Django Unchained is Tarantino’s skewed Christmas gift to America — a movie designed to reveal the chains of slavery that continue to haunt America, while introducing the horror with unrelenting violence. Django Unchained is also a cross between spaghetti western, Shaft’s Big Score, and the Mandingo films and books of the 1970s. Tarantino combines all of these elements to create an epic story, emulating the German ...

Can we joke about slavery when this country wants to forget it and banish it to the annals of history, all the while denying its present-day implications upon us all? My take on Django Unchained. **NO SPOILERS!**

William Jackson, M.Ed. Where do we go after the second election of President Barack Obama? I want it to be known, that I’m proud to have Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America. I’m proud of his ability to lead and to be a role model. That being said, Blacks Cannot Wait on President Obama to ...

Is America’s emerging prison state a revival or an extension of slavery?  Is it “a New Jim Crow”?  Or is it something arising out of those experiences, but significantly different, a brand new phase in the history of African America?  Historian Loic Wacquant here argues that America’s reliance upon prison as the principal way of dealing with the black poor ...

Adidas has reportedly cancelled its plans to release the “shackle shoe” into the market after it was criticized for advertising it on the Adidas Facebook page. I think that Adidas’ first mistake was releasing the design to begin with. I question whether they used simple marketing tools,such as surveys,  before they decided to launch this new “shackle shoe”. That being ...

While the country was fighting in the Civil War over the issue of enslavement, abolitionists were moving toward a new fight of educating emancipated Blacks. Pictures from the January 30, 1864 issue of Harper’s Weekly titled “Emancipated Slaves, White and Colored,” shows a picture of three emancipated Blacks, a young Black boy, and 4 bi-racial children. The picture was put ...