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Alana and Craig Wilson live in a predominately white, middle-class subdivision in Virginia’s Fairfax County, just outside of Washington, D.C. Across the Potomac River, Terry and Rodney Jefferson reside in majority-black Prince George’s County, Maryland. The Wilsons and Jeffersons are black and middle-class. Both families, deeply concerned about the world their children will inherit, do…

Not my idea, not really. Credit mostly belongs to a poet friend of mine. We were discussing some independent movie by an unknown black director he had just seen at a special screening at his local art house. It would be cool, said The Poet, to be able to see more movies like that, movies…

In the The New York Times last Sunday, Jill Nelson dismissed the idea that black people ever really wondered whether Sen. Barack Obama was “black enough.” My memory of how Obama was being discussed a year ago is different from Nelson’s. Today, however, black people who question Obama’s authenticity are indeed a fringe. So what’s…

As she observes the racial dynamics at play in the Democratic presidential contest, Toni Morrison must be somewhere biting her nails. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer never struck me as the nervous type, but if ever there was a case for the jitters, it is now. In recent months, Morrison has had to stand back and…

Tucked away at the edge of a ramshackle strip mall on the black side of town in Montgomery, Ala., there’s an AIDS clinic. When I was last there, in 2005, the mall featured just a couple of weather-beaten shops—a dollar store, a beauty parlor—and this nondescript clinic, quietly declaring its presence without using the word…

Every black writer I know complains about it. “Street lit” has taken over as the de facto literature of our time. We’ve all seen it — the teeming shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble full of raunchy books beckoning the generic black reader. Meanwhile, serious fiction is hidden behind come hither covers, presumably because…