It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which means the online magazines, in addition to everyone else, are in an all-out war to out-black each other. Except here, the result – a healthy discussion about race in America, not a discussion about lynching – might actually be worth your time.
On Slate.com, we've got the first of three excerpts from Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, where Ford "sets the stage with the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, in an effort to determine whether and in which ways his detractors were truly racists."
And over on Salon.com? Wise words from N-Word author Randall Kennedy on … Clarence Thomas.
Stay tuned for February, when Black History Month offers a full 28 days of this.
Editorial Director
it's sad that every icon of Civil Rights was so clearly immoral and unfaithful in their own marriage. Kennedy, King, Clinton - all great men, indeed, but on a personal level, not so much