american culture
I was just an ordinary Southern guy that, when I wasn't working to pay the rent, I spent my free time trying to learn and grow in anti-racism and social-justice work. Then suddenly, my whole world unexpectedly was turned upside down when I made a couple of videos about race in America.
I was in 5th grade when I realized I wasn't American. Not that I hadn't had some awareness of that fact from an early age. I mean, when you're 10 and can articulate the basic premises of communism, you start to understand that maybe you're not exactly from the land of Twinkies.
If it sucks to be an adolescent, it sucks more to be an immigrant teenager in a new country. Take all the angst that faces every teen, then add language barriers, cultural confusion, discrimination, and general discombobulation. It's not pretty, is it?
Last week, I sat next to a French production executive at the Reality TV Awards. Our discussion centered around the attack a couple weeks earlier at the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and the world outpouring thereafter for free speech.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
My sense from engaging many levels of Chinese society is that China does not want an aggressive relationship with the United States; it wants to forge a partnership of mutual respect and opportunity.
What defines a man as a man these days and how far have millennial men come as far as the variety of emotions they are allowed to express openly?
The things Oprah once gave us -- the sense of community, the relevant national conversations and lines of inquiry, and the iconic model of intelligent self-reflection -- have been cheapened by her attempt to align them with things.
For many people around the globe books are alive, they are collected, cherished and contemplated periodically with love. They are milestones that punctuate one's emotional and social life.
I have had relationships with two men with the surname of Williams who completed suicide -- one, my fiancé. The other, someone I never met, but for whom I felt the most sincere love and appreciation for the gut laughter he brought up in me, and billions, time and again over decades.
After living the first six months of 2014 in Provence, France, my wife, Kathy, and I figured we'd face some minor cultural readjustments coming home to Boston. Coffee mild enough so that it didn't grow hair on my chest, for example, or showers, with four walls instead of three, that didn't bathe the entire bathroom floor.