As we come upon both the day commemorating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with Black History Month just around the corner, I imagine (hopefully) that many of us will be reflecting on our history, progress, and shared collective responsibility in the midst of many ongoing injustices. The difficulty of celebrating civil […]
“Who will cry for the little boy, the boy inside a man / Who will cry for the little boy, who knew well, hurt and pain / Who will cry for the little boy, who died and died again / Who will cry for the little boy, a good boy he tried to be / […]
18 year-old Philadelphia student Cameron Clarke is making headlines for scoring a perfect 2400 on the SATs. Out of 1.66 million test takers, Cameron is one of only 360 who scored a 2400. AMAZING! Congrats, Cameron!
VMK, a company based in the People’s Republic of the Congo, has a set of smart phones and tablets that are more affordable and specifically designed for Africans.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and tomorrow many of us will start making resolutions we will inevitably break. I don’t make resolutions; I’m also not into composing “Best of…” and “Worst of…” lists mostly because I don’t choose to dedicate my memory to cataloging such things. Since my blogging day has coincided with the event, however, […]
I had planned on using this morning’s post to conclude my silly holiday special. Since I took time last week to make a mixtape of rappers covering Christmas songs, I figured I’d spend this morning telling you all about this new, mythical black Christmas figure I had invented. Since Kwanzaa is insufficient and the idea […]
BET’s new documentary ‘Murder to Excellence: Life & Hip Hop in Chicago’ spotlights our youth, the challenges they face, and the multi-faceted art to which their struggle has given birth.
At this point, even his fans know that rapper Rick Ross is far from the image he manufactures for his songs and videos. Slate Magazine even went as far to label the success of Rick Ross, in the face of his correction officer past, as the end of street credibility being necessary to Hip-Hop fans. So the news that Rick Ross canceled […]
GLAAD (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) took a moment to congratulate Jet Magazine for featuring a same-sex marriage in its wedding section. Happy with the feature? Do you thinl GLAAD’s effort reek of the assumption that blacks are more homophobic than others?
I just learned about “blerds” and I’m over them already. I got an email with a link to an NPR story about this apparently ascendant set of non-athletic, non-jive talking black folks–mostly men, I guess–who are apparently populating television shows and stand-up stages. It took fewer than 4 minutes, the length of Eric Deggans’ piece, for me […]
We, the youth of Generation Y have elders all across the world that we must consult in this daily struggle to find freedom. Our elders found me on my trips through the labyrinth of NYC yesterday—through Harlem, through the Bronx, through Queens. These kinfolk who have endured the 1968 Olympics, when Tommie Smith and John […]
America is a country of contradictions and mythologies. Thanksgiving, a most peculiarly American holiday, is no different. Only in the land where freedom for all is exalted but not practiced do we celebrate a grossly revisionist form of a holiday that attempts to whitewash the systemic destruction of indigenous American-Indian cultures. The flare of holidays […]