The Big Isms

Barack Obama Delivers a Jeremiad David W. Blight, Aug. 21, 2020, The New York Times On Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020, standing in front of an exhibition about the Constitution in Philadelphia, Barack Obama fully became an American Jeremiah. Unlike that Hebrew prophet, Mr. Obama did not shatter the earth, nor predict the destruction of all our temples, nor see our Jerusalem quite yet in its deserved ruin. He did not tell us that collectively our “clothing is stained with the blood of the innocent and the poor,” as Jeremiah did. But he came close, even as he delivered a moving reassertion of American “ideals” and “creeds.” Such is the purpose of the tradition of the “jeremiad,” in substance and style a rhetorical method born of Puritan sermons in the 17th and 18th centuries, and perfected by America’s greatest writers and some of its politicians in the 19th century. continue   Kamala Harris’s dad was from Jamaica, where a fierce woman warrior once fought slavery DeNeen L. Brown

we are sharing headlines and creating an archive... big isms editor Black Like Kamala Jamelle Bouie, Aug. 14, 2020, The New York Times It was probably inevitable that becoming Joe Biden’s running mate would result in controversy over Kamala Harris’s heritage. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is a woman of Tamil and African ancestry who identifies as Black. That’s why, after Biden’s announcement, she was described as the first Asian-American and African-American woman on a major-party presidential ticket. Not everyone thought this was the right description for Harris. Several allies of President Trump, for example, were quick to dispute the idea that Harris was or could be Black. The radio host Mark Levin said Harris’s Jamaican origins placed her outside the category of African-American. “Kamala Harris is not an African-American, she is Indian and Jamaican,” Levin said. “Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery, to t

Watch the first trailer for Steve McQueen’s #SmallAxe , premiering at the 58th #NYFF . pic.twitter.com/yBmDtmLtTw — New York Film Festival (@TheNYFF) August 7, 2020

Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy Lauren Gambino, 30 July 2020, The Guardian Barack Obama hailed John Lewis as a founding father of “a fuller, better” United States in a soaring eulogy on Thursday, while forcefully calling on Americans to stand up to the forces threatening a cause the late congressman was willing to die for: the right to vote. From the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached, Obama traced the arch of Lewis’s life – a child born into the Jim Crow south, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, a leader of the civil rights marches in Selma, and a US congressman from Georgia – tying his legacy to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a black man under the knee of a white police officer. He then drew a line from the racist leaders who opposed civil rights in the 1960s to the policies and ideologies embraced by Donald T