theory & essay
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Being A Husband Means You Kill The Maggots
Like many other public speakers, the pastor at my church loves to use metaphors and analogies when he speaks. A reading from scripture where Jesus played pick-up basketball with Paul is really a lesson about sacrifice. A story about that time John the Baptist got sick after eating too much kettle corn is really an…
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The "When Was The Last Time Your Parents Beat Your Ass" Roundtable
Today is Halloween. Which means many of us are going to go to ridiculous lengths to be as quasi scary as possible today. Because we’re all adults, and we’re not scared of shit. (Well, we’re not scared of shit except for this.) But there was a time when belts and switches and rulers and Hot…
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Yup, Black Pittsburghers Have A "Pittsburghese" Too
I went to college in Buffalo, NY, a city which shares many cultural and aesthetic similarities to Pittsburgh. Well, Pittsburgh in a time warp. It’s a city that’s perhaps 10 or 15 years behind where Pittsburgh currently is, which makes it five years behind Cleveland and 225 years behind D.C. That said, I greatly enjoyed my…
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Master P Didn't Ruin Hip Hop, Jay-Z Did
Yeah, I said it. Any discussion about what happened to hip-hop – and by what happened, I mean the apparent downfall of it – usually starts and ends with the South and the rise of one Percy “Master P” Miller and the point when he and his No Limit tank invaded NYC and DJs began…
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A Second-By-Second Breakdown Of President Obama Reminding Us He Can Take Your Girlfriend
00:11: The aptly named Mike Jones jokes “Mr. President, don’t touch my girlfriend” —- a move that raises two questions: 1. Is there a more appropriate name for a Black man somewhat insecure (jokingly or not) about his romantic status than “Mike Jones“? 2. How awkward would this entire exchange have been if Jones’s girlfriend was…
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The #PostBadBeards Struggle Is REAL: Why I'm Not Mad At Fake Beards
Earlier today, I came across a discussion on the homie Demetria Lucas’s Facebook page which dealt with the beard enhancement industry. Most of us are familiar with bigen — where men with thinning hair use spray-on to make their beards and hairlines look more full — but now there are actual beard weaves, beard lacefronts,…
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I Just Want To Talk To My Mom Today
It feels odd to type that The Sopranos helped prepare me for my mother’s death. It seems like a something Rob Gordon or some other character in a movie a bit too self aware to be completely realistic would say, not a real person. But I am a real person. I’m really sitting here, really…
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Our Dangerous Definition Of Manhood
While performing a couple of my daily tasks at EBONY this morning, I came across two extremely tragic news stories. The first was out of Detroit, where a 27-year-old mother of three was killed recently after rejecting a man’s advances in a bar. From My Fox Detroit A mass shooting killed one person and wounded…
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I'm Someone's Husband? Me? Really?
(Damon’s latest at EBONY on the word “husband” and how he doesn’t quite feel like one — or at least the movie version of one — yet) When I think of a husband, I think of a character Dennis Haysbert or Danny Glover or some other deep-voiced, barred chested man would play in a family…