pop culture
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Love & Hip Hop NY Ep. 506 Recap: All My Baby Mamas
Happy Tuesday everybody. I write to you from the confines of my cozy Brooklyn apartment because meteorologists were about as accurate about snowfall as men who claim their height to be 5’9 – which means I was able to do a deep dive into our favorite stories. So, Amina had herself a beautiful baby boy…
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Florida Evans: Hero Or The Biggest Hater Ever? A Good Times Treatise
Despite originally airing before I was alive, Good Times was a cable TV staple of my childhood. I tuned in regularly to ponder: Will James Evans Sr. get the job? Will the Evans’ get thrown out? Did shape ups just not exist in the ‘70s? I still watch, and Facebook lets me know that my…
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A Dark Girl On Light Girls
“When did you learn to be okay with being a brown skinned woman?” This question appeared in my Ask.fm mailbox and kind of took me aback, mostly because it’s premised on the idea that at some point I wasn’t okay with it. Or that perhaps hating your skintone is part of what you go through…
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Love & Hip Hop NY Ep. 505 Recap: Half On A Baby
Happy Belated MLK Day everyone. I hope you guys capped off a weekend chock full of ill-advised party flyers with condemning Peter Gunz to the ninth circle of hell. And if your company didn’t give you the day off…well, they’re racist. We begin yesterday’s fairly mediocre episode with watching Peter Gunz get on the fast…
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10 Thoughts On "Light Girls"
1. Like it or not, a show, song, role of hot buttered wax called “Light Girls” is going to be met with a million side-eyes BEFORE anybody even sees it. It’s an uphill battle from the second the title hits the ether. To that end, there’s nearly no way this can be successful by doing…
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Why I Don't Talk About Race With My White Family
I came across this very interesting piece on Gawker the other day about a Black man (he’s mixed, but ya know, he’s Black) talking about a discussion he got into about race with his white cousin who was pretty much of the mindset that racism was more or less a figment of Black imagination and…
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Was The HBCU Experience Necessary For My Success? Maybe. Maybe Not.
I have a friend who I consider to be uber-successful. I have very successful friends. Every one of my immediate closest friends from college has at least one advanced degree. A few have Ph.D.s. Some own their own businesses. Some of us are married. Some of us are parents. Point is, everybody, on paper and…
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Dear Black People: It's Okay To Be Mad Selma Was Snubbed By The Academy
In the next month, you will hear, read, and possibly even talk about how Selma was largely shut out of this year’s Academy Awards. While the film was nominated for Best Picture — a category that has nine nominees and makes you wonder if Selma was placed there just so we’d shut up about it…
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Sorority Sisters Was Canceled Because It's A Shitty, Stupid, And Boring-Ass Show…And That's It
The “trainwreck” metaphor is used so often when discussing the appeal of certain reality television shows that it’s become cliche. But, being cliche doesn’t make it untrue. There aren’t many other ways to encapsulate how something so seemingly unwatchable can become watchable. At their best, The Real Basketball Wives of Hip-Hop manages to pull this off. They…