I’m one of those people who live in a neighborhood where anytime I get an “out for delivery” email/text/raven for any package that won’t fit into my mailbox, I know it means it’s time for me to head home. I will either receive the package personally or be present to witness it NOT being delivered even though the…
Legendary filmmaker John Singleton was laid to rest this week after he passed away at the age of 51. Naturally, it has many reflecting on his filmography. For me, I’m specifically thinking about his most important film.
At the beginning of this year, I saw a meme on Facebook where a young man mentioned that over the past year, he had learned to stop “aspiring to sit at tables where he had to bring his own chair, squeeze in between folks and repeatedly convince people that he deserved to be there.”
John Singleton passed Monday, April 29, 2019. After suffering a stroke that left him in a coma, his family ultimately decided to take him off life support. To say it was a life gone too soon is an understatement, especially for a figure who has had such a tremendous impact on the black community at large. I grew up in…
1. Well done.
“I don’t know how you ended up so bougie when we came out of the same family,” said my baby sister one day over the phone.
Illmatic, my all-time favorite debut album and one of my top-five favorite hip-hop albums of all time, celebrated its 25th anniversary April 19. Whether or not Nas ever released another classic album has been the subject of an interminable debate among hip-hop nerds; what isn’t up for debate is that Nas had a largely…
When confused philosopher king Kanye West rapped, “racism’s still alive, they just be concealing it...” on “Never Let Me Down” from his debut offering, The College Dropout, he was not talking about Mississippi. Or Alabama or South Carolina or, well, you get the point. Regarding Mississippi specifically, it is the last…
Washington, DC, is in the midst of a culture war between the new residents who want to mold the city into their own version of VanillaTown and the folks who didn’t ask for any of this shit but now have to defend their ways of life. Yes, we’re talking gentrification. From new residents of Chinatown trying to stop the…
When I think of the 90s, there are a few specific groups, songs and television shows that immediately come to mind: Martin, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Jodeci, SWV, Wu-Tang Clan, Jade’s “Don’t Walk Away,” Groove Theory’s “Tell Me,” (for my money, one of the best and most 90s songs of all time) and indisputably Zhané’s…
My friend Toni and I text a lot and for good reason. We are the same age. We divorced young. We have small children. We work together.
Last night, Beyoncé did what Beyoncé does and dropped a whole ass 40-track album, Homecoming: The Live Album, out of nowhere that we didn’t know was coming but we’re all better off for having. Beyoncé, ever since that first secret drop back in 2013, just comes through whenever she wants and takes over the entire ass…
I’m one of those people: I’ve never seen a full episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones. I say full episode because I tried to watch the first episode a few years ago and just couldn’t make it through. I don’t know what happened or why on that particular day I couldn’t complete the task. I binged the entirety of the first…
I’m from Boston.
Tiger Woods made a triumphant return to Augusta National on Sunday, winning his fifth Master’s Tournament (and his first since 2005), becoming one of the oldest golfers to win a major tournament at age 43, and putting him three back from tying the record for most majors titles, currently held by golf-legend Jack…
I’ve been to a lot of funerals in my life, so many that I really have no idea what that number is. The first funeral I vividly remember attending was in high school for a friend who went to my school. While the rumor mill was full of conspiracy theories, it was determined that he accidentally killed himself while…
Recently in black America, I hosted a meeting for the VSB x Mahogany Books (a black bookstore in Washington, D.C.) Monthly Book Club where we discussed the book, She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan, author of the famed book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. The book itself, S…
There is an old Negro saying: If you want to get a black woman to shut the F up, actually listen to her! (I swear I heard my grandmother say that to my grandfather once).
I was reminded recently why we are taught as youth not to speak to strangers. While the goal of this lesson for children is to hopefully curb abduction and prevent being handed candy with razor blades lodged inside, it is also a lesson one can put to use as an adult. Because sometimes, something as simple as a refrain…
Today is April 4, 2019. Fifty-one years ago today, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by James Earl Ray while standing on the balcony outside of his room, 306, at the Lorraine Motel, located at 450 Mulberry St., in Memphis, Tenn. In the time since then, the Lorraine Motel has been turned into…
