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You Have to Be Perfect or Lucky (or Perfect and Lucky) to Buy a House If You’re Black
I’ve learned through age, maturity, meditation and Lisinopril to not allow myself to be bothered with certain things that might have irked me 10 or even five years ago. Basically I’m learning to give less fucks because fucklessness is a form of self-care for me. But there is (at least) one strain of conversation that…
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Experiment Proves That Conservatives Are Little Baby Snowflakes Who Act the Way They Do Because Everything Terrifies Them
The most obvious answer when attempting to find the root cause for certain Americans being so obsessed with guns is fear. These people are scared of something—irrelevance, anarchy, immigrants, black people, aliens, Black Panther Build-a-Bears—and this fear drives them to amass arsenals and fight against even the idea of any sort of restriction. They attempt…
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Betsy DeVos Is the World’s Most Useless White Woman
Of course, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is not the world’s most useless white person. That title belongs to sentient-pile-of-shredded-Monopoly-money-lining-an-albino-hamster’s-cage Jared Kushner, who has somehow managed to stay dead in the center of every Trump-related scandal despite the fact that no one knows what he does or did before whatever he’s doing now, or even what he…
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Negative Parenting Milestones They Don’t Tell You About in Baby Books
I don’t remember the first time I bumped the back of my daughter’s head on the top of the passenger-side rear door when attempting to put her in the car seat, but I remember the last time I did it—Saturday afternoon. We were on our way to Whole Foods (whose hot bar is a surprisingly…
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The Fish-Porn Flick That Beat Get Out and Won the Oscar for Best Picture, Explained
Not technically a fish. According to the Wikipedia page about this film, it’s a “captured humanoid-amphibian creature.” No. Not Aquaman at all. Just a fish … man. Yes. Someone fucks a fish. The Shape of Water. Other names considered include The Fish That Saved My Pussy, Aquamandingo and Moby Dick … but Like, Literally. Yes.…
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America Wasn’t Ready for Get Out’s Too Depressing (and Too Realistic) Alternate Ending. Neither Was I
A year after I first watched it—and a day after watching it again on HBO (which seems to have a networkwide mandate to show it 17 times a week now)—the part of Get Out that fucks with me the most is that after Chris discovers Rose’s collection of selfies with the black people she’s lured…
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Is Beyoncé Taking Shots at Tiffany Haddish on ‘Top Off’?
A song called “Top Off,” featuring Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Future and DJ Khaled, dropped at 6 a.m. Along with encouraging Maybach owners to take the tops off of their cars, I think the only reason this song even exists is that Future probably felt really, really, really sad about that Jay-Z line from “Kill Jay-Z” (“In…
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10 Lies and Misconceptions About the Hood That We Need to Stop Spreading and Believing
Today, East Liberty—a neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s East End—is a hypergentrified concentration of boutique hotels, upscale retail, luxury lofts and “’90s-style hip-hop fried chicken” restaurants. The redevelopment has been so dramatic, the name of the neighborhood has changed. Some now call it Eastside—a colonizing portmanteau of East Liberty and the neighboring (and predominantly white) Shadyside. This…
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The Trump White House Is Love & Hip Hop for Terrible White People (and Ben Carson)
Remember way, way, way, way, way back when Love & Hip Hop: New York was centered on Peter Gunz and his revolving sister wives? And way, way, way, way, way back before then, when Erica Mena was still on the show and hurling wine flutes like ninja stars at Rich Dollaz’ neck? And way, way,…
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Is ‘Colonizer’ the Best Word for Problematic White People Ever?
The search for the perfect slur for white people has been relentless, exhausting and mostly fruitless. There are dozens of contenders, but none that have ever truly stuck. Basically, the search for the perfect slur for white people has been like the search for a really good fast-food fish sandwich. “Cracker” is perhaps the most…
