Word: african
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...more complicated friendships was with James Agee, who reviewed movies for The Nation and Time, had contributed the text to the Dust Bowl picture-poem Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and would go on to write the novel A Death in the Family and the African Queen screenplay with John Huston. (He also worked vagrantly with Manny on a never-completed script.) Agee was the alcoholic Episcopalian golden boy to Manny's cranky Jewish mensch, and that may have stoked jealousy and resentment. How was Manny to know that Agee, however lauded in his time (he died...
...Biden officially launched his 2008 presidential run in February of 2007, he virtually ended it with a classic Biden gaffe - this one involving the man on whose ticket he'll be a part of in the race for the White House. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said, apparently oblivious to his implied slur of previous African-American politicians. Although Obama brushed aside the comment, other prominent African-Americans and much of the Washington political class came down hard on Biden. He apologized...
...second are the tests unique to being a relatively inexperienced senator - and the first major party African American nominee - who won a fractious race against his party's dynastic forces and has recently dealt with the first significant poll-sliding in a career that's been defined so far by forward momentum. This is the tough stuff...
That is resolutely not the message communicated in Obama's campaign, however. "I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation or victimhood generally," he has declared. He enjoys nearly unanimous support from African Americans in polls; nevertheless, just as Broyard sought to avoid being labeled a "Negro writer," Obama resists efforts to define him as a "black candidate." And for some of the same reasons too. As soon as the race label is added, some of the audience tunes out, others are turned off and still others leap to conclusions about...
Obama's memoir displays more familiarity with the ideas of the far left than most American politicians would advertise. His interest in African independence movements led him to the seminal work of Frantz Fanon, a Marxist sociologist, and he speaks in passing of attending "socialist conferences" at the Cooper Union in New York City. But as Obama told TIME, this was in the Reagan years, and he was also reading works by conservative giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. He browsed among the ideologues but never bought in, he said. "I was always suspicious of dogma and the excesses...