Alt-right still mad that Black Panther movie isn’t all-White

File under #Trifling. HuffPost reports that the alt-right — in the form of a group named Down with Disney — plans to destroy Marvel Black superhero movie Black Panther’s Rotten Tomatoes critics score, possibly through the bots used by the same group to attack The Last Jedi film. While we’re only talking about a movie […]

West and Coates should look East

Can we not acknowledge that there are deep disagreements among us with our very lives and destinies at stake? — Dr. Cornel West in Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle, Guardian, Dec. 17, 2017 Quoting Dr. Cornel West’s words seemed to be a good initial approach as I partially unpack […]

Sunday Smack: What About This Race Conversation?

This Sunday Smack deals with a question I’ve indirectly brought up in previous posts: the conversation about race. Is a conversation necessary? Whose minds would you like to change as a result of a conversation? After what we’ve seen in America during the past two weeks, do you think a conversation would change anyone’s mind? […]

Trump Makes a Valid Point About ‘Changing Culture’

My main point about yesterday’s memorable press conference with President Donald Trump has less to do with his full turn of opinion when he reestablished air cover for his Alt-Right peeps by reincarnating his “Many sides” theory as an explanation for the death and racial violence this past weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. But I should […]

Charlottesville, White Terrorism and History — a Black Man’s Viewpoint

President Donald Trump’s difficulty with specifically denouncing the “Unite the Right” rally and White terrorist violence committed in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend confirms what many people of color already felt about the Trump regime: it’s Al-Qaeda or Islamic State in khakis and polo shirts, hiding behind perverse and ancient renderings of a noble religion […]

Racial Segregation and Death Through Secession — Jefferson County, Alabama Schools and the Rest of America

We’re witnessing an social crisis in Jefferson County, Alabama — a county with one of the worst measures of income inequality [PDF, page 15] in a state with one of the worst measures of income inequality, nestled in a country whose Gini Coefficient among industrialized nations is embarrassingly topped by only Mexico and Chile — that […]

Trump’s Alternative Black History: Endorsement of White Terrorism

After watching President Donald Trump get his talking point wrong about Frederick Douglass’ current status on earth, I percolated the idea of creating daily posts of the humorous sort about Trump’s Alternative Black History — but ultimately decided against this route. First — mentalunrest’s (deliberate lowercase M here) editorial policy tells me to cover topics […]

POST-ELECTION MEDITATIONS: WE’LL SURVIVE TRUMP

We lived under the leadership of a Ku Klux Klan-loving President who broadly rejected Japan’s 1919 Treaty of Versailles amendment that would view all races and countries as equals — likely because this President had more colonial ambitions to chase that involved nations of color. We lived under a president whose treatment of Black Mississippi […]

POST ELECTION MEDITATIONS – WOMEN AND STRUGGLE

I have plenty of post-election thoughts to share, but will have to break my natural stream-of-consciousness writing style and create a series of posts to avoid publishing tomes. This is still a blog, after all … Perhaps a good place to start is a discussion about women’s personal connection with Hillary Clinton being so close to punching […]

A STATE-SANCTIONED LYNCHING: 10 TAKEAWAYS FROM READING HEATHER ANN THOMPSON’S BLOOD IN THE WATER

“A state-sanctioned lynching” and “Bipartisan political cover-up” are only two of the screaming thoughts I had while reading Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, by historian Heather Ann Thompson. Blood in the Water is a National Book Award finalist for Nonfiction this year. Of equal wrecking power are the […]