Very Smart Brothas
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Don’t ‘Fix’ My Problem. Acknowledge That It Exists
I’m in a real, grown-up relationship. We’re engaged, but it already involves kids, a mortgage, car payments, bills, blended families, vacations and real-life decisions. It also involves fun, but it’s less of the boozy-brunch variety and more of the adult-with-kid fun that occurs when you hang with the other homies with kids at each other’s…
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I Finally Saw Drake’s ‘God’s Plan’ Video, and Drake Is All Right With Me
Yesterday I saw Drake’s video for “God’s Plan,” the song he dropped a few weeks back that is currently sitting atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the fourth straight week. When I checked it out yesterday, it was sitting at roughly 25 million views on YouTube, and as of today, it’s nearing 30 million. I…
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Pittsburgh Cop Shoots 3 Black People in Less Than a Year, Kills 1
On Feb. 11, 39-year-old Mark Daniels was shot and killed by Pittsburgh police officers after he allegedly shot at and ran from them when they attempted to approach him. The details, reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are somewhat fishy. The police were called to the scene after being “alerted to an actor with a gun.”…
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10 Thoughts on Tell Them We Are Rising, the Documentary About the Story of HBCUs
As an alumnus of Morehouse College and a staunch advocate for HBCUs, I was very excited to finally see the Stanley Nelson film Tell Them We Are Rising, a documentary about HBCUs. Overall, I thought it was cool, with some very interesting stories and facts, but I believe it suffered from a time crunch. Ultimately,…
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Why I Hate Referring to Anybody in My Family as ‘Step’ Anything
For roughly the past six months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk and write about my family in a way that is more substantive than I have in all my years of writing; most discussions were spurred from the article about how politics had created a rift between my (white) mother and me. In nearly…
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A List of Things That Are Definitely Racist
1. Pittsburgh potholes (Related: On the way to see Black Panther Friday night, I hit a pothole and got a flat. Fortunately, I was a quarter mile away from a gas station, so I was able to drive there and park my car. From there I caught an Uber to the theater, watched the 2-hour-and-15-minute-long…
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An Open Letter to the Men Whose Girlfriends and Wives Saw Black Panther and Now Want to Move to Wakanda
Like everyone else, you were excited to see Black Panther. You’ve been waiting for it for years, got excited for the trailers and even read all of the newer Ta-Nehisi Coates- and Roxane Gay- and Yona Harvey-penned comic books. And while you didn’t go full Wakandan cosplay for the premiere, you did wear all black.…
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Yet Another Reason Why Shuri From Black Panther Is the Greatest Disney Princess Ever
If “Don’t scare me like that, colonizer” wasn’t already enough to give Black Panther’s Shuri (depicted amazingly by Letitia Wright) the crown as the Greatest Disney Princess Ever—it was, but let’s just pretend that it wasn’t—there are dozens more reasons why she deserves it. In the last half of the movie alone, she saved a…
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Down for Some Biased Boning and Nationalistic Nookie? Try These Dating Apps for Trump Supporters
Apparently, it’s hard out here for a “Make America great again” pimp. Since the election, there have been myriad stories about Donald Trump supporters having difficulties dating. And I can only imagine how it must feel to be ostracized and discriminated against because of your beliefs. That thing that has never happened to me or…