Michelle Obama: Star of the RNC and, Perhaps, the DNC

Featured at Roll Call

PHILADELPHIA — When you want to put on a memorable show, you cast a superstar to get it started. Is anyone surprised to see a Michelle Obama speech scheduled for Monday, Day One of the Democratic National Convention?

Without even attending the convention the Republicans just wrapped up in Cleveland, the first lady found a way to dominate in the most visible way possible; her words anchored the prime time speech of Melania Trump. Like many women of all political persuasions I’ve interviewed through two terms of President Barack Obama and his family in the White House, the wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump found inspiration and something relatable in Michelle Obam

 

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Jul252016 TAGS: , , , ,

Saturday Night Special: First Ladies

Featured at WGN radio

This week on the Saturday Night Special, Amy is talking all about the history of American First Ladies. Scarlet Neath joins to discuss her piece in the Atlantic about how the role is defined. Abigail Adams biographer Edith Gelles paints a portrait of that famous First Lady’s life. Mary C. Curtis gives her take on Melania Trump’s RNC speech and how it unites her to Michelle Obama. Later, Kate Andersen Brower joins Amy to talk about her book “First Women” and the changing role of First Lady.

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Jul242016 TAGS: , ,

Hillary Clinton’s ‘Law and Order’ Problem

Featured at Roll Call

PHILADELPHIA – In politics, nuance is often a negative, particularly in the middle of a cutthroat presidential campaign. So while Hillary Clinton’s position — supporting and sympathizing with both police officers and the mothers of African Americans killed in encounters with police — is a reasonable one, it doesn’t quite fit on a bumper sticker. It’s about criminal justice and race and trust and perceptions it would take a pile of history books to start to untangle.

On the other hand, “law and order,” the mantra often repeated by GOP nominee Donald Trump in Cleveland at the Republican convention, fits just fine.

 

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Jul242016 TAGS: , , , ,

My White Husband Loves Guns, Our Black Son Does Not

Featured at NBC News

My husband likes guns – a lot. He collects a variety of pistols, rifles and shotguns and likes to shoot targets at the range and, occasionally, skeet.

When a clever squirrel figures out how to raid his fenced-in garden, he has been known to pick up the air rifle to scare it off. He once bought a pistol for me to carry in my car when I would return home very late from my copy editing job in Tucson, Ariz., where getting a gun was as easy as going to a shop and telling the clerk you weren’t a dangerous criminal. But once we moved back East, I was fine with keeping my distance.

Though guns are not an interest I share, his hobby never did more than amuse me—because you know how it is with married couples: compromise. He doesn’t join me on every theater outing, either. But the first time he took our young son to the range to enjoy the gun experience, I stopped smiling.

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Jul242016 TAGS: , , ,

The NBA moves forward as North Carolina drifts back

Featured at The Undefeated

Not even its storied basketball history and inevitable disappointment for legend and Charlotte Hornets chairman Michael Jordan could stand in the way of North Carolina’s rightward drift. The NBA has moved the 2017 NBA All-Star Game from Charlotte, making it hardly the first but simply the latest and surely the highest-profile casualty of House Bill 2, the so-called “bathroom bill,” which regulates the restrooms transgender folks use – and so much more.

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Jul232016 TAGS: , , , ,

The Heat: The State of U.S. Race Relations, Part 2

Featured at CCTV


The shooting in the U.S. state of Louisiana was the latest in a month of extraordinary violence and racial tension in the United States.

Investigators said the shooter, an African American marine veteran, ambushed and killed three officers and injured three others before being killed by law enforcement. The incident happened just weeks after police officers in Baton Rouge were caught on camera shooting a black man several times.

The violence has focused renewed attention on how African Americans are treated in the U.S. and the larger issue of race relations.

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Jul222016 TAGS:

The Heat: The State of U.S. Race Relations, Part 1

Featured at CCTV


The shooting in the U.S. state of Louisiana was the latest in a month of extraordinary violence and racial tension in the United States.

Investigators said the shooter, an African American marine veteran, ambushed and killed three officers and injured three others before being killed by law enforcement. The incident happened just weeks after police officers in Baton Rouge were caught on camera shooting a black man several times.

The violence has focused renewed attention on how African Americans are treated in the U.S. and the larger issue of race relations.

 

Read the rest atCCTV
Jul222016 TAGS: ,

The Unconventional Republican National Convention

Featured at WCCB Rising

CHARLOTTE, NC — The RNC may have gotten off to a rocky start but an anti-Hillary Clinton theme seems to be bringing the party together. WCCB Political Contributor Mary C. Curtis weighs in on the events so far in Cleveland and what could be ahead as we move closer to November.

Read the rest atWCCB Rising
Jul202016 TAGS: , , , ,

Melania and Michelle: Sisters in the American Dream

Featured at Roll Call

It is embarrassing that portions of Melania Trump’s opening night speech repeated not only the themes but the very words spoken by Michelle Obama in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention — not, however, for the reason most would think. (Though you should expect at least one sloppy speechwriter’s head to roll.) No, the real reason the campaign’s public gaffe stings is that it contradicts the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s message that America is a “divided crime scene .”

If the African-American first lady whose journey took her from the South Side of Chicago to Princeton to Harvard Law and the White House and the Slovenian-American immigrant , model/designer and perhaps future first lady have so much in common, that means the Trump candidacy has little reason to exist. We don’t need a “law and order” candidate to get us in shape. Maybe we aren’t at each other’s throats after all.

 

Read the rest atRoll Call
Jul192016 TAGS: , , ,

Spotlight Elections: What’s Next America?

Featured at Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

When Barack Obama gave the speech that made him famous at the 2004 Democratic National Convention – and doesn’t that seem like a lifetime ago – it wasn’t just America that noticed. The words he spoke, the sentiment he expressed provided hope for the world: “Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy; our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’”

Obama’s campaign for president, with the message of “Hope and Change,” was felt not only in the US but was truly international. In Germany in 2008, Obama closed a main thoroughfare when he appeared. The French president all but endorsed him.

It was also what Barack Obama, who would become the first African-American U.S. President, represented. Obama was and is a man of the world. In his example and election, not once but twice, America set an example to aspire to, a country stumbling to find its better self – eventually. In travels, other countries marveled, and had to ask – with an obvious answer — if a member of a discriminated minority closer to home could rise so far.

What a difference eight years make.

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Jul182016 TAGS: , , , ,
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