In April, several months before Rachel Dolezal became head jester of racial appropriation court, Rush Limbaugh called celebrated black image activist and feminist Michaela Angela Davis, “a mixed-race little orphan Annie.” The statement was shockingly ugly, a blatant reminder from the court’s self-appointed king that,…
“What do you think I want, respect or compliance?”
Memphis. July 17. A Friday. Carefree black boys call it a night. Darrius Stewart is just around the corner from his mama’s house when blue light hits the rearview mirror of the Chevy Malibu. A routine traffic stop. A simple thing. One week ago, Sandra Bland was stopped in Texas for a simple thing.
“There are a few things that people don’t know about my brother Samuel Harrell. He wasn’t just an inmate,” Cerissa Harrell tells a group of nearly 50 prepared to blockade the Dutchess County District Attorney’s office on Poughkeepsie’s very public Main Street. Cerissa stands with Diane Harrell, Samuel’s widow. Hands…
The following correspondence between Brian Alsup and Kiese Laymon took place during the week of August 31, 2015. As John Callahan once wrote of the decades-long exchange between Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters, it is “the bounty of a rare and spontaneous friendship in which…
I began teaching in the Social Work Department at North Carolina State University in 2011. As a faculty member teaching the anti-oppression social justice course, I sought to use the lessons of Hurricane Katrina to talk about the history of systemic oppression in the United States.
Twenty years ago, Friday and Species were blowing up at the box office. Groove Theory’s “Tell Me” and Notorious B.I.G’s “One More Chance (Remix)” were in heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman. I had just graduated from high school in Philadelphia and was finally dealing with my sexuality. This was the summer sex workers…
On January 27, 1991, at a record-release party for the rap duo Bytches With Problems in Hollywood, producer/rapper/then-N.W.A. member Dr. Dre brutally attacked Dee Barnes, the host of a well-known Fox show about hip-hop called Pump It Up! Dre was reportedly angry about a Pump It Up! segment hosted by Barnes that aired…
I was 14, just starting high school at an all-boys public school in the Bronx, when I began to feel a strong physical attraction to other boys. I was quiet and observant, and I didn’t yet know if I should, or could, act on those emotions.
D’Angelo’s “Untitled” is on BET, your forehead pressed against the screen trying to look down, praying there’s a few more inches of TV. you don’t know what drives you to press your skin to the screen filled with his skin but you let yourself be driven, be hungry, be whatever this is when no one is around. you don’t…
It’s late July. There is a helicopter circling. A “ghetto bird” on this clear, dark blue night. I’m in my bed, staring at the ceiling fan, trying to sleep. It’s 1:30 a.m. It’s 2:00 a.m. I’m struggling. I’m tired. It’s hot. Someone’s dog is barking. I am now on Facebook, seeing post after post about rumors, or fact, of…
The first friend I made in Elizabeth, New Jersey was a white kid named Billy. As a New York transplant my Dominicano look wasn’t too popular with Jersey folk. I had an afro, wore dress pants, a collared shirt, and black leather shoes with little gold buckles. Most of the kids just wanted to know what my thing was.…
In honor of America’s new Christmas, “Amazon Prime Day,” please take a moment to reflect on how the now-20-year-old Amazon got here: by treating many of its employees like shit.
Some people think men choose to sit down when they pee. But I always knew I was a sit-down pee-er—even when I peed standing up.
Earlier today, I took my children to my great-grandparents’ grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto. They don’t have a big headstone, or a nice spot. But they have a big place in my heart: He came to Canada from Barbados, she from Jamaica, and he built two(!) houses for their extended family.
Living black in a world formed from the crucible of anti-black slavery imposes many moments of visceral absurdity, leaving you in a vast fissure between hysterical laughter, unstoppable streams of tears, and rage hot enough to burn a body. But what body should burn? The end of April imposed a moment on me that made…
I used to hate white people. Not in a deranged John Muhammad way, but like an old black guy who remembers getting rocks thrown at him for trying to vote. More of a simmering resentment than a homicidal loathing.
My mama is 79. Wednesday night is her bible study. Just like Ms. Ethel Lee Lance, mama has her circle of church going elders—black women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s for whom church is home. Maybe even safer than home. Their pain was safe in the hands of this particular Jesus. Unshed tears from the Middle Passage were…
I first applied in 1997 with an application filled out in chalk on the sidewalk of East 128th Street in East Cleveland. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in my personal essay, but it involved a game with squares and a basketball.
I never have had to doubt my parents’ love, not even when I had to explain to them what I meant when I said, “I’m queer.” In my days at home, my parents were the type to be at every event; my mother was given the “Team Spirit” award on my tennis team during my senior year of high school. My first girlfriend had called…
