fox News started a “Common Controversy” about whether the Chicago-based poet and rapper should have been invited to a White House poetry reading by the First Lady.


50 Years of Freedom (Celebrating the Freedom Riders)

...full text also available at Truthdig

From May through November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives by simply traveling together on buses and trains as they sojourned through the Deep South.


Trumped-Up Racism

...full text also available at Truthdig

   

Dispelling Donald Trump’s birther charges that Barack Obama is foreign-born, the president released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday. Politifact, the fact-checking site for politics, says its article about the issue (with a link to the certification of live birth) is the most popular item that it has ever published. The certificate and its release prove two things most people should already know: Obama is an American. And, as PBS host Tavis Smiley put it to MSNBC, the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to be “the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic.”


Fosberg's "Incognito" No More

...full text also available at HuffPo

   
The phone rings. I can't believe what I'm hearing. My father tells me about a book, a play and a man with whom he knew I would resonate--Incognito: An American Odyssey of Race and Self Discovery and Michael Sidney Fosberg. As usual, Dad was right. By the time I'd clicked on Fosberg's website I knew I had to learn more. So, I ordered the book and a copy of the performance directly from the author. Then, I set myself to reading and watching.


The Rise of Mad Masculinity

...full text also available at Truthdig

   

The first quarter of 2011 has ushered in the year of the “mad man.” From Charlie Sheen to Chris Brown to George Lopez to Jared Loughner and David Prosser we’ve seen it all: everything from attempted murder to assault and battery, to polygamy, to verbal and emotional abuse against women. Sadly, this idea of mad masculinity is being turned into a commodity that can be consumed repeatedly across a range of media outlets.


Featured on KPFK's "Truthdig Radio"

...full audio available at KPFK's Truthdig Radio

Dr. Dawkins talks about her latest article on gender, culture and "The Rise of Mad Masculinity" as profitable entertainment and political problem with Truthdig's Kasia Anderson.


Featured on NPR's "Tell Me More"

...full audio and text available at National Public Radio

Dr. Dawkins discusses her forthcoming book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity and trades expert opinions with Latoya Peterson of Racialicious.Com, Galina Espinoza of Latina Magazine and Farai Chedaya of NPR on beauty, mixed race identity and "mad masculinity" in The Beauty Shop on National Public Radio's Tell Me More.