A different set of subjects — Ellington's musical development, his band members, even his women — might have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which Ellington's sights were set.
From this beginning flowed the hallucinatory stream of ordinary, grand, awful images for which he is well known: carnage-strewn car wrecks and pretty flowers; sweet Marilyn and imperturbable Mao, off-the-roof suicides and racial assaults; portraits of the rich and now half-forgotten famous; shimmery abstract paintings made from diamond dust and urine.
In practice, campaigns can use voter lists and other public records to paint an ethnic, racial and political portrait of a neighborhood, but they cannot be sure about the politics of every individual.
By employing street dancers, Sellars and Gray add an authenticity and rawness to their disturbing portrait of racial discrimination.
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1961, and widely praised as a sensitive portrait of racial tension as seen through the eyes of a child in 1930s Alabama, it has been criticised as sentimental and paternalistic.
A bleak portrait of racial and social exclusion at Oxford and Cambridge has been shown in official data which shows that more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years.
Dear White People has a pretty provocative title — and the show, for the most part, lives up to that promise, with a sharply drawn portrait of racial tension at Winchester University, a fictional Ivy League school.
Dee Rees' searing portrait of racial tensions in World War II era Mississippi has netted sterling reviews since screening at Sundance in January.
At the time, critics praised Parker's film for its portrait of racial catharsis, and many in Hollywood hoped it would serve as a step forward in the ongoing debate about diversity in the film business.
Praised for its haunting portrait of racial tension in rural Mississippi during and immediately after World War II, the movie was so acclaimed that Netflix paid a hefty $12.5 million to acquire it.
