In a perfect world, black people wouldn’t face incessant discrimination over our choice of dress, dialect, impeccable seasoning prowess, or how we chose to do our hair.
My mother called it “cruising for a bruising.” Some places refer to it as “begging for a butt-whipping.” In my South Carolina hometown, old-timers would often ask if you wanted them to “go to your goat-smelling.”
#LivingWhileBlack is tough. It seems that just by living our black-ass lives and minding our black-ass business, we are subject to all types of nonsensical terror, ranging from unfounded 911 calls to death. It doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire, Bob Marley’s granddaughter, an NBA player, the editor-in-chief of…
A key feature of burglaries is that people typically try to remove items from a home, rather than move them in. This basic fact seemed to elude Tonganoxie Police, who handcuffed a 61-year-old black man on the front steps of his new home as he wrapped up an arduous day of moving in.
It may feel like it was three years ago that H&M got hemmed up for posting a racist photo of a young black child in a “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” sweatshirt, but in fact, it was just in January of this year—far too soon for the retail giant to get caught up in another anti-black mess.
Getting out the vote means knocking on doors. And that’s what Sheila Stubbs, a 12-year veteran on the Dane County, Wisconsin, Board of Supervisors was doing on August 7. Stubbs, a candidate for State Assembly, representing Wisconsin’s 77th district, was canvassing the neighborhood in anticipation of the Democratic…
There are a few times of day you can routinely expect people to look “agitated:” heading to work is definitely one of them.
We live in a country where a black child was placed in handcuffs for bouncing a basketball. In a gym.
Oumou Kanoute was just trying to catch a break—a lunch break to be precise. A rising sophomore at Smith College, Kanoute has been working on the campus this summer as a residential adviser and teaching assistant. On Tuesday, Kanoute was in a campus common room of the women’s college quietly reading and eating her…
It was the kind of shop that fits right into the San Francisco landscape: Gourmonade, a small, high-end lemonade shop which recently opened in San Francisco’s Mission District. But the shop’s black owner, Vicktor Stevenson, says he’s been dogged by racist acts against him and the shop even before he opened. The worst…
Don’t look now, but #PoolPatrolPaul appears to have a Canadian cousin out here doing his mayonnaise lord’s work.
It’s officially the summer, so you know what that means: the beginning of cop-calling season.
For many kids and their families, summer jobs are a rite of passage: a way of imparting lessons about responsibility and hard work, and finally having a response to the age-old parental question, “you have McDonald’s money?”
At this point, people are becoming hashtags in a way we never imagined. #PermitPatty, #BBQBecky and other melanin-deficient folks have decided that they should be the gatekeepers of spaces where black people thrive. Now we have #PoolPatrolPaula because socks. At this point, they’ve got to be stopped, and I know just…
A white man, upholding his civic duty to keep his community safe, summoned local police when a black woman threatened to use her neighborhood pool for the nefarious purpose of swimming.
Because I believe that many of America’s Great Value-brand people harbor an innate fear of African Americans, I am perfectly aware that white people calling the cops on black people isn’t a new trend. I do, however, believe that it is time for black people to reclaim our reluctance toward dialing 911 by repaying these…
It’s no secret that there’s a fear of a black planet. This fear is so pervasive, so insidious, that black people are being reprimanded for merely living.
