Strange Fruit

This week in Juicy Fruit, we of course talk about Annie Lennox, who released a cover of the iconic Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit" in the same week she weighed in on Beyoncé's right to claim feminism. Later in the week, she gave an interview to Tavis Smiley in which she managed to explain the meaning of our titular song without even using the words black, African American, or lynching. And Ebola coverage remains wall-to-wall in the media, but how does the fear of the disease tie in to deep-seated fear of what was once called "the Dark Continent," and ideas about the "other" being scary and dangerous? Shonda Rhimes also gets a shout out for her no-nonsense dismissal of a twitter user's complaint that there are too many "gay scenes" in her shows. And for our feature interview, we speak with Erika DeSimone, co-editor of Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century. Often when we think of black Americans in that period, we think