Relevant To The Lives of Black Americans

Like most Black Americans who grew up in the age of the Civil Right movement, my household always had an issue of Ebony Magazine somewhere in the living room. Even young I understood the vital connection the magazine afforded our household to the wider Black American community; Ebony Magazine has always been for, by and about Black Americans. Over the intervening years that formulation has not changed even as the magazine has undergone modernization, and left most of its rather shallow articles behind.

Today’s Ebony Magazine, which once again adorns our homes’ coffee table, is new and more, shall we say, upscale, than the periodical of my youth. The images are more professional finished, it articles (for the most part) have more depth, and advertisements though still slanted toward hair and beauty products have a higher gloss on them. And speaking of advertisements, like most modern magazine, there are a lot of them; it is not an exaggeration to state that fully half of the magazine is given over to them. And they run the gambit from full two page spreads on automobiles, to one page write-up’s on food, clothing, and the ubiquitous beauty products.

Ebony Magazine likes to showcase celebrities and other successful and notable Black Americans, but the magazine does a good job of showcasing work-a-day black people that have made the American Dream their own. The whole magazine is devoted to uplifting stories about and for black people, and in this vain Ebony Magazine is a great counter balance to all of the negative stories in the mainstream press about Black Americans.

The March 2007 issue for instance featured a rather lengthy article on Raven Symone of The Cosby Show and That’s So Raven fame, entitled The $400 Million Dollar Woman. There was also a very informative and engaging article on the new governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick who holds the title of the second black governor of an American state. And still another about the harm Hip-Hop and Rap music can and probably is doing to the self-esteem of Black children. The article entitled Sex, Violence, and Disrespect: What Hip-Hop Had Done To Our Women was written by Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole, the president of Bennett College for Women, and president emeritus of Spelman College. The article mirrors a chapter in her latest book, co-authored with Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Woman’s Equality in African American Communities, and is a fitting discussion on an issue vexing the Black American community at large.

But there was also a rather shallow article on interracial dating, entitled, Is Love Becoming Color-Blind? The article really lends very little to the discussion of this complex issue, and such articles have always—regrettably—found a home within the pages of Ebony Magazine.

Like all periodicals, Ebony Magazine reserves certain sections for monthly re-occurring features. These include Letter to The Editor, Ebony Book Shelf, Center Stage, Money Talk, Sisterspeak, Ebony Advisor, Body Talk, among others. All and all these monthly sections are fun to read, but honestly offer little in the way of useful information, with the exception of Ebony Book Shelf, and Ebony Travel Guide.

When all is said and done Ebony Magazine is a necessary part of the Black American experience and growing up without its sometimes shallow, but always relevant words. Those words inspired, they energized, and they lent and lend purpose to life in a world where Black Americans, young and old, find little in main stream American culture to encourage them.