Indeed it is motivating when a disembodied head you’re looking at on a screen says ‘JoeJones1234′ keep it up you’re doing great’! Yet I ask all my readers who’ve ever walked, ran and cycled in residential neighborhoods was that more motivating than when you saw a Rottweiler the size of a small horse break full speed for you at 25-50 paces. Go Pelaton Team Go! No, you wish your Pelaton team was there so they could prove the old adage created by African Wildebeasts. It says, ‘when the lion is chasing you, you don’t have to be the fastest Wildebeast…
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I was fascinated by the fact that post-modern whites act very surprised when we tell them how distrustful we are of public institutions and public health with the most glaring example being our reluctance to get vaccinated and distrust of the police. Smart Negro professionals, talking heads, Black pundits, Black academics and public intellectuals told them the history of the Tuskegee Experiment, the history of the Henrietta Lacks research, forced sterilization and the way the white south used the criminal justice system in the Jim Crow/Black Codes eras et al. There are many examples but I notice white folks eyes…
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Have you ever been scrolling through YouTube videos and boxing matches and MMA fights come up; and street fights and brawls pop up. The key to your time on the video is A) the amount of time it takes to get to the knockout punch and B) how dramatically effective the knock out punch is. Keisha, Stacy and Fani are in danger of in the words of proverbial Youtubes of this nature, ‘getting knocked the fuck out’. In all honesty I haven’t had time to reflect on Keisha quitting on us and leaving us in the lurch (us being Black…
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No hyperbole or writer’s license necessary, my first conscious memory was at Greenbriar mall. I was pre-school age and my mom took me to an Easter breakfast program circa 1974 when Rich’s had a restaurant on the second floor that overlooked the mall. My mother and I watched the program from the floor of the mall because of crowd. We couldn’t get into the restaurant but I know there was an Easter Bunny taking pictures and walking around. After the event was over I went to pre-school at the KinderCare on Fairburn Rd. That experience at Greenbriar Mall and KinderCare…
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The white south was so dependent on slavery ideologically and culturally that it nearly completely ignored finance capitalism, manufacturing, technological innovation, industrial innovation and the legal and wage labor benefits and tools that come along with them. The very same elitist cultural forces that kept Black people ignorant and illiterate (in an academic sense) kept large swathes of poor white people ignorant and illiterate and more or less incapable of taking advantage of economic innovations in the North and the rest of the 19th century world. If for no other reason than a mistake by white pre-1860 leadership of that…
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It’s really white people’s fault that Ninjas are running around tearing down statues of white confederate history. When any people erases its own history for ANY reason, you are dealing with a very wounded individual people. Someone has been torn down, abused, mocked, demeaned and used when your self esteem is so low that you want to rewrite history and the history of a place because it makes you feel uncomfortable. History itself (that is to say reality itself) is thus some kind of aggression or micro aggression to you that you cannot bear or tolerate to be reminded of?…
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Lessons from Atlanta Street Racing Let’s begin with a series of assumptions. Southern country white folk love car racing and NASCAR. Their attachment to it is legendary. As a matter of fact the legends of car racing reads like a deep white country list of biblical patriarchs and their families; Richard Petty, Al Unser, Bobby Allison, Bill Elliot, Earnhardt, Wallace, etc. Auto racing has a whole history and ‘thing’ (for lack of a better word) behind it. From stock cars, to Formula 1 to drag racers, to trucks, motorcycles and even go karts, being a child of urban Atlanta I…
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I have no problems with female leadership, political or otherwise. The thing to contemplate however is that it is one thing to lead the basketball team because you are 6’1” and everyone else is 5’10”. It is quite another matter to lead the team because you actually have skills. Do you actually have skills or are you just 6’1” and simply the tallest person they could find to build a team around that ‘looks’ competitive on the court? I’m going to offer some hints although I do not want this to be interpreted as a critique of Black Women. I…
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I love stories you can’t make up. People either wouldn’t believe you or would question your motives for citing such an outlandish story. But alas it is true. One of my ‘jobs’ that my bachelors in Political Science and my Masters have proffered me as a Black man with a felonious weed sales conviction is I do general labor cleaning out houses after an investor that I work for purchases the property. I was just able to vote in 2010 when my 10 years of being ‘on paper’, my fines and my 60-90 days in the County/Regional Detention Facility aka…