Pat’s Polemics

Did you know that one of the Haitian Vodou loa, gods, is a U.S. Marine? Apparently, a Captain Daybas became interested in Vodou, became an (Continue Reading)

On reading Sacred Possession, one reads that the hounfort or temple included a central dwelling of one or more rooms, circumscribed by a large area (Continue Reading)

There is a marvelous scene in Isabel Allende’s The Island Beneath the Sea (La Isla Bajo el Mar) where the slave woman who is the (Continue Reading)

Charlotte Forten was a fourth generation free woman of color, rather privileged, living in the Northeast before the Civil War. Here is her diary entries (Continue Reading)

My daughter came home with a very funny story. She was in Petsmart and the check out clerk was having difficulty with the cash register. (Continue Reading)

When are Black people in this country going to realize that no matter their power, their visibility, their smarts as individuals, in the crush, they (Continue Reading)

Again I see that East Africa is the source of information about African culture for African-American and other students in this country. I saw an (Continue Reading)

Richard Sherman engages in time-honored African-American braggadocio and gets called a thug but a Staten Island representative in Congress threatens a reporter’s life and it (Continue Reading)

Maria Bethania “… all artistic creation is the work of God.” This encapsulates the sense I have when I see Black artists out of the (Continue Reading)

My wife and I saw Django. It was a Tarantino film. My wife is extremely sensitive to any distortion of the experiences of Black people (Continue Reading)

Here’s a technique I thought of to use when students observe that something a few decades back was “so long ago” that it is unimportant (Continue Reading)

We just went through a denegrofication project. We were going to have our house appraised and as we were scurrying around scrubbing and fixing up, (Continue Reading)

Nice touch. Yesterday my son walked into my class of freshman Latin students, most of them 14 or 15 years old and most White. Geoff, my (Continue Reading)

How long ago was it I blogged on a church funeral? These are getting too frequent. My wife is about to turn 70, so I (Continue Reading)

For years I treasured any little snippet of filmed African music performance. There were a few videos, like the one of the Dagomba of northern Ghana. (Continue Reading)

Quite often I hear or read something that seems perfectly clear to me in its ramifications while seeming to bypass other people. Here’s a quote (Continue Reading)

Trying to get through to people on language can be hard. For instance, the idea of hearing only the way White people talk is scary. (Continue Reading)

This is the sort of thing commentators mean when they talk about the continuing distortion of African-American life in this country. I wrote a personal (Continue Reading)

The New Republic printed John McWhorter’s comment on the truth of one very controversial statement in The Marriage Vow, that a slave child was more (Continue Reading)

Having purchased and started reading The Voice of the Leopard, I got desirous of hearing the music of Calabar. I realized that Cameroun music of (Continue Reading)

Three examples of African music’s influence on American music come to mind, fairly specific examples. They all come from Cuba.   The first is the (Continue Reading)

In order to protect people who might not want their names to appear in my blog, I’ve excised the name here, but the following was (Continue Reading)

Way back when I read Melville Herskovits’ Myth of the Negro Past where he describes how many behaviors of American Blacks derived not from some (Continue Reading)