theory & essay
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How To Be Unapologetically Black
On Tuesday, I was at Google’s New York City office for a panel titled “Breaking Through The Noise: Making Our Voices Visible, Scalable And Impactful.” For roughly 90 minutes, David Wilson (founder of The Grio), Tiffany Warren (Senior VP, Chief Diversity Officer at Omnicom Group/Founder & President, ADCOLOR®), Lilly Workneh (Black Voices Editor at Huffington Post)…
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Five Ways Babies Are Basically Tiny Hoteps
1. They always #staywoke…like, literally Pictured above is my three month old daughter. That photo was taken by my cousin while she was visiting us last weekend, and I’m certain she took it some time between 7pm and 10pm. Because that’s when she was visiting us. But, if my cousin happened to visit us at 3am or…
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When In Doubt, Trust Yourself (Unless You Make Bad Decisions As A Rule, Then Don't)
Disclaimer: The following words do not work if you are allergic to common sense or if Chris Brown or Kanye West are your spirit animals. They work only if you have pledged allegiance to good decision-making. I’m feeling motivational again. Until I saw the movie Brown Sugar in the early aughts, I’d never heard the term “trust…
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Lessons In Blackness From Yale University's Black Solidarity Conference
(This will be long and yes, that is what she said. There’s a lot to unpack in these words. Grab a seat and come along for the ride. Also, keep in mind, I’m an HBCU graduate so my perspective is rooted in that fact. Perspective is everything.) This past weekend, Damon and I had the…
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An Ode To SWV
I grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, as a military brat in the mid-’80s and early ’90s. Those of us who grew up overseas had one channel to watch on television: AFN, which stands for the Armed Forces Network. We all watched the same cartoons, the same soap operas (General Hospital was followed by Guiding Light), and the…
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Why We Need To Raise the Minimum Wage To $15
“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” — James Baldwin I’m not poor, but I’m not rich; according to my W2, I’m middle-class. I’ve never had sleep for dinner, but I’m very familiar with poverty because I’ve witnessed it firsthand. In my neighborhood, nobody was “fly on your eyeball,…
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A Primer On Bitchassness Courtesy of Love & Hip Hop New York
On Monday nights, VH1 broadcasts Love & Hip Hop New York (LHHNY) bringing to us the shenanigans of a beloved group of super-villains, all of whom are on the “cusp” of fame and dangling their legs off of the cliff of notoriety. If you were to tell me that you hate everybody on that show,…
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The Hip-Hop Dalmatians Are the Greatest Rap Group That Never Was. Probably. Maybe.
As far as late-’90s and early-2000s black cinema goes, Brown Sugar is probably my favorite movie. The Wood is as close a second as you can get, much in the way thatReasonable Doubt is my favorite Jay Z album but I can listen to The Blueprint all day every day. In fact, The Wood is…
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Why Is Every Black Church Pastor Also Good At Singing? A Black History Month Mystery
Recently, the Wife Person and I have started attending a new church. Actually, “started attending” is a misnomer. We’ve been there exactly twice — once because of an invitation from friends, and once a couple of weeks after that — which is exactly twice more than we’ve been to our home church in the last six months. Our attendance…