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Is the Cold-Blooded UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Getting This Much Love Because He’s a White Man?
There’s just no damn way a Black man would get the same treatment.
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What's Ailing Bishop Eddie Long?
I’m concerned about Bishop Eddie Long. In August of 2016, Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, went viral after video showed that he’d lost an alarming amount of weight. “People are asking, ‘Bishop, what happened to all of you?’” he said on a video posted to Facebook that has since been taken…
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The Top 10 Racists of 2016 Not Named Trump
“Sup with ya man’s?” I knew Kanye West had done something wrong. The text was from a frat brother I never hear from unless we are debating Ye’s music or behavior. “What did Ye do now?” I replied. He sent a link of Kanye walking into Trump Tower looking like Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man.…
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The Black Christmas Music Debate: If ‘Santa Baby’ Isn’t on Your List, Your List Is a Fraud
I love Christmas … but I really love Christmas music. I’m the kind of guy who will start listening to the Yuletide classics immediately after Halloween—and only if I wait that long. While I love the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Christmas Time Is Here,” and I can appreciate Frank Sinatra’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,”…
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Frank’s Hot Sauce and 9 Other Black Thanksgiving Faux Pas That Will Earn You a Side Dish of Side Eye
I have a complicated relationship with Thanksgiving. It has historically been framed as a day, every year, when we are gluttonous to celebrate the fact that white people were saved by Native Americans. Therefore, it is only fitting that Thanksgiving, like the word “n—ga,” has become one of the blackest things in America. As with…
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Obama Was the Most Disrespected President; So What Do We Call Trump?
President Barack Obama was, arguably, the most disrespected president in history. First there were the questions about his birth certificate. Birthers, unaware that Hawaii joined the Union in 1959, were in the streets asking to see the certificate of the 44th president of the United States like a disgruntled man on the Maury Show. Then, during…
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Soundtrack for Survival: 10 Songs to Help You Through a Trump Presidency
I was in the fourth grade when my white best friend told me a racist joke. “Why are black people so dark?” he asked a group of us at lunch, with a mischievous grin. I looked at him dumbfounded. I put down my milk box, wiped what had dribbled down from the corners of my…
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Why I'm Comfortable Being an Angry Black Man
I was first called an angry black man while a student in college. We were in African-American History, and our professor, a white member of Omega Psi Phi (I say this only because in all my years of Greekdom, I have never come across another old-head Omega who was white; I can only imagine what…
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50 Years Later: A Look Back at the Black Panther Party
Fifty years ago, in October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobbly Seale had a brilliant idea. Initially conceived as a way to protect the black community against the oppressive presence and indiscriminate violence of the police in Oakland, Calif., the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense evolved into a organization that advocated for revolutionary black…
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Review: The Birth of a Nation Isn't Strong Enough to Shake Director's Past
Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers. The Birth of a Nation reminded me of Old Man Harris. He was a bluesman in the Mississippi Delta before he became the director of the men’s chorus at my childhood church. He claimed that he’d played with the likes of B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf before…
