Suspicion Has a History Black people do not become suspicious every time something looks wrong because we are irrational. Sometimes suspicion grows out of history. That does not mean every suspicious death is a murder. It does not mean every official report is false. It does not mean every police department, medical examiner, sheriff, prosecutor,
Black Suspicion Did Not Begin on Social Media Read More »
The Photograph That Changes the Way You See Him There is an image of Earl Campbell later in life that is difficult to reconcile with the football player people remember. The man who once ran through NFL defenders needed a walker and sometimes a wheelchair just to move around. His hands had become so arthritic
Earl Campbell: The Tyler Rose and the Price of Running Through Everybody Read More »
Before Michael Jackson Called, Teddy Riley Had Already Changed the Radio By the time Michael Jackson reached out to Teddy Riley, Riley was already a major force in R&B. In the late 1980s, he helped create New Jack Swing, a sound that blended hip-hop beats with R&B vocals, melodies, and harmonies. He had already helped
Teddy Riley: The Man Who Changed the Sound of R&B Read More »
Sleeping in Front of the Life He Wanted Back around 2011, Mario Kelly’s life had fallen apart. He was unemployed, divorced, and living out of his van in Detroit. That alone would have been enough to make a lot of people feel defeated. But Mario did something unusual. Instead of parking randomly every night, he
Mario Kelly: From Sleeping in a Van to Building a Million-Dollar Future Read More »
I Miss the Old Internet I miss when the internet did not seem determined to sell me something every five seconds. If you were online in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably remember what I mean. The internet felt rougher, slower, stranger, and somehow more personal. People built little websites that looked terrible by
When the Internet Felt Like a Place Instead of a Marketplace Read More »
The Sunday Night the Gold Window Closed On Sunday evening, August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon went on national television and announced a change that would help transform the world’s monetary system. He ordered the Treasury to suspend the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments and central banks. Under the Bretton Woods system,
When Money Stopped Being Metal Read More »
When the Most Profitable Picture Is the Worst One I want you to sit with this question for a minute because I think it takes the conversation about internalized racism somewhere deeper. What happens when the most profitable version of Black visibility is the version that makes Black people easier to blame? We usually talk
When Blaming Black People Becomes Profitable Read More »
The Thought That Disturbed Me I caught myself thinking something today that disturbed me, and I had to sit with it for a minute. My brother called me from a diner and described two Black people nearby: a woman talking loudly on the phone about her child’s father being on probation and a young man
When One Image Starts Looking Like a Whole Race Read More »
The Story Many of Us Have Heard I have something I want to straighten out because I have heard this story repeated for years. Somebody will say that white people are called Caucasian because white Europeans originally came from the Caucasus Mountains. At first, that explanation sounds perfectly logical. Caucasian sounds like Caucasus, so case
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The Groove That Refused to Die I love stories like this because sometimes music takes a life of its own and travels farther than the person who created it ever imagined. In 1981, Rick James released “Super Freak,” a song with a bass line that is almost instantly recognizable. It was funky, playful, unusual, and
One Bass Line, Two Eras: Rick James, MC Hammer, and the Grammy They Shared Read More »