Episode 3 of our new series featuring FBT co-founder Michael David Cobb Bowen and author Winkfield Twyman Jr. Mike and Wink compare their respective imagined roles as King(s) of (black) History Month.

"Mirrors on the ceiling

The pink champagne on ice

And she said, "We are all just prisoners here

Of our own device"

And in the master's chambers

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast."

     ---- Hotel California lyrics by the Eagles (released February 22, 1977)

References and Resources:

• White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming Of Age Black In White America by Marcus Maybry
• The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? by Ellis Cose
• Civility by Stephen L. Carter
• Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation edited by Gerald Early
• Blues People: Negro Music in White America by LeRoi Jones
• Cane (Kabnis) by Jean Toomer
• The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West
• Oxherding Tale by Charles R. Johnson
• High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney
• Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle by Michael Thelwell
• The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
• Captain Blackman by John A. Williams
• Jazz by Toni Morrison
• Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories 1968-1986 by Wanda Coleman
• Understand This by Jervey Tervalon
• Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 by Stanley Crouch
• Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America by Greg Tate
• Wink’s “Black Enterprise Magazine, Or, How I Became Black”
• Wink’s “Reparations No. 30”
• Wink’s “No Caricatures and Stereotypes Allowed”