The Nahmias Cipher Report

What made America? What makes us? These two questions are at the heart of the new PBS series Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Harvard scholar turns to the latest tools of genealogy and genetics to explore the family histories of 12 renowned Americans — professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian Stephen Colbert, novelist Louise Erdrich, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, musician Yo-Yo Ma, director Mike Nichols, Her Majesty Queen Noor, television host/heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. Source: PBS @ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/facesofamerica/

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 23:05 PM EDT, 19 February 2012 We each possess the power to positively or adversely impact our fellow human beings. So, “beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and [...]

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 22:46 PM EDT, 14 July 2010 WASHINGTON, DC – Among Attorney Julius W. Robertson many talents as an author, civil rights activist and lawyer, he was also the lead attorney on the case of Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, and he is my maternal grandfather. He graduated at the [...]

Famed Lena Horne died yesterday at age 92. An iconic figure in Hollywood and on stage, Lena Horne was a pioneer who forced the film industry to evaluate casting African-American women in roles other than stereotypically safe and culturally preferred maids and ‘mammies’. Blazing the trail in presegregration America, Ms. Horne used her intellect, talent and ambition to forge a career that spanned six-decades. Ms. Horne was an extremely talented and accomplished vocalist, and one of the first African-American actresses to sign a significant contract with a major studio. She continued to break barriers through her marriage to a Jewish conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947. This was a bold move at a time when miscegenation laws were on the books in 30 states.

“In the United States, the various state laws prohibited the marriage of whites and blacks, and in many states also the intermarriage of whites with Native Americans or Asians. In the U.S., such laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 until 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced such laws. Miscegenation was finally ruled unconstitutional 12 June 1967 through the case Loving vs. the State of Virginia effectively ending legal enforcement of this practice nationwide.

“This invisibility—this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time—is the greatest source of my longing. As you know, I’m a woman who yearns, who longs for. This is the key to me and to the work, and something which is rarely discussed in reviews or essays, which I also find remarkably disappointing. That there are so few images of African-American women circulating in popular culture or in fine art is disturbing; the pathology behind it is dangerous. I mean, we got a sistah in the White House, and yet mediated culture excludes us, denies us, erases us. But in the face of refusal, I insist on making work that includes us as part of the greater whole. Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion—even in the shit, muck, and mire—is the real point.” — Carrie Mae Weems

Cattle for wives. The plight of a daughter when an expat goes rogue.

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 03:54 AM EDT, 24 November 2009 LAGOS, Nigeria – It was 1970 when my father announced that we would be moving to Ile Ife, Nigeria. The move was precipitated by an incident in which my father was unjustly arrested by a racist policeman while driving me and my siblings home [...]

When a person has no roots, they cannot weather the storms of life. When a person doesn’t know who they are, they will try to be anyone. When a person stands for nothing, they will fall for anything. Platitudes spoken throughout the ages, yet ever true even with repetition.

It is truly amazing to me, how the more things change, the more they stay the same. As one who remembers history, I like to use the analogy of the theatre: the backdrops have been switched out, new props installed, the old actors have transitioned their roles to understudies, and the show goes on.