My wife watches a lot of English soap opera and mysteries. Most of them have a character, principal or marginal, who is Black. Over time, (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
Racism without malice
08/01/2021 Pat Barrett 1 CommentLast night we went to the ASU football game. I am not a sports fan but my wife had to be peeled off the ceiling (Continue Reading)
Why voter suppression now?
06/26/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentAnti-Black laws and ordinances depriving Blacks of their civil rights were passed in the ante-bellum North once slavery was outlawed in many states of the (Continue Reading)
Why do they have to keep talking about it?
06/01/2021 Pat Barrett 5 CommentsListening to and watching the coverage of the commemoration of the Tulsa 1921 massacre, I recalled the number of times I’ve heard people express impatience (Continue Reading)
Pink
01/16/2021 Pat Barrett Add Comment“What I’ve been going toward is this idea that pink is the inverse of black, or kind of the flip side—it’s part of it. Black (Continue Reading)
Let Me Tell You How Brilliant Isabel Wilkerson Is…..
12/07/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor years I have been bugged by the way people cast blame for a systemic problem on one individualized person or institution. On the listservs, (Continue Reading)
BLM
10/12/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentGuy B. Johnson, quoted in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, wrote: “This fact [total control over slaves] is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict (Continue Reading)
Truth and Reconciliation
08/12/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentHearing Stuart Stevens confess his mistake in believing the Republican Party was about governance and prosperity rather than about its true north, racism, reminded me (Continue Reading)
BBQ
06/29/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis quote from the Zocalo Public Square:The final key factor that tied barbecue to Independence Day celebrations in the South was the key role of (Continue Reading)
cowbell as cultural memory
03/28/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentReading Sam Floyd, my suspicions rise over terms like “cultural memory.” I recall a disturbing conversation with a Prof. Woods, chairperson of the art department (Continue Reading)
Panda Bear
08/15/2019 Pat Barrett 1 CommentWe wonder at times how our grandchildren navigate their biraciality. They live in the East Valley of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the reddest parts (Continue Reading)
Compare Calabar recitation to Havana homenaje
07/28/2019 Pat Barrett Add Comment
A historian describes my city in the 1950s
07/20/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentLike many emerging American cities at the time, Phoenix’s spectacular growth did not occur evenly. It largely took place on the city’s north side, a (Continue Reading)
Tension between immigrants and African-Americans
07/11/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe American immigrant story has a foil, African-Americans. Our first encounters with this go something like Uncle Harry telling of his grandfather who came to (Continue Reading)
Dramatic evidence of who made the changes in America
12/23/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn Michelle Obama’s new book she has two class pictures, one of her kindergarten class and one of her first grade class in a school (Continue Reading)
The centrality of music to the Black religious experience
12/10/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’m sure I’ve written up this incident here before but cannot find it. It points to the centrality of music and esp of rhythmic music (Continue Reading)
School perspective on Black culture
08/03/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe general opinion among Whites is that Black culture is something Blacks can study as a separate issue while the general study of the U.S. (Continue Reading)
Untangling Police-on-Black violence
07/26/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe reasoning that goes on behind the shootings protested by Black Lives Matter seems shallow. Why does the story run so often along these lines: (Continue Reading)
A provocative thought about the African diaspora in the U.S.
05/28/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentNicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land posits a connection between the so-called underclass of the Northern ghettos and the impoverished share-croppers of the deep South who (Continue Reading)
The Diaspora Comes Full Circle
05/21/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle this weekend in Great Britain marks a point on the circle of the African slave trade if (Continue Reading)
Letter to a friend re the Magnum Opus and unbroken transmission
03/22/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentAnyway, I wanted to force on you some more stuff I’ve come across recently which supports the thesis of my Magnum Opus, which is that (Continue Reading)
Lucy and the football – Af-Am version
01/11/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn Generations of Captivity, Berlin describes the jubilation of free people of color in the Lower Mississippi Valley when that region became part of the (Continue Reading)
Another memorial service with a twist
12/18/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe man was 97 years old, had been in CCC and the military in WW II. He started a business and was the first Black (Continue Reading)