It’s been a long time since I posted on this blog. I just didn’t have the heart, through the Trump administration and the Covid-19 pandemic, to keep going back through the negative emotions that suffused so many of those days just to write about them. Living them was hard enough. I can’t say wholeheartedly that […]
I don’t know that I have written much about the tremendous, burdensome “loyalty” that many Black men exact from Black women in order to treat us with even just the smallest modicum of respect or give us even the tiniest crumbs of love and affection, but I know I have spoken tomes about it in […]
So I am going to roll up my sleeves and write some real shit here this morning. Please try to bear with me. Feel free to unfollow me if you can’t. When I was a teenager, I was heavy into grunge. I listened to hip hop because of course I did. I am black, born […]
As you all know, I am one of the unfortunate people who have lost employment and income because of the Covid-19 quarantine. That is what spurred me to finally sit down and write my last post about adjunct teaching – a piece that I had been contemplating for literal years. I hoped, when I wrote […]
I never intended on teaching college. I never intended on teaching at all. I only got my degree in English because I love writing. I love reading. I love words. I love books. I knew that if I had to sit in a series of turgid classrooms for four whole years and produce work that […]
I have seen these tee shirts advertised on Instagram. They’re cute. They say, “Black women are for grown-ups.” And to quote the space-age mage Janelle Monae, I like that. I do think that black women in America have been faced with tremendous hardship over the years, and through the various political fires we’ve had no […]
Ummm… Harvey Weinstein is on trial for his crimes. He lost his company and wife. His name is persona non grata in the city that he once owned. He is not “getting away” with anything. Roman Polanski is unable to re-enter the US without being charged for the crime he committed decades ago when he […]
We buy into all the misogynist bullshit about how girls and women are difficult – petty, messy, vengeful, emotionally sloppy, manipulative – as if we don’t see behavior like this from boys and men every day – as if cultural expectations and pressures don’t create and reinforce a lot of these mental and emotional habits […]
If you are a black man out here claiming that you protect black women, but you have stipulations on the kind of black women you protect – only cis, only hetero, only respectable according to assimilationist standards, only afrocentric, only “woke,” only pretty, only the ones you fuck, only the ones you wanna fuck, only […]
I always say: It’s not about people letting themselves be victimized. You have to look at the assailant. The attacker. The abuser. The real issue is with a person that can know someone is weaker than them for whatever reason and knowingly, willfully, and perhaps even gleefully hurt that person. Babies. Women that have been […]
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