Conversating, When Conversation Goes Wrong: VH1, Hip Hop and Jamal Bryant

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 […]

Kanye, The Entertainer-in-Chief

I’ve never watched MTV’s Video Music Awards from beginning to end. The only reason I did last night was because BET-owned Viacom made the decision to run the VMAs on BET right after the season finale of “Sunday Best,” the gospel music show based on the “American Idol” model. As far as the entertainment world is concerned, […]

Have We Reached a Post-Cornel West Era?

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 […]

If Ta-Nehesi Coates and Kendrick Lamar Had a Conversation…

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 […]

Waiting on the Movement

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 […]

Who Speaks for Michael Singleton?

“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 […]

Rekia Boyd and the Myth of Modern-Day Black Male Exceptionalism

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. […]

If You’re Reading This It’s Not Too Late to Start Writing: Black Public Intellectuals in a Ghost West Era

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 […]

The Murder of Walter Scott and the Boogeyman of Whiteness

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 […]

A Christian’s Apology to Atheists because “God’s Not Dead”

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 […]

Joshua Lawrence Lazard

The blog of the one formerly known as The Uppity Negro