The Smithian

‘…women were depicted on a higher percentage of covers from 1954-1965 than from 2000-2011.” For their research, published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, [they] looked at 716 SI covers from January 2000 through June 2011. They excluded the annual swimsuit issue, “as its focus is not on sports performance per se.” While they found considerable variation from year to year, the total added up to a…35 covers, or 4.9 percent of the total. A grand total of 11 featured women of color. The imbalance looms even larger as you dig further into the numbers.

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…all the markers of a novel written in the…Southern gothic tradition…references…to race, poverty, the blues, voodoo and an ill-fated brothel…the Southern literati have raised an eyebrow at its author: Bill Cheng, a 29-year-old Chinese-American from Queens who has never set foot in Mississippi.

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There’s something disturbing about ZIP code uses that serve to divide us, rather than to connect us, as they were originally intended. Defining ourselves by ZIP code rather than metropolitan region, county, or even city diminishes the sense of the commonwealth. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the separation made manifest in mid-century sprawl and white flight were part of what gave birth to ZIP codes in the first place.

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…the memes, the autotune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amidst the hood backdrop—the gnarled teeth…the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s—we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent…[Antoine] Dodson and [Sweet] Brown and Ramsey [are] all up in our gifs and all over the blogosphere because they’re not the type of people we’re used to seeing or hearing on our TVs. They’re actually not the type of people we’re used to seeing or hearing at all…

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Kaiser shipyards, Richmond, California. Miss Eastine Cowner, a former waitress, is helping in her job as a scaler to construct the Liberty Ship SS George Washington Carver launched on May 7, 1943.

From the series: Negro Activities in Industry, Government, and the Armed Forces from the Records of the Office of War Information.

[look of the hour]

…the little known story of how Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor elected in a major U.S. city with an overwhelmingly white population, rose to power, changed Los Angeles through an extraordinary multi-racial coalition, and in the process, transformed American politics.

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“We didn’t hate white people…We didn’t even know any. We hated the system. That’s what we were protesting about.”

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[Flip] Wilson was a more troubled person than his easy and attractive onstage demeanor would suggest. But he was also a more serious and committed one, who studied comedy like a science and performed it as an art. Part of the first wave of black comedians to break the color line, he arrived during the sociocultural crack in time we call the mid-’60s. He straddled that crack for a while, and then it swallowed him.

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Downton Abbey producers were searching for the…person to play the show’s first ever black character…’Death In Paradise’ actor Gary Carr will be joining the cast…as jazz singer Jack Ross.

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In the early 20^th century many African-Americans found steady…jobs in urban Post Offices, but little room for advancement. Despite discriminatory employment practices, the Post Office Department was a rare avenue of opportunity…postal jobs were coveted positions that helped lead to the emergence of a black middle class. 

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“…there is this discussion of Chicago and black Chicago. And in … all that I’ve read, in interviews, there’s often this discussion of two different cities. And I think when Chicago finally wraps its hands around all of itself and doesn’t speak of it in these two different terms, I think they’re going to be a lot closer to solving some of these problems.”

more, plus an excerpt, here.