Yeah, wasn’t... wasn’t Mr. Arbery wearing shoes if he was, you know... running? How the hell could they see his toenails? Would that really be the detail that was on the mind of some random cracker about to go full Confederate on a passerby?

Bob Hope once remarked that Willie Best, who acted under the insulting pseudonym “Sleep n’ Eat”, was probably the most talented, most disciplined, best-prepared actor he had ever had the pleasure to work with.

An interviewer once asked him about his choice of non-threatening, essentially saintly characters, and I’ve always remembered his reply (well, enough to paraphrase, anyway). He said, “I’m the only one. I’m the only Negro* actor who works with any sort of regularity. Wait until there are six of us, then one of us can…

I believe the sentence may have meant, “I wrote about women’s professional football of the 1970s and 1980s the same way I reported on women’s professional baseball, which was active two decades before that.” (I thought women’s pro baseball started in the early 1940s, which would have been about three decades earlier…

Mel Brooks’ entire movie career exists so that he could tell the tasteless jokes he was absolutely forbidden to unleash on TV audiences. There was a colossal audience ready-made for him: people who longed to hear those same tasteless jokes. (Note that I’m not saying he is a bigot; if anything, Brooks is the most…

I’m beginning to think it will never be possible to re-create the absolute sensation that was “Star Wars” when it came out originally. You can safely divide the history of sci-fi movies into pre-”Star Wars” and post-”Star Wars”. I remember vividly the summer it premiered. Lines that stretched for blocks, saturated…

Yeah, I think where we get into so much argument about taste-based judgments is that we assume “this is not for me” and “this is bad” are the same thing.

There’s definitely lazy crutch-joking in all of those scripts: “We need a chuckle here. Oh, I know, let’s throw in a one-liner about women and shoe-shopping!” When you can’t rely on a shared set of bigotries, it pushes the writer(s) to reach beyond lowest-common-demominator humor.

I saw “Clue” in the movie theater when it was brand new, and literally all I remember is the homophobia.  Never was tempted to go back and give it a second chance.

Not entirely sure it’s inaccurate!

My mom does this, to my vast and continuing sorrow. She and my dad saw to it that their three white children, raised in segregated Houston, Texas, in the 1960s, did not evince the slightest twinkling of racism, and I will always be grateful for the rare, precious gift they granted us as white Americans. Every MLK Day,…

I was just gonna say, with a thick ladling of sarcasm, “Oh, well, if Tony Dungy, of all people, says Gruden’s not a bigot, that would be definitive, then.”

Western racism is apparently a created social construct dating back to the 1600s. You know, just about the time a new continent with exploitable resources was fist available to Europeans. You needed some reason to murder people of one color and enslave people of another color to do alla that exploitin’, and racism has…

Apropos to this discussion, I believe:

I’m with you.  Has anyone who wants to know the official PETA line on keeping pets done any research?

There’s also “Right Through Me,” wherein she notes that a man, apparently a recording industry exec, “Wined, dined, 69ed me, didn’t listen to a damn word I said.” An awful lotta people ignoring an awful lotta lyrics over the years.

I’m just imagining Edie Windsor, floating somewhere in a fabulous eternal realm, exclaiming, “Holy shit, Robbie, what a dick move!”

Israeli psychologist Zvi Rex was quoted as saying, “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” It’s one of the most bitter, cynical comments I’ve ever heard about the Nazi madness. I’m reminded of that statement every time I see a white American bully a Black American, and it all amounts to, “How dare your very…

Every time I see news of the latest whistlestop on the Valerie Taylor Oh I Really Respect Sharks Now Pinky Swear tour, I am reminded of that thoroughly unsettling moment in Peter Matthiessen’s “Blue Meridian” where she offhandedly recounts Ron swimming among the great whites, casually eviscerating them from beneath…

I just finished reading Oliver Sacks’s book “Hallucinations” and found it enlightening. He and his patients mostly experienced their visions as a result of neurological misfires, accidents, illness, traumatic injury, sleep deprivation, or drug use. He was able to identify broad categories and intensity levels to the…