HARD CRACKERS

The following is the second in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” Prior to going away to college, my interaction with Black people had been limited conversations with a Black cleaning woman named Louise. I loved her and would go down the basement of […]

What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that explores how a red, white and blue diaper baby, raised by conservative Republican parents in a largely conservative Republican and all white suburb in a conservative religious tradition grew up to become first, a social justice activist and eventually a Marxist Humanist revolutionary. The longer […]

In 1977, I was a signaler (radio operator) in the South African Army, the infantry. I was stationed in a camp called Mpacha, which was a few hundred yards from the border of Zambia in the Caprivi Strip of northern Namibia. When we signalmen weren’t on patrol, we had shifts in the Mpacha base underground […]

There’s a line of thinking that calls out the problem of “slavery movies”—the apparent overabundance of depictions of Black people being enslaved, the way those depictions can too comfortably glide into voyeuristic pleasure at Black suffering. Why not portray other periods and experiences in Black history, this line of thinking goes. It’s an important point. […]

Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit singer and songwriter, died on August 8, 2023. He was 81 years of age. What follows is a short essay I wrote about him in July, 2012, the day after seeing the preview of the documentary film about his life entitled “Searching for Sugar Man.” The article was never published. I […]

For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had the good fortune to be in a relationship with Clem Maharaj, a former jazz drummer from Trinidad whose mother had taken the precaution of sending him to Europe in a suit made of flame-resistant fabric. This fireproof suit occupied a large space […]