“‘Women of Color’ have rarely had the opportunity to write about their love affairs.” The line is from an Alice Walker poem of the same title, found in her 1991 collection Her Blue Body Everything We Know and wafted through my mind as I watched Whitney: Can I Be Me, which airs tonight on Crave […]
Man Up: Men must speak out against sexual assault
The young man who, in 2011, reputedly gave a thumbs up sign while sodomizing an inebriated Rehteah Parsons has gone on with his life. Ditto the fellow who took a photo of the assault that was then circulated online and unleashed a barrage of “slut-shaming” attacks against the once cheery Dartmouth teenager. No longer able […]
Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise
White space Raped at age seven, famed author Maya Angelou refused to speak for the next five years. The experience stands at the centre of her debut 1969 novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The instant best seller takes its name from a line in the Paul Laurence Dunbar work, “Sympathy,” and has […]
The first column I never wrote for the Chronicle Herald
A former freelance contributor to the Chronicle Herald, I had two articles poised for publication when unionized employees went on strike last January, a year ago today. I immediately withdrew my work. The first piece — on the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster — appeared on this site. An article about my dental adventures was featured […]
Viola Desmond, Carrie Best, and serving face
A Black journalist and her newspaper championed Desmond's cause
Having abandoned my dream to become a prison warden, I came late to a journalism career. There was one other Black woman at the San Francisco Chronicle when I joined the staff, as a rookie reporter, in the mid-1980s. But having had a falling out with the powers-that-be over the paper’s lackluster coverage of the local Black […]
Touched by The Greatest
Dartmouth High grad Jim Clark photographed Muhammad Ali's last fight.
A devoted fan of the Chicago Cubs, I routinely travelled with my family from our home in nearby Gary, Indiana to cheer the baseball team. One day, when I was about 12, we arrived at Wrigley Field for a game. Back then, vendors hawked popcorn in cardboard containers that, when emptied, were easily transformed into...
Colour me purple: Alice Walker, Prince, and being present in the world
The youngest of eight children born to a sharecropping family in rural Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker is best known for The Color Purple, the 1982 novel that garnered her the first Pulitzer Prize in fiction awarded to a Black woman. Last fall, I was invited to join a group of high school students in Alice’s...
Eight films to watch with kids as an antidote to the hate-mongering Herald article
The Chronicle Herald has been rightly humiliated for its skank screed on refugee children. Set against the backdrop of the “newspaper’s” self-inflicted implosion, it seems useful to highlight several films that ponder the plight of youth around the globe. Indeed, parents and teachers might consider watching an age-appropriate film or two with youths — as an antidote […]
Marie Henein showed viewers exactly why Peter Mansbridge should make his way to the exit door
As a former legal advocate for the Seattle City Attorney’s Battered Women’s Project (BWP), I spent countless hours in courtrooms. The ongoing debate about the sexual assault trial of Jian Ghomeshi, his attorney, the complainants, the judge, the Peter Mansbridge interview, etc., has prompted me to reflect on the role I once played in helping...
Through space and time
Thirty years on, the Challenger disaster connects two journalists, each with poignant memories of the event
The Castro. The Mission. The Avenues. Fresh out of journalism school, I’d moved from New York to San Francisco and had been reporting for the region’s largest newspaper for two weeks — just long enough to deduce that locals referred to the city’s diverse enclaves with a distinct lingo. The Haight. The Tenderloin. The Marina....