America In Black

For Heather Heyer and her fellow anti-racist protestors, two years after Charlottesville.

“You are my worst fear realized,” a black woman—and complete stranger—said to me after I concluded my keynote…

I don’t neatly fit into many of the cultural lines set before me—much like many black millennials. It’s almost…

I’d spent two years on this earth when I met my paternal grandmother Julianna Oni for the first—and last—time. As I…

“You’re so different. You’re so articulate. Why do you talk like a white girl? You’re the whitest black girl I know.”

John Singleton. Dead at 51. Stroke/Hypertension.

At the beginning of this year, I saw a meme on Facebook where a young man mentioned that over the past year, he had…

My friend Toni and I text a lot and for good reason. We are the same age. We divorced young. We have small children.…

I’m from Boston.

I stand before you today a black woman with a shocking secret: I wasn’t born black.

We sit around the dining room table on the cusp of the itis. Somehow we gather enough energy to keep the party going…

“I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged into the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted…

When I tell people I’m from Jersey that usually garners one of three reactions:

One of the first sermons I ever preached was titled “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

When sitting in the passenger seat of a car with a known drug-dealer during a high-speed chase, one should always…

If I had to describe my relationship with Islam in one word, it would be nuanced. Two words? Profoundly nuanced.

My mother tells me I look like my grandmother, a brown belle whose features I know only through faded photographs…

Shortly after I entered the world via Detroit’s now-shuttered Grace Hospital one summer day in 1981, I set upon what…

One of the best parts about VSB over the course of our existence—which is going on 11 years(!!!!!) come March—is…