ldquo;Intelligent and thought-provoking.”

Autorentext

Cora Daniels is an award-winning journalist and the author of two books, Black Power Inc. and Ghettonation. She was a staff writer for Fortune magazine for almost a decade and currently is a contributing writer for Essence. Her work has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Fast Company magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Men's Fitness, among others.

John L. Jackson Jr. is a cultural anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer. At the age of thirty-four, he was named the first-ever Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and has served as a visiting professor of law at Harvard. He is the author of four books: Harlemworld, a Publisher's Weekly Notable Nonfiction Book; Real Black; Racial Paranoia; and Thin Description.

Klappentext

When was the last time you said everything on your mind without holding back? In this no-holds-barred discussion of America's top hot-button issues, a journalist and a cultural anthropologist express opinions that are widely held in private?but rarely heard in public.

Everyone edits what they say. It's a part of growing up. But what if we applied tell-it-like-it-is honesty to grown-up issues? In Impolite Conversations, two respected thinkers and writers openly discuss five "third-rail" topics?from multi-racial identities to celebrity worship to hyper-masculinity among black boys?and open the stage for honest discussions about important and timely concerns.

Organized around five subjects?Race, Politics, Sex, Money, Religion?the dialogue between Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson Jr. may surprise, provoke, affirm, or challenge you. In alternating essays, the writers use reporting, interviews, facts, and figures to back up their arguments, always staying firmly rooted in the real world. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't, but they always reach their conclusions with respect for the different backgrounds they come from and the reasons they disagree.

Whether you oppose or sympathize with these two impassioned voices, you'll end up knowing more than you did before and appreciating the candid, savvy, and often humorous ways in which they each take a stand.

Leseprobe
Impolite Conversations

CORA

Let’s pray for sexually active daughters.

“I want a freak in the morning, freak in the evening, just like me . . .”

—ADINA HOWARD, FREAK LIKE ME

A few years ago there was this Subaru commercial that was perfectly engineered to touch any parent’s heart. In the spot a father is giving his teenage daughter the keys to the car for the first time, but when he looks in the driver’s seat while giving his safety speech he is still seeing his daughter as the toddler she once was. I experience the opposite effect daily. From the moment my daughter was born I’ve been thinking about the woman she will grow up to be. Part of this future focus is that I am an obsessive planner. I surround myself with to-do lists, buy tickets months in advance, and register for things the first day possible, always. By December 1 this past year, I had already planned out my kids’ entire summer vacation, including finding and registering them for seven different weekly summer camps between the two of them. My husband thinks I’m crazy. What he doesn’t know is the constant planning I do that he can’t see. Since before my daughter could talk I have been thinking about the Talk, as in how will I talk to my daughter about sex. She’s barely started elementary school, so our sex talks have been relatively limited so far. But that hasn’t stopped me thinking. And that’s mostly not because of my obsessive planning but because I’m a woman raising a future woman.

I enjoy sex.

It is amazing to me how few women can say those three words proudly, unapologetically, void of embarrassment, or even without cushioning the admission with a little humor. Perhaps the only thing I envy about men is that it is assumed that they like to get their freak on, when for women it is still something that we are supposed to whisper. Here I am a grown woman, mother of two, still married to the boy I met in college, and writing a book dedicated to candor, and of all the personal, honest, tasteless, and impolite things I’ve written, it is those three words—I enjoy sex—that make me pause at the thought of my mom reading. And if we are keeping it real, honestly, I am not sure I would be able to write those three words so loud and proud if my father were still alive.

For the record, I think about sex, I fantasize about sex, I enjoy sex. At the playground whenever I see fellow parents sporting mommy/daddy gear and exhaustion, I think about how they have also had sex. I actually find one of the best unexpected aphrodisiacs in life is to spot a family from an ultraconservative religious sect, like Hasidic Jews or the Amish, with all their children upon children in tow. Seeing all the sex that couple is obviously having immediately shames any too-tired thoughts from my mind. In fact the only good thing that came from having to endure a presidential election race with the insufferable Mitt Romney was the bombardment of family photos of his five children and his brood of grandchildren (twenty at last count), which put my sex life into overdrive. The Romney clan is clearly doin’ it, and doin’ it, and doin’ it well.

Of course, the major flaw in my thinking is the assumption that just because you are having lots of sex doesn’t mean you are enjoying it. Most people think by enjoying it, it means the sex has to be good. I come from the school where all sex, even bad sex, at some level can offer some enjoyment if you let it. I’d rather be having bad sex than, say, go to work, ditto for cleaning my house, shuttling my kids to their endless list of playdates, soccer games, or ballet lessons. Bad sex is better than the morning commute or trying to do errands with my four-year-old in tow. Where bad sex starts to lose its appeal is when it is up against other forms of enjoyment—dinner and a movie, a girls’ night out, sleep. That’s when our minds start to wander through all the things we could be doing that would be more fun as we wait for the bad sex to end. Still, bad sex doesn’t really become bad until you’ve had great sex. In fact, that moment of great sex is the turning point. Before that moment of great sex, if given the choice—a year filled with lots of sex that’s just okay versus a year of hardly any sex, but the sex is mind-blowingly great—I’d surely have picked lots of sex. But after that great sex moment in life it is hard to go back to okay sex no matter how much you’re doin’ it.

What I have realized is that, unlike some parents, I don’t dread the day my daughter will have sex. That’s partly why dads, like the one in the Subaru commercial, constantly infantilize their daughters because they can’t bear to acknowledge their daughters’ sexuality. Instead, what I worry more about is whether my daughter will enjoy sex.

That worry doesn’t make me too popular at the playground. Much of the conversation in parenting circles is about how to prevent our kids from having sex, period. Whether the concern comes from our values and belief system or from a health and pregnancy standpoint or some combination, often the discussions focus on dangers and fears. Recently, I went to a meeting at my children’s elementary school that dealt with talking to your kids about sex, and the speaker opened the session with: “If you have children in kindergarten they are five years away from puberty.” I saw two dads bolt fro…