Very Smart Brothas
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Kanye Ain’t the Only Black Person Believing and Spreading Anti-Black Nonsense About Slavery
Kanye West is a cornball with low information and high-fructose corn syrup, but what he’s saying about slavery being a choice soaks in the same implicit anti-blackness as “They wouldn’t have been able to keep me in chains.” Or “I wasn’t built to be a slave.” Or “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors…
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I Seem to Have Developed Seasonal Allergies as an Adult. I Can’t Breathe Right Now. This Is Trash
Allergy season is upon us and it is the worst of times. People with allergies are buying up all of the stuffs in hopes of temporary relief from Mother Nature’s fury. I come from a family full of folks with allergies. My sisters, nieces and nephews, and even my dad are all afflicted with the…
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Kanye Has Gone Full Kanye and You Never Go Full Kanye
I watched his interview with Charlamagne tha God. The whole thing. Though it was recorded just a few weeks ago, we’re in a world with a whole different Kanye West. We’re in the world with “Make America great again” Kanye. Despite the fact that Kanye is parroting the philosophy of free minds and thought, he…
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You Can’t Love and Support R. Kelly and Also Love Black Women and Children
For 24 years now (24!), R. Kelly’s behavior has been as essential to his place in the zeitgeist as his music. He married Aaliyah in 1994, which also happened to be my freshman year of high school. The infamous tape was leaked and distributed in 2002, when I was in college. Dave Chappelle’s “Piss on…
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Bill Cosby’s Legacy Is Now Shit. Throw That Baby Out With the Bathwater
You know what conversation is confusing? This one: Bill Cosby has now been convicted of doing exactly what he said he did—please go read the deposition again—and there is a legion of people who want to make sure that we still acknowledge that Cosby has done a lot for the black community. I don’t know…
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‘You Had a Bad Idea and You Making It Worse’: 10 Thoughts About Kanye and T.I.’s ‘Ye vs. the People’
Over the weekend, Kanye “‘MAGA’ Hat” West dropped a song called “Ye vs. the People” (starring T.I. as “the People”). I’ve listened to it several times at this point. I believe the old black griots in the community would refer to what’s happening here as “This n-word has lost his damn mind.” Here are some…
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Bill Cosby Wasn’t ‘Publicly Lynched’; He Hanged Himself
Just hours after Bill Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, his publicists were busy making the media rounds. Publicist Andrew Wyatt called his recent guilty verdict a “public lynching,” and publicist Ebonee Benson invoked the story of Emmett Till—whose accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham, admitted that she lied, which resulted in…
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Life Comes at You Fast and Your Faves Are Probably All Trash
When I woke up this morning, I planned on writing about (actually, I did write about) what was probably going through Nas’ mind as Kanye continued to go on his alienate-the-black-community Twitter spree. With albums set to release in June by Nas, Cudi, Pusha T and Teyana Taylor, I figured that none of them could…
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Hey VSB Commenters, Reclaim Your Time and Your Comments (From Disqus)!
If you were a commenter on Very Smart Brothas before the switch to Kinja, this is your chance to reassociate all your old comments from Disqus with your new Kinja account. Just follow these steps: Go to kinja.com/claim. Click the “Claim With Disqus” button. Log in to the Disqus account used to comment on Very…
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Kanye West Doesn’t Care About Black People
Last year Panama Jackson, a man who, in the 14 years that we’ve known each other, has become one of my best friends, published a piece about his mother’s support of Donald Trump, and revealed how that ruined his relationship with her. Deciding to write this was very difficult for him; we had countless email,…