This has been an interesting moment in time for blackness. The imperfect harmony of the nightmare that police brutality against black bodies along with the exoneration of whiteness and the beauty of black pride and some semblance of existential unity hearkening to years past. Two hallmarks of this time period have been both Kendrick Lamar […]
Read more "If Ta-Nehesi Coates and Kendrick Lamar Had a Conversation…"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"The burden of carrying about blackness in this country is one that seems to compound exponentially as times goes on if you let it. The state of being “in a rage all the time” as James Baldwin said is something that comes with a tax; there is a price to pay. Relationships suffer, isolation sets in. […]
Read more "Rekia Boyd and the Myth of Modern-Day Black Male Exceptionalism"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"Late Sunday night after a topsy-turvy weekend of emotions on the homefront, my life settled enough for me to peruse the B-lists of movies that were on Netflix. For those who don’t have Netflix, there are a bevy of second-rate movies that usually live up to their B-list nature. Occasionally there are a few box […]
Read more "A Christian’s Apology to Atheists because “God’s Not Dead”"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"Okay, I’ve come down from my emotional ivory tower about last night’s #Scandal episode and I’m back on solid ground: Firstly, that would have never happened. A black man walking out with a shotgun who openly fired it would have been immediately shot with cameras filming. I was about five minutes late when I tuned […]
Read more "My Thoughts on “The Lawn Chair” Episode of ‘Scandal’"Oppression messes with the mind. That’s a sentiment that has stuck with me in earnest during the second half of 2014. As I personally embroiled myself with online conversations around race and gender that I found supremely frustrating and watch a nation grapple with race in a different manner following the deaths of Eric Garner […]
Read more "Being True to Our Native Land: Why Thomas Chatterton Williams gets the race conversation wrong"I just watched the latest episode of Fox’s breakout mid-season show “Empire” and as the show’s central character Cookie Lyon’s took the podium that was indeed acting as a Jezebel–Queen Jezebel that is. The name Jezebel is the English transliteration from the Hebrew Bible of the wife of the Israelite King Ahab who married a non-Israelite […]
Read more "An “Empire” Divided: Reimagining Cookie Lyon as a 21st Century Jezebel"In full disclosure, I am a native Chicagoan. I proudly state “I was born and raised, South Side of Chicago” and I wear it like a blue ribbon earned in a 1st grade spelling bee. Being able to claim the South Side of Chicago is a badge of honor amongst other blacks like being able […]
Read more "Living in District Boundaries: Why Jackie Robinson West being stripped of their title is all about Race"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 