To offset this post, I wish to enlist a famous quotation from the late Toni Morrison’s expository catalog. In “The Nobel Lecture in Literature,” Morrison writes: “We die. That make be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (203). While this quotation speaks to death as…
Tag: #georgefloyd
A Word on Nancy Pelosi and the Petting Incident…
I admit that I always had an issue with the way that the media treated Gianna Floyd. Nevertheless, I, along with millions of others, watched the interview where a six-year-old Floyd said she missed her father and wanted to be a doctor to help people. Upon looking at Gianna’s face, one could see George Floyd…
George Floyd, Four Hundred Years Later
It is imperative that the African descended resurrect George Floyd from the chokehold of American his story. The morning of May 25, 2020, would become the final hours of Floyd’s life. By this time last year, his feet were tagged, his organs prepped for an autopsy that would “prove” what millions would see from various…
Daunte’s Inferno
Grandma Tilson, I’m afraid of hell. Ain’t nothing to fear, there’s hell on earth. I mean the real her where you can go when you die. You ain’t gotta die to go to the real hell. No? Uh uh, you just gotta sell that silver mirror God propped up in your soul. Sell it to…
Be Careful what You Wish For, Re-Presentation and 2020
2020 began with the devastating death of Kobe Bryant and his teenage daughter Gianna. What still permeates my memory is how Bryant’s parents attended his public memorial to no acknowledgment. Their omission delineated a poignant truth: that the black optic attains its status following a complete uprooting from its origins. Then, we watched COVID birth…
What Will His Story Remember About the Year 2020?
His story will remember this year for everything it wasn’t. The question the confused will ask years from now is: where were you during the performative gestures that inundated 2020? The appropriate question is: where were you before? Where were you before an anti-black media told you it was okay to stand up and speak…
So We’re At Our Tipping Point, But…What About Tawana Brawley? #saytheirnametoo
I wish it were true; that the waves of white supremacy came crashing down in the weeks before summer 2020. But I know that the coming weeks, months, and years to come will reference this moment to counter pro-black and “separatist” agendas that seek to actualize the change so many pursue hollowly. In the contemporary…
Protest Participation and Black Power
We met on the hilltop. The chants occurred sporadically, ascending when passing those translating our footsteps to footage on their phones. The African adjacent came with signs more often than the African descended. The crowd knelt with raised fists twice, a gesture synonymous with closing one’s eyes to pray. In studying the ancestral plight to…
When the Smoke Clears: Why We Must Live a Life of Protest
“the great show down cannot be postponed indefinitely” –Frantz Fanon
Anti-black Violence: An American Vaccine
Another day another slay, literally. George Floyd, yet another black man murdered by the police inundated news stories yesterday, and as it is with black murders, it is not only Flloyd’s story that makes the news but his body. His body, robbed of the richness of black spirit, lay breathless on the concrete, yet another…
Whispers of a Womanist 