(ThyBlackMan.com) Many, if not most, African Americans are believed to be of partial Native American ancestry. William Loren Katz in Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage explored the roots of this Black and Native American admixture. Black contact with Native Americans goes back long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. In ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Even after the adoption of legalized segregation in the late 19th century, individuals who were as much as one quarter Black were classified as white. According to George Tillman a delegate to the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1895. It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Have you ever wondered how jazz, and then later rock ‘n’ roll, developed out of the blues? How Black music came to be America’s music? Whether or not people who are not Black can really play Black music? Amiri Baraka speaks on these things in his 1963 classic, Blues ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) North American popular music is today heard all around the world. How and where did it originate, and how did it change over time? The music of a people is generated by those at the bottom of society, closest to the land. In the US that would be the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Hillary and Bill Clinton attended Yale. But they must have skipped class for the lesson in honesty related in Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, “Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field”—“Oh what a tangled web we weave /When first we practice to deceive.” Hillary and Bill have struggled with the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Before we fully solidify into warring camps over the Slap Heard ‘Round the World, let’s try and situate the episode in its larger context. To begin with, Who is Chris Rock? + Who is Will Smith? Let’s start with Chris. Who’s Chris Rock? Yes, he’s a comedian, but he ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Sidney Poitier’s family hailed from tiny Cat Island in the Bahamas. As a boy of four, he would leave the house on his own and wander the woods or go swimming out in the sea, all by himself. He was born in Southern Florida while his mother was working ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Prior to a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to the Senate floor that ultimately failed, McConnell was asked by a reporter about concerns among voters of color. This is how the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, replied. “Well the concern is ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) As Christmas approaches, the network “news” divisions have showered the Bidens with gifts. NBC late-night host Jimmy Fallon gave President Joe Biden a free platform for 16 minutes on Dec. 10, and hailed him as a “classy guy” who brought “class back” to the White House. Two days later, ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) The makeup of the United States population has changed over the centuries, and will continue to do so. But “a three way ethnic component was involved in the original basic ingredients of the formative American nation—white Englishmen, black Africans, and red Indians. The fact that nineteenth-century immigration added millions ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Slavery made perfect sense, so too did Jim Crow in its time, as does mass incarceration today. If it did not, we would long ago have ended it. Why haven’t we? According to Norbert Wiener, we “live in a chaotic moral universe,” wherein “our main obligation is to establish ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) As I watched the closing rounds in the 10-episode FX series, “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” I kept waiting for producers Ryan Murphy and colleagues to pull their punches and let Bill Clinton up off the mat, but they did not. In fact, they closed “Impeachment” Tuesday with the kind ...