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 .

Last night at around midnight (Central Time), I learned on Twitter that Sen. Ted Kennedy had died . It was one of those things that was rather disheartening to see but not that unexpected. His health had been failing for a little while now. On top of that, seeing all the hullabaloo about the polarizing health care debate can't exactly give a champion of health care the additional will to live. After that initial half-shock came over me, I thought about where this would leave the health care debate. Sen. Kennedy's passing does leave the democrats without a filibuster proof 60 seat majority. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post noted last week that Sen. Kennedy's passing could be perilous to health care reform without special circumstances put in place in our now current situation. But after all that, I noted things in the big picture. I kept seeing folks reference " the Chappaquiddick incident ." In fact, as of this writing "Mary Jo Kopechne" is the...

I've been working on some ideas in the back of my head for a couple of days but while I've wanted to seriously tackle some newsworthy ideas, I'm still mulling stuff over. Still, it's been a week since I've written something and I've consciously tried to post something once a week to show some consistency and frankly, I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately. Where do homeless people get the markers to make their signs? At what point in your desperation do you realize, Hey, I think I'm about to end up pretty destitute. I'm going to have to come up with an idea pretty soon to bring in some income. Purchasing a Sharpie and getting a piece of cardboard at some point shifts from being something you think about conceptually to an actual reality. You have to consider obtaining these things. Getting a marker and cardboard for a sign are now investments in your future. And then you have to consider your begging technique. This becomes a bit of...

I'm growing my hair out. I typically do this from time to time (oddly enough, during rather sweltering summers) to see what I could do with my hair if I ever gave it the chance to grow long enough to do something different with it. I have toyed with the notion of putting it in locks for years, but never had the patience to put up with it. As a black man, many of us cut our hair short with great regularity. We do this partially for social acceptance. Imagine our president with longer hair. President Obama with an afro. President Obama with dreadlocks. President Obama with a high top fade. With an S-Curl. Now stop thinking about it, it's scary enough. It's not really that acceptable for a man of President Obama's stature to do much else with his hair than what he's currently doing. But another reason why black male hair is kept so short is because maintenance is a hassle. It's pretty easy to keep it all short and lined up than to deal with the combing,...

For many years, I’ve been a devotee of jazz music. It has kept me musically afloat all my life, since I was five. I was listening to David Benoit when I was five years old. My favorite musician has been Joe Sample since I was ten. My favorite episode of The West Wing is episode 6.16, “Drought Conditions,” solely because it ends at a reception in which Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is played in its entirety. Jazz, the music and the mindset, makes up a lot of my persona. My walk, my writing, my speech, my mechanical nature of doing things all has that same angular, improvisational ideal to it. As I’ve grown older and continued to learn more about jazz’s past and its future, I’ve expanded all my musical tastes as well (this hyperlink goes way back in my writing). For the most part, I’ve been able to keep my variety under control but as time has gone by, I’ve been less able to keep my tastes in check. It has become harder and harder for me to draw lines between genres. This is diffi...