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"Miles Davis was a brilliant musician with a interpersonal issues. I Don't confuse the artist with the art" Good point. Neither do I. The two are separate things. While I do not condone men who physically abuse women, I have no problems separating their genius from their behavior. Frank Lloyd Wright was a brilliant and innovative architect but his personal behavior was atrocious. Anyone who knows anything about the brilliant artist Diego Rivera knows that he was a notorious womanizer that tormented the soul of Freda Kahlo. Ike Turner was a very creative and original artist but his abuse of Tina Turner is legendary. A man who starts out in life in his twenties, believing he can physically beat on men as he does women and one day collect social security and medicare is surely mistaken. That is why they pick on women because the life expectancy of beating men is a short one. But women and children are easy prey for their obnoxious and cowardly behavior. Miles had a long standing history of abusing women. But there is a caveat that is rarely discussed. The women who indulged and had relationships with Miles knew of his explosive temperament. It was no secret! Yet they decided to do so. There is something to be said about women who choose to be with abusive men..... And here is a somewhat irrelevant sidebar: Years ago -I met a woman at an art exhibit who looked exactly like Miles! She had the same complexion, facial structure, eyes and facial features. It was stunning! I told her so and she just laughed. She said she knew this and in fact -when she was very young, she lived in the same residence as he did in NYC. She told me he was very kind to her, often inviting her over for dinner that he cooked. She also said she used to tell people she was his sister. Trust me -you would have believed her! And yes, she also told me she knew of his abusive reputation with women. But she personally never experienced any of it. Miles’s music was in constant flux! His music was constantly evolving and changing whether one agreed with it or not. His musical transitions were very apparent if you compare his various groups from the “early to later 50's”, his “late 50's (1959 was the year of his quintessential masterpiece -"Kind of Blue") to early 60's”, the “middle and late sixties group” (love that period included Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) and a revolving door of super star musicians ( Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett, Chic Corea, John McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul, Benny Maupin, et al) in the late 60’s. The transition from acoustic playing to electronic began with "Miles in the Sky", “Fillies de Kilimanjaro” , “In a Silent Way” and then the masterpiece that changed the course of what we know as modern jazz in 1970 -"Bitches Brew". It took me a few years to reach “Bitches Brew” but when it clicked -it was on! I remember that entire experience very vividly. After digesting "Bitches Brew", I slid into an insatiable addiction to hard core improvised “free jazz” (Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Hill, AEC, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane’s Impulse recordings, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, et al...). Took a couple of years to balance my one sided indulgence to include traditional music (e.g. Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane's Prestige and Atlantic recordings, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, Booker Ervin, et al). And the irony is that I started out with straight ahead traditional music ! Then I slid into an uncompromising consumption of hard cord improvised music. Met a friend from Pittsburgh (I learned a lot from him about music) who helped me balance my fixation to include both traditional music and the hard core stuff. I’ll never forget that! Ha! Anyhoo, enough of that... Miles’s music continued to change and it became purely electronic and almost chaotic (“Live Evil”, “Big Fun”, “On the Corner” and “Get Up with It”) at the beginning of the 1970’s. Then Miles took a hiatus from playing until he came out of retirement in 1981 and recorded, “The Man with the Horn” . After that, his music descended into irrefutable rank commercialism. That's when the unrelenting criticism reached its apex. Miles was reaching a wider and younger audience with his electronic-rock-funk-pop performances while alienating those who grew up and embellished his superbly crafted traditional compositions and acoustical playing. But regardless, Miles was undaunted and could care less what anyone thought of the direction he was headed in. His perpetual choice of musical transmutations and playing had nothing to do with “selling out” for monetary gain or fame. He had no personal interest in either. Miles was doing exactly what he wanted to do and was constantly searching for new musical realms. When asked about the standards and classics he used to play, he recoiled and said he had no interest in playing that genre again. He said, "When I listen to it now, it sounds like I'm playing under water...". Ha! Miles ahead...!!!!!!

As somebody just dropping in, I personally find all this extrapolation of figures boring, especially since it's common knowledge that statistics can be manipulated to represent a desired result. I'm curious about the name of Sara's white-anointed book gathering dust on library shelves all over the globe, the publication she keeps crowing about in between touting her friendship with oodles of black female authors. Watta resume! And I can just picture a self-help book about a subject on which she is a foremost authority, its title emblazoned across the cover. DUPLICITY FOR DUMMIES ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

For both of you to look at, this is only sales chart for a particular year. This was a pivotal year because it's when Borders declared bankruptcy: http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm I present this because it shows the sheer volume of books sold and if Blacks at one time made up a larger part of this market the book stores would have relfected this. Now Sara states that Blacks were reading all books to counter the idea that the Black book section was never more than 2 rows in large bookstores. There were however more indie book stores. The next link is the chart for general readers broken down by education and class from 2012 (Now your discussion is based on the 90s. Numbers and statistics are pretty firm for every decade and there is never a seismic shift that makes one time period jump considerably. The natural progression for growth or decrease is always about 1% per year in the negative or positive. If you look at this chart and apply the 1%+-, Blacks would still not make up the majority of the readership in America simply because the amount of Blacks in America is a 1/6 of that of Whites (Whites are 75% and Blacks are 12%). This is just logic and not based on fact. It would be very hard to discover the actual facts from the 90s via the internet and it would have to come from an industry book, but here is the chart: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/part-2-the-general-reading-habits-of-americans/ Troy's point is valid based purely on numbers and the breakdown of the country... but Sara's assertion has legitimacy and can be argued if there is real documentation because in this Pew document it states, " Additionally, blacks (42%) are more likely than whites (34%) to read daily or almost daily for work or educational purposes" Which stands to reason that Blacks indeed read more than Whites and if you skew these numbers for growth over the last 20 years with the boom of Sista Lit in the 90s you would possibly have about 50% to 38% rate, but even then based on the numbers of Whites in the US this would mean that Blacks were consuming 6 times as many books as Whites and that just isn't logical, but like I said it can't be verified because neither of you are willing to dig in for the stats to back up what you say. Based on logic and common sense, it is almost impossible to look at numbers from 2012 and say that those numbers could be completely inverse for the 90s. As a final insertion (yep I said insertion because I just put myself into this discussion, lol) logically if we look at the height of the Sista Girl Lit movement in the 90s none of the books show up on the top books of 1995 (random year in the middle of the decade). http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/leb182.htm While Sara makes the argument that blacks were reading more books in a variety of genres, this book list can't be deciphered by race, but if Blacks were reading there would be an appearance of a book like Waiting to Exhale on this list simply because a movie almost guarantees a book a second life. The book was published in 1992, but there were a host of books released that year. Anyway, I know how futile it is to ask for facts, but I thought for anyone dropping in to this they might want to see stats and make up their own conclusion.