Very Smart Brothas
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Ask Agatha: Is Taking Care of Men Becoming the New Trend?
Brandi from Washington, D.C., asks: Is taking care of men becoming the new trend? I’m not talking about a meal here and a shirt there. I’m talking about broadcasting on your profile, “My husband and I’s apartment … ,” when they’re not legally married, yet giving him full compensation from the random people sleeping in…
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How to Respond to White Folks Who Ask How They Can ‘Help’
It could all be so simple. Though eradicating racial hateration should be an intraracial undertaking, undoing centuries of Olympic-level oppression and curing chronic multigenerational Caucasian terribleness is frequently placed on our to-do lists, along with setting trends and keeping the Electric Slide alive and sacred. A shame. Your co-worker’s favorite decadently mediocre second-rate diva Lady…
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Insecure Takes Us Back to 1997 With a Convo About Oral Sex I Thought We Weren’t Having Anymore
One of the best things about Insecure is the credit it gives the audience. Considering how, in this day and age, just existing as a black person is treated as a controversy in the mainstream media, Insecure is one of the few shows on television in which the point of it all is not to…
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Floyd Mayweather Jr. Didn’t Beat ‘Racism,’ He Just Beat a Racist White Boy (and Made Him Rich)
Of the myriad justifications for 1) witnessing the sham “fight” between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor and 2) finding joy in the serial domestic abuser’s win, the worst is that Mayweather’s pummeling of Caucasian Jidenna was some sort of existential victory for blackness. “They” lost last night and “we” won. Of course, this distinction…
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The ‘Best Rapper Alive’ Title Is Some Overused Bullshit
As a writer and English teacher, I’m forced to come to grips with the ever-(d)evolving way we approach our language. We’ve managed to squeeze zeitgeist-y words like “LOL” and “YOLO” into the dictionary and our vernacular. Words and phrases like “I could care less” and “irregardless” are no longer as subject to deserving scrutiny as…
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Taylor Swift’s Stale and Unsweetened Lemonade
From Kellyanne Conway and Tomi Lahren to the whole “53 percent of y’all voted for Darth Cheeto” thing, this has not been a particularly good year for white women. Collectively, they’ve undergone a bit of a cultural reckoning, as there has never been a hotter spotlight on their role in propagating, nurturing and fighting to…
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My Girlfriend Took Her 1st Trip Down South*. Here’s What Happened
One of the most enlightening conversations I had in college happened with a friend of mine who went to Spelman College and is from Nigeria. We were out at IHOP (I think; probably a safe assumption because we pretty much lived at IHOP), and she was telling a few of us about her preconceived notions…
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Did Afropunk Lose Its Punk Roots?
This weekend, a sea of unapologetic blackness will descend upon Fort Greene’s Commodore Barry Park for Brooklyn, N.Y.’s 12th Annual Afropunk Fest. Instagram feeds and Twitter hashtags everywhere will be peppered with twist-outs and bold prints; your favorite vibe curator will inevitably make a thread of the best of the best of the audience’s fabulous…
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10 Signs You’ve Just Met a Black Person Who’s About to Tell You ‘I’m Not Like Other Black People’
1. You saw his Facebook profile, and his latest status read, “I’m not like other black people, because I watched Frasier.” 2. You read one of his tweets, which read, “The black kids in my high school didn’t like me because I wore Vans and listened to Linkin Park.” 3. You’ve met other people who’ve…