When My Daughter Cut Her Locs, I Cried I was afraid that her releasing her locs was also a way for her to release me. *** We Are Not Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams. We are our Ancestors. What we remember as the past cannot actually be “past” because we are continuously making and remaking that […]
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My little one, 8 years old, often feels unheard. He’s a little person, half the size of others in the house. After explaining the horror of George Floyd’s murder, I tried to explain the reaction, the protests happening around the country. I asked him to remember a time where he felt unheard, which I know […]
Read MoreThe story is old. A white woman’s fear costs a black man his freedom. The story is old. White woman sees black man where she does not want him to be and tells him to leave. You don’t belong here. Used to be a sidewalk. Now it’s a coffee house. Implicit bias? Overt bias? It […]
Read MoreAnother example of how this week has just been too much: I am a black South Carolinian. Here’s why I support the Confederate flag. – By Byron Thomas, via WaPost If this is what they are teaching black children in school — that their “ancestors” were Confederate cooks who “served” admirably (but like used as a tool […]
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News of the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston S.C. spread like wildfire on social media Wednesday evening, before the mainstream media picked it up. Twitter immediately recognized the significance of the murder of nine black churchgoers; we relived the grief of associated with the deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Denise […]
Read MorePoignant pictures are spilling out of Baltimore. Photos of what we may soon regard as the latest protest in our “Spring” movement show brave bodies in various states of resistance. Some with faces covered, others brazenly identifiable — but all filled with the justifiable rage of living in what feels like a police state where black lives […]
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Cross posted on CocoaMamas Watching Ava DuVernay talk about Selma. Seeing black bodies beaten by white police officers. “That was the past. They should get over it.” You might think that these words came from the mouth of a conservative white male who is tired of talking about slavery, tired of talking about Jim Crow, and […]
Read MoreI wrote this at the end of August, after the murder of Michael Brown. Still relevant now. To my Beautiful Black children, This week you returned back home from spending the summer with your grandparents. For eight weeks, you engaged in what so many of our people have done for generations: spent the summers unburdened […]
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The beauty of black people is that tomorrow, we’re gonna get up. We’ve been here before. We’re gonna shower, get our children ready for school, and go to work. We’ve been here before. We’re gonna smile at our boss, at our co-workers. We’ve been here before. We’re gonna do our jobs. We’ve been here before. […]
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Doctor Mama Esquire 