Free Republic

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s (R) and his supporters did not believe slavery and the Holocaust were real. Stoney is the co-chair of the Terry McAuliffe (D) campaign. Mitchell said, “How did Terry McAuliffe let Glenn Youngkin reframe the debate on education, including things like Toni Morrison’s book ‘Beloved’ becoming a flashpoint in this race with the issue of Critical Race Theory, which is not even taught in Virginia schools, but it’s become, according to most of the polls a big deal?”

Stanley Crouch died yesterday at the age of 74. Crouch is best known as a great jazz critic. His biography of Charlie Parker is a classic. But Crouch was also a literary critic and a critic of our culture. Here are some gems from his criticism: On rap: It is “either infantile self-celebration or anarchic glamorization of criminal behavior.” On Toni Morrison: She has a certain skill, but she has no serious artistic vision or real artistic integrity. “Beloved” was a fraud. It gave a fake vision of the slave trade, it didn’t deal with the complicity of Africans, and...

Author Toni Morrison says white Americans overwhelmingly supported President-elect Donald Trump due to fears that “their natural superiority is being lost.” “Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force,” Morrison writes in an essay for the New Yorker, entitled “Mourning for Whiteness.” Morrison catalogues an apparent list of concerns held by white Trump voters: “There are ‘people of color’ everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.” The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author also...

Novelist Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and the American Book Award, has written a short essay in the New Yorker magazine about the recent presidential election. In the piece, Morrison writes that the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is part of a reaction by white men to an increasingly multicultural society. “Under slave laws,” Morrison writes, “the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are ‘people of color' everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition...

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“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race’,” Morrison told the Daily Telegraph. “This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.” She added: “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison says she wants to see an officer shoot an unarmed white teenager in the back before agreeing that the “conversation about race” is over, but she almost certainly already has received her wish. An analysis released last week shows that more white people died at the hands of law enforcement than those of any other race in the last two years, even as the Justice Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of police force. “People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race,’” Ms. Morrison told the (U.K.) Telegraph...

Boston, Mass — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the late senator and nephew of the late president, told an audience in Cambridge, Mass. Monday that President Bush has brought fascism to America. Kennedy appeared at a forum, "Books, Politics, and the Culture War," sponsored by the Harvard Book Store and the Progressive Book Club. A longtime environmentalist, he delivered an extended criticism of the Bush administration's environmental policies before alleging that the president has, in effect, created a fascist system of government in America. "I was taught that Communism leads to dictatorship and that capitalism leads to democracy," Kennedy...

Common Core Education has sparked political controversy since the U.S. Department of Education decided to adopt its curriculum nationwide in both public and private schools. The Common Core website lists “exemplar texts” by grade which they recommend for reading and one in particular has some parents taking action. The Common Core recommends a book for 11th and 12th graders by Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison called “The Bluest Eye”. The excerpts from the book are too pornographic to post here but you can choose to read them here at this link. The Bluest Eye depicts detailed accounts of incest,...

Remember the Universal Translator? Peter Wood, in like manner, provides a useful guide to translating regular English prose into the style of Nobel-prizewinning author Toni Morrison, probably the most frequently assigned writer on US college campuses. The basic rules: Misuse common phrases Embrace inconsistency Omit words to create more forceful expression Mix up parts of speech Chop in self-conscious micro-sentences He provides some wonderful examples. For instance, this office memo: Just to remind you, I will be out of the office Tuesday to meet with our supplier, Acme Explosives. Please finish your work on the 2Q budget and let the...

Call it the backlash against the backlash. Over the past decade, Americans have increasingly understood that the divorce revolution, fatherlessness and single parent households are harming our children. Now those who view the traditional family as disadvantageous to women are firing back, defending women who choose single motherhood and depicting fathers as superfluous. Last fall Stanford University Gender Scholar Peggy Drexler penned the highly-publicized book Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men. This month Oxford Press released Wellesley College Women's Studies Professor Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women...

<p>I (Horowitz) just came across this on the Internet and couldn't resist sharing it. The vacant bloviating brain of Cornel West has been ominpresently on display of late as he promotes his latest book of vacuous posturings. For me the wonder is that anyone within a mile of his presence can keep a straight face.</p>

Toni Morrison (on Clinton's adultery) October 1998 Thanks to the papers, we know what the columnists think. Thanks to round-the-clock cable, we know what the ex-prosecutors, the right-wing blondes, the teletropic law professors, and the disgraced political consultants think. Thanks to the polls, we know what "the American people" think. But what about the experts on human folly? This summer, my plan was to do very selective radio listening, read no newspapers or news magazines, and leave my television screen profoundly, mercifully blank. There were books to read, others to finish, a few to read again. It was a lovely...

Md. Teacher Finds Botched PSAT Question Student Test Scores Increased Due To Erroneous Question POSTED: 9:00 p.m. EDT May 14, 2003 The nation's largest testing company has increased the PSAT scores of nearly 500,000 high school juniors after the company concluded it was wrong about the correct answer to a grammar question posed on the exam last October. Students were asked if anything was grammatically wrong with the following sentence: "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African-Americans have endured." The correct choice on the multiple choice exam was originally listed as...