The emerging story of Jussie Smollett

I always tell you that my natural writing style is stream-of-consciousness — an approach I use for capturing my raw feelings about any topic. But that doesn’t mean I’ll write in the absence of cogent facts. You can pretty much figure that out by the number of sources I’ll cite in each post. A dose […]

Empty victory: young Black wrestler’s sacrifice

Reading Frantz Fanon or writers like him can make you easily relate to a dictum that seems to describe unequal societies: when you’re on the losing side, a “W” is an welcomed “W” — until you realize it’s not. I see this dictum in the angering story of Buena Regional High wrestler Andrew Johnson, a […]

Synagogue of blood and the warlock’s spell of hatred

The warlock’s latest spell — cast since June 16, 2015 — of manipulating hatred, paranoia, and economic exclusion, remains intact. This spell, like the others, can easily integrate with each other to present society with more complexity and danger. And extensibility. We saw evidence of this on November 11, 2016. We see additional proof today […]

Bitter gumbo: drunken ultra-White male privilege and the political party that didn’t give a damn in 2014

At this point, it would be a bit cliché for me to say “What if me and my Black azz showed up to the job interview amidst word that I drank myself into unconsciousness when I wasn’t trying to rape high school girls, I then melted down in the interviewee seat because I’m pissed that […]

Dallas police officer Amber Guyger — killer of Botham Shem Jean — may still retain God status after her arrest

Off-duty Dallas, Texas police officer Amber Guyger walks into civilian Botham Shem Jean‘s apartment last Thursday night — because she thought it was her residence — and then shoots Jean to death because she thought he was an intruder. The incident is another example of how cops are treated as God. Infallible. Uncorrupted. Not capable […]

When the beat stops dropping — marching after Trump

The synchronized goose-stepping to President Donald Trump’s White-America-First drumbeat seems highly familiar to many of you. And this is the point where most media analogies between Trumpism and Nazi Germany stop short. I want to go deeper and explore the policy and moral ramifications of Trumpism’s eventual end — and what will happen once the […]

Deleting inconvenient contradictions: US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and Congress

Leave it to me when it comes to peppering America’s Independence Day celebration with quick dive into how the country reconciled its slave-owning system of production with a statement for liberty and independence from Britain’s rule. Like most other chapters in American history were the narrative of virtues cruise closer to B.S. territory, the nation […]

Here we go again: Permit Patty summons police and joins in Becky-drenched assaults on benign moments in Black life

Do you know why no one can call me Kupkake Kwame or Cookie Cassius? Because when I walk around my neighborhood and see eight-year old White boys or girls selling cupcakes, checking these kids’ merchant credentials to sell merchandise — or calling the police if they say “What’s a credential, sir?” — is the furthest […]

A century of state-sponsored bananas, blood and bullets — facts that are missing from today’s immigration debate

I’ll preface my different angle of approach to the latest immigration episode concerning President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy by first addressing those of you who think droning children overseas, snatching them from parents at the U.S. border, physically abusing them, or injecting them with anti-psychotic meds without consent or proper diagnosis is symptomatic of a healthy […]

Unstable mixtures and missing chapters — Chekesia Clemons’ beef about plastic forks at Waffle House ends with being stripped and arrested by Alabama police

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson’s arrests at the Philadelphia Starbucks and the story I just read about the Black woman who was choked, stripped and arrested by Alabama police officers — more on that in a moment — reminds me of a late-night encounter I saw in a downtown New York City diner from the […]