culture
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HBCU Football Stars Had a Coming-Out Party at Super Bowl I
When the Kansas City Chiefs took the field against the Green Bay Packers nearly a half-century ago in the first Super Bowl, they embodied the most obvious plotline of the game: How would the champions of the upstart American Football League fare against the established titans of the NFL? Less overtly, though, the Chiefs were…
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My Son Is Gone Because Someone Deemed Him a Criminal and Not My Child
My son is gone. It’s been two years since my husband left our home—on Feb. 7, 2014—to pick up our 14-year-old son, Andrew Joseph III, from the state fair, after he was late for curfew. We understood him being late this particular Friday night because Saturday would be Andrew’s confirmation—a Catholic ceremony where he would…
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I’m a Grown Man, but I Still Don’t Cuss in Front of My Dad
I remember the first time it happened. I was in sixth grade. It was my second week at St. Barts, a private Catholic school in Penn Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh. My parents took me out of the city schools and sent me there because of its academic record and its athletic reputation. Actually, that’s…
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How to Get Over Writer’s Block
I’m a writer. As a writer, one of my least favorite things on this planet is Comic Sans. Coming in a close second is writer’s block. If you are a writer, there’s a better than 100,000,000 percent chance that at some point you’ve experienced a case of writer’s block. What is writer’s block? I’m sure…
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Before Cam, There Was Clyde, a Model of Sartorial Splendor
Tight. Zebra. Pants. By now you’ve heard of them—laughed at a few memes, or perhaps created a few memes of your own. But whether or not you’re fond of the fitted, ankle-length, zebra-print Versace pants, which Cam Newton placed into infamy, you’ve got to admit that the black-and-gold britches made a lot of noise. And…
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Are Hair Extensions for Girls a Bit Too Much?
I’ve been following the recent outrage on hair blogs about a mother, who shared a video of her 2-year-old daughter, Kailee, getting crochet twists, a “protective style,” which is more or less the latest euphemism for a weave. That statement is likely to get some backlash, so let me explain it up front. The differences…
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My Son Has Autism, and He’s Perfect the Way He Is
I watched her closely as she watched my 3-year-old son, who hadn’t looked her in the eye one time in the past hour. I saw when her brow furrowed, when she looked pensively at her notes and back up. I urgently pointed out when he did something that I wanted her, needed her to be…
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In Gratitude for Maurice White, the Spirit Leader of Earth, Wind & Fire
Born of the Earth are Nature’s children Fed by the wind, the breath of life Judged by the fiery hands of God —Earth, Wind & Fire from the 1976 song “Spirit” The white album that I grew up with did not belong to the Beatles. As a child in the 1970s, fiddling around in the…
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How to Protect Yourself From the Flood of White Tears That’ll Come if the Panthers Win the Super Bowl
In the book of Genesis, God—apparently fed up with humans for acting like … humans—decided to start humanity from scratch by flooding the entire earth. Which proves, again, that God is truly the alpha and the omega of everything. Including being petty. Humanity eventually recovered from this flood—thanks in large part to Noah, who was…
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We Dated for 2 Years and He Still Wouldn’t Claim Me as His Girlfriend
I was dating this guy for about two years and I wanted to become his girlfriend, but he kept telling me that he wanted to wait until he got a full-time job because he wanted to take care of me, but we were doing boyfriend-girlfriend stuff anyway. I didn’t understand, so I told him I…