Ever since Destiny’s Child disbanded and Beyoncé Knowles, the lead singer for the group made a go for it as a solo artist, she’s had hit after hit after hit. We all looked up one day, and she had somehow become this artistic juggernaut who couldn’t seem to fail. She was the epitome of what […]
Read more "Made in Our Own Image: The Gospel According to Beyoncé"It’s time for a new black male aesthetic. Especially one that captures decolonized postmodern black masculinity as well as one that has ontologically transcendent capabilities. In simpler terms, an aesthetic that allows for black masculinity to not be defined by archaic norms in the realm of fashion, black male-to-male relationships and how one images themselves for the sake […]
Read more "Transcending America: How Russell Westbrook, Odell Beckham and Cameron Newton Have Changed Black Masculinity"One of the better things that has happened to me in the last year or so is that I have been more intentional about carving out time to cultivate my independent reading habit. Sure, everyone says they read but we all know there’s only really two types of readers: those that buy the books and […]
Read more "Book Review of “Democracy in Black” by Eddie Glaude, Jr."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”"Earlier this fall, there was an infamous photo of some well-known prominent (TV) pastors that were seen praying with (or for) GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. It was one of those moments that made the rounds of a short-lived news cycle on September 29 of this year. Pastors Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, David Jeremiah […]
Read more "The Day the Black Church Circus Came to Town"Dear Yusaf, I don’t know you. We’ve never met. I’m not sure just how much we have in common. The only thing I biographically know about you is that you’re from Philadelphia, you’re 35 with ten kids, and you did a porn movie with other men. And from one black man to another, I just […]
Read more "An Open Letter to Yusaf Mack"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"Editor’s note: I wrote this a little over a week ago on August 12, and thought not to post it for a myriad of reasons. Hearing news that Cornel West has chosen to endorse Bernie Sanders seems to be reason enough to post this. –JLL This has not been a great year publicly for Cornel […]
Read more "Have We Reached a Post-Cornel West Era?"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"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 