What happened?

THIS ARTICLE HAS LIGHT SPOILERS, BUT SPOILERS NONETHELESS.

Like many a southern rap fan, I grew up on André and Antwan, better known as André 3000 and Big Boi, and even better known as Outkast. When all the players came from far and wide, I too wanted to attend the “Player’s Ball.” What’s the funkiest kind of music for my soul? Southernplayalistickcadillackmuzik, of course.…

In two weeks, my daughter will be 3 years old. And then, two weeks after her birthday, if things happen when we’re expecting them to, she’ll be a big sister.

In the weeks before the midterm elections, America was rocked by three separate acts of domestic terrorism. One, which took place in my hometown, was the deadliest act of anti-semitism in American history. Another was the biggest mass assassination attempt in American history. And then there was the killing of two…

10. To direct passive-aggressive subs at significant others.

Yesterday afternoon, while searching “black man calls police” and “calling police black person” on iStock—to find a suitable picture for “My Self-Care Sunday Story: I Called The Cops On A White Guy”—I found the above pic. There are tens of thousands of images on iStock, and I won’t pretend to have seen them all. But I…

Like most black people with a modicum of sense and a willingness to continue their streak of consecutive years lived, I regard the police with a feeling that exists at the intersection of skepticism, annoyance and trepidation. Basically, I see them the same way I see ricotta cheese—good in lasagna but might kill me if…

Have you watched the show God Friended Me? It comes on CBS on Sunday nights, and let me tell you, I love this damn show. I can’t tell you exactly why, but I do. For whatever reason, as on-the-nose as nearly every aspect of the show is, it just ... works.

Most of the United States set their clocks back an hour this past weekend to mark the end of Daylight Savings Time, an invention the white man (no, really, also the first sentence of that article is some pure bullshit) created to apparently save the daylight for the evenings, which to be clear, is nowhere near as…

Let me be very clear, I love Belly. I love love it. When Mary J. Blige sang about “Real Love” in 1992, a whole ass six years before Belly would be released to the masses, she had no idea that she was singing my soul’s affinity for Hype Williams’ best music video ever. And what’s not to love? For a person like myself,…

On October 3, Wesley Morris, in a piece for the New York Times Magazine titled “The Morality Wars,” sounded the alarm (in a nutshell) about the difficulty in critiquing black art in today’s political climate in favor of protecting the culture.

The NBA has successfully branded itself as the professional sports league that embraces progressive politics and the individual freedoms of its players—the “woke” counterpoint to the NFL. You don’t have to be very cynical to see the intentionality behind this.

There are a few songs that I can remember exactly where I was the first time I heard them. Juvenile’s “Ha” is one of them. I remember sitting on the futon in my house in what must have been early October 1998 (because of when the single was released) watching Rap City, while on a break from class at Morehouse College,…

I have never been a big Halloween person. As a kid, I went trick-or-treating because that what everyone else and also because that’s where all the candy was. And while I’ve attended—and even thrown—Halloween parties as an adult, I always partied with a purpose. (When single, my purpose was “this is where all the women…

Although I attended a black church my entire life, I was ordained into the Southern Baptist Convention, an organization complicit in the rise of the alt-right and whose troubling racial history and contemporaneous actions revealed a deep commitment to ignoring the influence of white supremacy. Last year, I wrote a…

SpelHouse Homecoming, the joint celebration between Spelman College and Morehouse College, happened this past weekend in Atlanta. If you’ll remember, last week, I had to ask God for a little assistance because in the forecast even up to the day before the event, there was a strong chance of rain on Friday and…

Although Squirrel Hill, the Pittsburgh community where the white nationalist terrorist attack on the Tree of Life synagogue occurred, has been described in the media over the past few days as a Jewish enclave, it is not just that. It is also Pittsburgh’s largest and most ethnically diverse neighborhood. Combined, over…

I’m not a fan of haunted houses. Hell, I’m not even really a fan of scary movies. It’s not that I scare easy; it’s just that I don’t like surprises. Haunted houses are all about surprises and startling the shit out of you. Don’t startle me, bro. Ya know? However, outside of Atlanta exists a meshing of haunting with a…

Even for a 2018 filled with tragedy and terror, last week was particularly brutal. There were the assassination attempts on prominent Democrats and critics of the president. A white man shot and killed two black people at a grocery store in Kentucky. That man tried to enter a black church first, but the doors,…