culture
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You Must Be Honest if You Don’t Want to Raise Your Boyfriend’s Kids
I have never wanted to have kids. My boyfriend is OK with this, since he had kids from a previous relationship. I welcome regular visits and stayovers, etc., from his two kids and am willing to assist financially, emotionally, academically, etc., throughout their lives, but never planned to be a full-time mom. He now wants full…
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This Is What Happens When 2 Generations of Black Female Activists Come Together
Two powerful black women, representing two generations of social activism, delivered dynamic speeches on racial justice, human rights and black radicalism Wednesday evening at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Sonia Sanchez, the legendary Black Arts Movement poet and activist, reminded the more than 100 audience members—most of them young—that the Black Lives Matter movement is…
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Being Mary Jane Recap: When It All Falls Down
I owe my deepest apology to Mary Jane Paul. Hear me out. I rode her case all season about being an insufferable woman screwing up a good thing with the oh-so-perfect Sheldon. M.J. is many things, but dishonest is not one of them. Sheldon knew that M.J. wanted a baby. He saw it on TV,…
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Are We Afraid to Correct Other People’s Misbehaving Children?
At the beginning of the year, the viral video of the moment that everyone was talking about showed an unsupervised boy wreaking all kinds of hell inside a Tallahassee, Fla., Dollar General store. For three recorded minutes and the untold number before he was on camera, he smacked plastic trash cans and laundry baskets from…
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Horrifying but Common: Spring Break and Sexual Assault
Like many, I’ve been following the news story about a 19-year-old woman who was publicly gang-raped during spring break in Panama City, Fla. Dozens of people watched or recorded the incident, which is how it came to the attention of authorities who were investigating an unrelated crime in another state. The woman, who was semiconscious…
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The Rebirth of Billie Holiday
Some say that Billie Holiday is the greatest jazz singer ever. Her crystalline vocal clarity sounds like a bell, and the way she bent, swooped on and swerved around notes was from the heart of the blues. She could be girlish and youthful, but even as a teenager, she intoned a gravelly quality of maturity.…
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Black Women, Welcome to Your Breakdown
Author Benilde Little wants black women to know it’s OK. It’s OK to let go. It’s OK to cry. It’s OK to break down. In fact, in her new memoir, Welcome to My Breakdown, she welcomes black women doing so, becoming vulnerable and confronting their pain. In Breakdown, Little recounts her life as someone whom…
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Black America: We Can’t Afford to Wait
In the critically acclaimed book Why We Can’t Wait, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.” In the awe-inspiring treatise, ranked No. 78 on Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction works, King writes: “Just as lightning makes…
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A Save-Your-Life, Year-by-Year Medical Guide for Women
Add it to the list of slavery and Jim Crow’s legacies: the tendency to look after other people’s well-being at the expense of ourselves. But 150 years after the “peculiar institution’s” end, many black women tend to their jobs, their children and their partners—even their hair—before taking care of their own health. The tragic consequence…
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Hey Haters, if Erica Campbell’s ‘Trap’ Gospel Song Brings the Message to the Masses, What’s the Problem?
I grew up on gospel music, listening to songs of the genre that would be considered classics. My grandmother was the choir director of a church in Detroit, where I spent every summer. My mother took me to Washington, D.C.’s Vermont Avenue nearly every Sunday morning, and on the occasional seventh day I wasn’t sitting…