There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But 'Black Panther' fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.
Trump is an erratic figure - seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim.
Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).
It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.
Of all the liberal resentments during the Obama years, one of the sharpest has been the failure to secure a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act.
To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.
Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.
When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.
Authoritarianism doesn't fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you in the head. It rolls in like a slow tide.
I've written before that the president is our national avatar - a stand-in for what we believe we are, or want to be.
The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of 'you lie' from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.
In many ways, Trump is both a boon and a bane to Republicans. His insanity and moral decrepitude keep the country focused on things other than the horrible public policies the GOP is attempting to ram through. But because he has no loyalty to anything other than himself, he's much more useful to them as a shiny object than as an ally.
The goal of the eight Benghazi committees, one of which produced and nurtured 'emailgate,' has been clear from the start: to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States.
Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.
Too great a love for the presidency has caused Democrats to neglect state and local politics and to overly prize compromise and a futile quest for bipartisanship. It has made liberals too allergic to federalism and too shy about grassroots politics.
What White America and Black America wanted and expected from Obama were fundamentally different and opposite things.
The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.
Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.
We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.
The America that clings to Confederate statues and flags, and that jealously guards the social privileges white Americans have long enjoyed, form the stalwarts of Trump's base.
