America is in trouble if any of the Republican candidates for president actually defeat Barack Obama in November. Say what you will about Obama, as there is plenty to criticize.

We do need a major employment bill to put more people to work. We do need to deal with the hardcore woes of America’s middle class and poor. We do need an end to politicians’ cozy relationship with corporations and banks, a bond that has led to ruthless capitalism and senseless job elimination. We do need a tax system that…

September 11th

By Kevin Powell

Might it be, as my mother said to me on this ugly, sinful day,

That the world is on its last go-round?

Hijacked wild birds strip the sky of its innocent morning breath

Steel towers crumple like playing cards on an uneven metal table

Unrehearsed screams we dare not hear leap from windows

Into the open, bottomless palms of God

I cannot stand to watch life reduce

Itself to powdery dust and soot lathering the devil’s inflamed mouth

But I am fixated on the television anyhow:

Is this what slavery was like?

Is this what the holocaust was like?

Is this what famine is like?

Is this what war is like?

Is this how you felt, dear mother, when…

My adopted home of New York is grappling with becoming the sixth (and most populous) American state to legalize gay marriage. Whether it happens or not, gay or same-sex marriage as a movement in America is here to stay. That is why I am saying very loudly, as a heterosexual male who plans on marrying the woman I love in the very near future, that I support gay marriage. And that I feel it should be the law in the entire United States one day.

I have actually felt this way for a number…

Boy Asked To Be “Slave” At School

by Kevin Powell

Maybe it is simply me but it seems that the historic election of President Barack Obama has brought out the best and worst in America. Best in the sense that there is no way this man, of a White American mother and an Africa-born father, would have been elected leader of the most powerful nation on earth had it not been for our collective ability to unite around his candidacy. And in spite of America’s long and sordid dance with racism on every level imaginable.

Back…

Push pause before watching for colored girls…

People either love or hate filmmaker Tyler Perry—that much is clear to me. Weeks before I decided to see Perry’s “For Colored Girls” on opening night I could hear the extreme reactions to the fact he was adapting, producing, and directing a film version of Ntozake Shange’s classic 1970s choreopoem/play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf.”

“I think Tyler is the worst filmmaker ever,” one pal of mine said, an amazing actress and writer, who is completely traumatized that Perry was even permitted to touch Shange’s writing.

And then…