In 2009, Chicago was the United States’ bid to the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. There was a collective sigh of relief on the South Side of Chicago when it was announced that Rio De Janeiro would be the host. Many South Side residents who would have been directly impacted by […]
Read more "Waiting For Obama"Because the administration of Trump was a veritable dumpster fire even before the inauguration, the Democrats never had the usual trial by fire and public shaming that the losing party normally gets. There was never an opportunity for the Democratic party to listen to its constituents and perform a full autopsy on just how catastrophic […]
Read more "Dead on Arrival, Why Kamala Harris Shouldn’t Be the Presumptive Presidential Nominee"Michael Eric Dyson penned an essay paying homage to the black digital intelligentsia in 2015 that paid homage to names that had some level of household recognition amongst black folks as well as some non-black circles naming people such as Ta-Nehesi Coates, Jelani Cobb, Melissa Harris Perry, Marc Lamont Hill, Jamilah Lemieux and Salamisha Temet. […]
Read more "A Requiem for Black Intellectualism"“I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party.” These words formally ended the broad based political revolution that Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, had campaigned for so viciously. Just like that. In fact, Sanders’ political revolution ended the moment he failed to secure enough delegates. His words as […]
Read more "Bernie Sanders, a Post Mortem"There had been buzz in the past year or so that there was a filming of a movie entitled “Chi-raq” with the gun violence at the center of the movie. My initial thought, given the title was that it was going to be a documentary. I made this assumption because at the time the portmanteau was […]
Read more "The Miseducation of “Chi-Raq”"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"“A coupla years ago, my homeboy was beat by police. I wanted to go down with him and protest with him. Honestly, my mom wasn’t on my mind…the police were just on my mind.” Those are words that 16-year-old Michael Singleton offered to WMAR the ABC affiliate of Baltimore in the days following what amounted […]
Read more "Who Speaks for Michael Singleton?"I went on a Twitter rant in the following hours of the release of the bystander camera phone video of the death of Walter Scott of North Charleston, South Carolina. By now, most have seen or at least heard of the incident where a white police office, Michael Slager, shoots his service arm eight times […]
Read more "The Murder of Walter Scott and the Boogeyman of Whiteness"The American cultural memory seems to have lengthened. At least as far as social media outlets are concerned as well as the blogosphere and the plethora of e-media sites. As we still are affixed under the shadow of a “post-” era of Ferguson, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin et. al., every new moment we experience […]
Read more "The ‘Common’ Problem in Misunderstanding Racism"One of the challenges of doing cultural criticism is when the critic begins to infer their own meaning onto something that was not intended by the author or the creator of the work. With my theological background, we learned about textual criticism when it came to the exegetical work of the biblical literature. One […]
Read more "Kendrick Lamar and Black Hip Hop Masculinity"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 