recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: American Society
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By Richard A. Serrano | For years, I have carried around in my head a haunting tale—that of a handsome young black army soldier named John Arthur Bennett, and what occurred along a snowy winter creek in Austria and deep in the bowels of death row basement at the army’s Fort Leavenworth prison.
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By Howard Bryant | For black men, sports was not as promising an employment opportunity as it appeared. Their bodies were valuable, but beyond playing, chances to coach, evaluate personnel, or run or own teams were as remote as they were in the non-sports world. And as for the Heritage, Jackie Robinson had created the…
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By Kay Whitlock | I am often drawn to historical battlefields and sites by a sense that the memories, the ghosts, the landscape will somehow reveal more than I have yet learned through book-and-documentary-related study. And by the inchoate sense that I may even be changed by it, that in mysterious ways, my justice vision…
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By Kay Whitlock | In the autumn of 2017, my partner and I joined a long car caravan winding slowly across White Sands Missile Range. Organized semiannually by the Alamogordo, New Mexico Chamber of Commerce, the trek set out from an empty lot adjacent to the local high school’s athletic fields. Journey’s end, Trinity Site,…
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By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | The incident with the Covington Catholic school boys has been an astonishing exhibition of not only an intensely polarized country, but a dizzying conglomeration of issues. There were countless mixed messages contained in the assortment of video clips of Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann who appeared to be in a standoff.…
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By Deborah L. Plummer | My husband, Mike, is an engineer—a full-blooded engineer. Not only is it his career choice, but he also lives and thinks like an engineer. Often when we go out with my friends, the occasion is loosely planned and somewhat spontaneous. A phone call made that day inquiring about the evening’s…
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By Lisa Page | As a kid, I heard that Carol Channing was black (the word back then was negro). She was one of many celebrities rumored to pass, in Hollywood—a list that included Angie Dickenson, Dinah Shore, and others. These women had large brown eyes, full lips, and bleached blond hair. Looking white—being light-skinned—allowed…
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By Lori L. Tharps: I’m not mad. Not mad at all that executive producer, Peter Saji, covered the same ground regarding colorism and family dynamics in a twenty-two-minute Black-ish episode that I covered in my 200-page heavily researched 2016 book, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families.
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By Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks | After years of basking in the glow of a flattering limelight, by the fall of 2011 the very rich were experiencing something new and altogether jarring: the glare of a harsh spotlight trained directly on them. The temptation to bark orders like: “Dim that light, or else!” was…
Beacon Broadside 