Anthony Dean-Harris

While spending some time on the evermore ubiquitous Twitter, I ran across a story from The Root 's feed. Black students at the humorously-named Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania are complaining about an editorial cartoon depicting a black man hanging from a noose, asking the white crowd below, "You're doing this because I'm black, aren't you?" Those in the white crowd then say the black man is playing the race card. While I haven't seen the cartoon (can a brotha' get a jpeg?), that description sounds pretty funny. But when you read the story , many seemed to disagree. If you read the story, you'd also find the artist of the cartoon is black. A black man made a comment through satire about how white people can at times persecute blacks and then say blacks are calling the race card, but so many of us see a black guy in a noose and start to call Rev. Sharpton (just wait). When I heard about this story, I could only immediately think about

Folks who know me know I've loved jazz since I was probably five years old. I'm said time and again that jazz was my first love after Jesus. Qualitatively, I mean that. Quantitatively, I'm not sure. That's probably right. I think I got saved at 3 and started bugging kids about jazz stations come the first day of kindergarten. Anyway, folks who know me know I love jazz and always have. They also know me for being young but relatively wise before my years. Well, I'm not alone in these attributes. Since I've tried lately to learn more and more about my first love, I've been following all sorts of music blogs. My favorite is NPR's A Blog Supreme (Although, I've followed Ethan Iverson for much longer). This blog is a recent invention by NPR intern (though he's so much more than that) Patrick Jarenwattananon. Jarenwattananon is but 24 years old and cognizant of jazz's need to spread to the masses. He currently put together an effort to

I've been absent for some time now. I apologize for that but it's been hard for me to gather the motivation to write. Even now, I'm probably not going to write anything here. Instead, I am going to plug something. Some folks may know, I've been volunteering at San Antonio's jazz station, Trinity University's 91.7 FM KRTU San Antonio . I'm taking over The Line-Up, which airs Fridays at 9pm Central Time. My first show was last night and while I wasn't able to pick out the music, I'm hopefully putting personal touches on the show already while not deviating from the great show that was before me. There should be writing here soon once I get out of this slump but in the meantime, listen to my show .