Four things you don’t really need to know before watching this (but I’m going to tell you anyway)

A few years back, one of my best friends had the opportunity to go back to his home church in D.C. and give a speech during a service. As a son of the church, he was speaking on his journey from his beginnings in southeast Washington, D.C., to, at that point in time, receiving his Ph.D. in psychometrics from Fordham…

Yes, I did.

Do people still call Washington, D.C., Chocolate City? I’m asking for a friend and also because my people, my people, you guys showed up and showed out at our Very Smart Brothas and The Glow Up Boss Moves event on Thursday, July 19th—sponsored by Toyota—filling the Long View Gallery with beautiful boss blackness that…

What a difference a year makes. Just a little over a year ago, Damon and I signed those final signatures to complete the process to transition into becoming part of The Root. Like most things in life, it’s important to reflect on milestone moments. By this point last year, Damon had begun working as a senior editor at…

The word “Hotep” has gained a lot of traction online in recent years. By definition, Hotep means peace—like a greeting. To have Damon Young of Very Smart Brothas tell it, Hotep is the Egyptian version of “What’s good?”

On a macro level and, I think, by most objective measures, 2017 was a fairly shitty year. I don’t have the time or disposition to run down everything that went wrong, but in a nutshell: Our president sucks, Congress sucks, our white electorate sucks, white people keep white-folkin’, we lost a bevy of great people and…

1. I didn’t love the title, either. The substance of the piece itself was perfectly fine—to argue and debate that would be stupid (more on this later). It’s no different from conversations many of us have in any number of spaces we congregate when sober, perhaps not wrapped up in as neat a bow as Damon presented, but…

The talk is literally a talk many black parents have with their children to inform them of the dangers of “existing while black” and the myriad things out there actively trying to kill us.

True story: I’ve known the founders of VSB, aka the blog Very Smart Brothas, for a minute. They are my friends, fellow black-blog pioneers who hopped into the game in 2008 and revolutionized and remixed it to the degree that their greatness had to be acknowledged.

The Washington Post once described Very Smart Brothas as “the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet. Period.” And aside from a photo of Jesse Jackson and Marvin Gaye playing basketball with their “thigh meats blaring,” Damon Young and Panama Jackson are just that.

By most accounts, 2016 was balls. So many of our favorite celebrities bought the farm. Trump was elected. It was so bad that even perennial Race Draft offeree Don Lemon said that it was an awful year, prompting his bosses to cut his mic after announcing how “lit” he was while in New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. Drunk…

A profile of Damon ("Blogger left basketball behind to chronicle black experience in Pittsburgh") ran in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.