In 2007, I started blogging like any good millennial. Blogging has had its highs and lows. My writing got better. My thoughts matured. This blog is a place where I’ve flexed my opinions—good ones and bad ones—and worked out ideas in real time. No edits. I’d hit the “publish” button and walk away. I’ve called […]
Read more "Why Being an Uppity Negro is Still Relevant"By all accounts, new ground was broken last night when it came to the public discourse of the intersection of the hip hop community and that of the LBGTQ community. More specifically, the black LGBTQ community. Following the season four premier of Love and Hip Hop on Viacom owned station VH1, an hour-long round-table discussion called […]
Read more "Conversating, When Conversation Goes Wrong: VH1, Hip Hop and Jamal Bryant"Last August, as the steam gathered behind the national sentiments of anger following the death of Michael Brown, I kept waiting for the moment that something or someone was going to grab the reins and take it to the next level. As the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter emerged and assumed a life of its own, I kept […]
Read more "Waiting on the Movement"Below is an excerpt from the essay Michael Eric Dyson that was recently published entitled “The Ghost of Cornel West” in the magazine The New Republic: This is no biased preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar versus […]
Read more "If You’re Reading This It’s Not Too Late to Start Writing: Black Public Intellectuals in a Ghost West Era"In short, the sh*t finally hit the fan in Detroit. It was just as bad as all of us had heard and feared. For the better part of the last ten years or so, Detroit made national news for all the wrong reasons and uncomfortably, the faces were always black. Who can forget the antics […]
Read more "The New Jerusalem: A Chance of Redemption for Detroit"Over the past two days, two videos featuring black parents videotaping their forms of discipline have made their way onto my Facebook timeline. Please watch both of them in their entirety, I have some challenges with what’s being displayed. First, I’d like to discuss the young ladies and their father beating them. Yes, beating them. […]
Read more "My Challenge to Black Parents and the Continued Pornography of Violence"In case you missed it, I’m moving. Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook should already know, but in case you just missed it all, I’m moving to New Orleans. **cue the second line** Oh yes, I’ll be living in the Big Easy, the Crescent City, the City that Care Forgot….all of […]
Read more "I’m Moving…"Not because I don’t feel like writing, or that I’m busy, but really, I want to reach back find what I consider to be some of my classic posts, and just run them again. Yes, I’m that vain. No, honestly, I do consider myself to be pretty decent in my writing and that some of […]
Read more "Throwback Week!!"…I’ve added a “tip jar” via PayPal ’cause I’m a broke grad student. Nuff Said. There’ll be a permanent one on the left hand sidebar in case you don’t decide to click on this one today. And support the cause–of me. And all of me. Keep it uppity and truthfully radical, JLL
Read more "So In Case You’re Feeling Generous…"Like many black folks around this country, our hearts sank, yet again when we discovered that the shooter at the Manchester, Connecticut Budweiser Hartford Distribution plant was black. I, like others I’m sure, immediately said “Black folks don’t do those things” or something similar when we first heard about the news. You know, black folks […]
Read more "Lies My Community Told Me: “Black Folk Don’t Do Those Things!”"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 