Daily News Feed 6.26.08

India.Arie stars, Whoopi Goldberg produces Broadway’s ‘For Colored Girls’
Grammy-winning singer India.Arie will make her Broadway debut in a revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” She will open in the play Sept. 8 at Circle in the Square. Preview performances begin Aug. 19 in what will be a revised and updated version of the play, which was an off-Broadway hit for the Public Theater in 1976 before transferring to Broadway for a run of more than 700 performances. The new production will be produced by Whoopi Goldberg, directed by Shirley Jo Finney and choreographed by Hinton Battle, a three-time Tony winner. “For Colored Girls…,” a prose-poem portrait of black women in America, originally featured Shange and Trazana Beverley, who won a Tony for her performance. (Continue Reading…)

Racist Groups Increase Membership in Wake of Obama Win
The serious hatin’ on Barack Obama is in full force among racists in cyberspace and has spread to countless computers in homes across America. Since Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary last month, clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and could become America’s first black president in November, racist groups, white supremacy organizations, neo-nazis and skinheads have all increased their activity on the Internet and stepped up their hateful online denunciations of Obama. It’s a hate experts say is now reaching a fever pitch. “I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Arkansas, told The Washington Post. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly non-white president.” (Continue Reading…)

Sharpton Calls Nader’s Comments ‘Most Troubling’
Rev. Al Sharpton sent an open letter to consumer activist and independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader today following comments he made about Sen. Barack Obama, in which Nader claimed Obama “talks white” and ignores issues of poverty. In the letter, Sharpton said he found Nader’s comments divisive and “most troubling.” Nader’s comments were published today in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News and quickly spread on the Internet, in which he said, “(Obama) wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician…He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful.” “I don’t know how one “talks black or white,” wrote Sharpton in an email which was emailed to members of the press. “There are clearly different styles and speech cadences in every community.” In closing his letter, Sharpton wrote accused Nader’s comments of being “beneath the respect many have had for you and more importantly below the level of political discourse we need at this point in history.” (Continue Reading…)