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There might well come a time in your life when you feel the need to somehow start again with regard to your finances. When that time comes, you need to know what it is that you can do, and how it is likely to work out. The truth is that there are plenty of ways of approaching this, and as long as you are happy to do so you will find that you can soon enough give your life a much more stable feel to it too. Any financial refresh is likely to help you keep things on track, and it is something which most of us will find we need to do at some point in our lives. In this article, we will take a look at what this might entail, and what you should consider essential if you really want to make sure that your financial life is given such a necessary boost.

Step Back & Analyze

If there is anything that will prove necessary in order to refresh your financial life, it is taking the time to step back and really analyze deeply what’s going on. It is all too easy to get caught up in your own finances, to such a degree that you can completely lose sight of the bigger picture and what is going on generally. However, when you make a point of stepping back to analyze it as a whole, you will suddenly find that you are faced with some stark evidence of what it might be that needs fixing. That can be a painful moment, but it is vital if you are to make the right kinds of changes for your own financial future.

This process of stepping back to analyze means that you need to develop a cold and detached view of your own finances, and that is not something that comes naturally to everyone. However, it is something that anyone can develop, and once you have learned how to look at your finances in this way, you will probably find it a most useful tool for the future too. When you are first starting to step back and analyze your finances, you will find that it is hard to know what to look into, or which details are important. The easy answer here is that, at first at least, it’s all important, as it all allows you to gradually get to the bottom of your own financial situation. So make a point of starting to look at your finances in this way, and you will find that you are already moving in the right direction.

Above all, you need to start to identify what it is that you need to change. You can only do that by looking at both the bigger picture and the smaller details, the macro and the micro. So try to do just that if you are keen to give your life that refresh that it really needs. You will soon discover some areas for improvement which you can work on soon enough.

Make Snowballing Changes

Part of the reason that it can seem so overwhelming to completely change your finances around is because you are thinking about it in such huge terms. While you can expect these big changes to occur, it is a good idea – indeed, necessary – to make sure that you are thinking about them in terms of their smaller constituent parts. That means that you should focus first and foremost on the smaller changes, as it is only by taking small steps that you ever take the larger steps. This will help you to keep focused on what you need to do, and it will mean that you are going to be much less overwhelmed as you try to make such significant life changes too. These small changes, however insignificant they might seem at first, will soon enough add up to bigger and bigger changes, and it is this snowballing effect which ultimately makes the difference. So don’t be afraid to make small changes when you want to change your financial life around.

Of course, you need to know where to begin, and the truth is that you can start with simple practical stuff that might seem to make hardly any difference at first. Let’s think about the bills you pay each month. You might well feel that reducing these slightly won’t really help, but that is not quite the case. Actually, if you can keep your bills down, it will mean that you can hope to make a big difference overall. If you think you could save money on your cell phone, think about something like https://www.smarty.co.uk. If you feel that your energy bills could be reduced, you might want to look into using a tool like www.moneysupermarket.com. All of these little things really do make a difference, so it’s important not to overlook them if you can help it.

It goes beyond the monthly bills, too. Even something like finding a way to improve your cooking skills can mean that you spend less on food. As you are probably starting to appreciate, completely refreshing your financial life often means focusing on changing things you might never have considered needed changing or altering at all. Once you start to make these changes, you will see some profound effects in no time, which will help to spur you on.

Recovery Planning

When you set out on this mission of improving your finances, you need to make sure that you are starting off right. That means knowing where you are heading, what you want to achieve along the way, and how you hope to make it all come together. In short, you need a plan, and it is this method of recovery planning which will mean that you can make the most of the whole journey. Let’s take a look at what might be involved in recovery planning, so that you can hope to get moving in the right direction straight off the bat.

First of all, make sure that you have one major, clear goal in mind for what you want to achieve. Something like blog.conqueryourdebt.org/ could help here. It could be something very concrete with an obvious endpoint, such as paying off every penny of debt you have. Or it might be more nebulous, but still important, such as improving your general approach to money so that you have more of it at the end of each month. Whatever it is, you need to be absolutely clear on what it is, and make a note of it. It might even change over time, and that’s fine too – the important thing is that you have something at all times that you are working towards.

Then you need to think about what you need to do to get there. That means having headlines about the major steps along the way, and also planning for as much detail as you can. With all of this kind of planning, you need to make a point of being as detailed and honest as you can be. Don’t make any guesses except where absolutely necessary: just work out specifically, to the penny if possible, what you are going to have to do. If you can do that, your plan will come together exactly as you need it to, and that will mean that you are much more likely to have the kind of success you are hoping for.

As you can see, it is always possible to give your life a financial refresh, so long as you know how to begin.

Source: http://www.thefrugalfeminista.com/blog/

Later this month, my wife and I will celebrate our five year anniversary. Which feels like an accomplishment. Not because getting and staying married makes you any specialer than those who ain’t either of those things, but because I think we know each other well enough now to make a pragmatic decision on whether to escape. And there’s been no escaping (yet)!

With this anniversary comes some pressure. Year Five is one of the years that’s recognized by the greeting card industry and shit, so you know it’s a big deal, as what we’re supposed to buy, what we’re supposed to do, which animal we’re supposed to sacrifice, etc., are less questions than commodifiable goods. According to the Internet, there’s a standard gift (wood), a modern gift (silver), a preferred flower (daisies), and a gemstone (turquoise). Which together sounds like we should just buy each other Infinity Gauntlets.

I’m not too worried about that, though. We’ll figure it out, and like with the rest of our marriage, if all else fails, we’ll just eat some zinc pills. What really concerns me—and has concerned me for our entire relationship—is that I still haven’t quite figured out how to address my in-laws, and I feel like I probably should know that by now.

Now, my father-in-law doesn’t live in-state, and I only see him a few times a year, so this isn’t as pertinent with him. But my mother-in-law lives five minutes away. We see each other multiple times a week, and also occasionally correspond through text messages and phone calls. And when any of that happens, the following thing also happens:

***Mother-in-law comes over***

Her: Hello!

Me: Hi! How are you today?

Her: Great! How are you?

Me: I’m splendid!

***I need to call my mother-in-law to confirm what time she’s coming over to babysit***

Her: Hello!

Me: Hey ... I was just calling to confirm the time for tonight.

Her: Does 7 still work?

Me: Yes ma’am. It does. Thank you!

This—the excited greetings without a name or some sort of honorific accompanying them—doesn’t seem to bother her. I doubt she’s even noticed. But, while it doesn’t really bother me either—I’m fine with keeping things as they are—it just seems ... odd. Like this is something I should’ve figured out by now.

As I see it, there are four possible options here:

1. I can call her by her first name, which seems too informal. (And by “too informal” I mean “like some white people shit.”)

2. I can call her Ms. + her last name, which seems too formal.

3. I can call her Ms. + her first name, which feels performative and blaxploitationey.

4. I can call her “Mom,” which, um, no. I just don’t feel comfortable with that.

(Interestingly enough, reason #4 is actually one of the tens of thousands of reasons I neglected to jump in during last month’s “Auntie” wars. I don’t call anyone “Auntie” or “Uncle” except my actual aunts and uncles. And as much as I appreciate and adore my mother-in-law, my mom is dead, and I just can’t call someone else that.)

Now, I imagine many of you are reading this and thinking “Um ... why don’t you just ask her what she’d like to be called?” And yes, that’s the best answer. The smart answer. The adult answer. BUT IT’S BESIDE THE ENTIRE FREAKIN POINT BECAUSE THE SORT OF PERSON WHO HAS SOME MILD ANXIETY ABOUT HOW TO REFER TO A WOMAN HE’S KNOWN FOR SEVEN YEARS IS ALSO THE SAME SORT OF PERSON WHERE “EASY” ANSWERS LIKE “Just, you know, ask her” AIN’T EASY AT ALL! Also, an extensive four-person survey I did on Gchat and Slack 10 minutes before writing this proved that there are at least two other people not sure what to call their mothers-in-law, which officially makes this an epidemic. (For what it’s worth, both of the men I asked are in the same boat as me, while the women were both like “You’re running out of things to write about, aren’t you?” Maybe there’s a there-there.)

Again, though. We seem to have a good system now, so there might not even be a need to change. (And, now that I think about it, I don’t remember her ever calling me “Damon.” Maybe she’s writing a blog about it too.)

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

Queen Sugar’s fourth season has not disappointed one bit. Not that I expected it to, but the writers continuously find new ways to hit us with shit we absolutely did not see coming. This week’s episode was no different. I had enough moments that elicited a physical reaction in episode 4, “Skin Transparent,” that I decided that 1) I had to write about it; 2) the only way I could write about it was to recap it in GIFs. Buckle up, Buttercup: Nova Bordelon has leveled up the trash game to new heights.

We open up with Nova outchea sad that nobody is returning her calls and apparently the only person who wants anything to do with her is Young Protegé, Micah West, who apparently is also on the outs with his boo because he’s going full light-skinned and you never go full light-skinned. 

Charley and her new boo Romero (I’m not sure he’s really a new boo anymore) legit got up a whole-ass clinic in like a week. They’re efficient as hell.

And because Charley is a mix between Olivia Pope and apparently Clarence Avant, she both managed to find out who sent Micah those threatening letters AND the person is now in police custody.

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

It’s mid-July, which means it’s almost August, which means it’s almost fall, which means it’s almost that time of year when everything dies, which means you’ll soon be contemplating your own dwindling mortality and inevitable death. Since we don’t have much time left, we need to spend as much of it as possible living our very best alive-ass lives. Apparently, there’s a whole entire Megan Thee Stallion-inspired movement devoted to doing exactly that. (There’s also a thing called a City Boy Summer, which to me sounds like you just work at an inner-city non-profit.)

But what if you can’t really deal with all of that Hot Girl/Boy Summer heat because you’re experimenting with a new charcoal-based deodorant and you’re not that comfortable being overheated around crowds yet? What if things like “moving your lips while talking to people” just seems too time- and energy-consuming? How do you live your best midsummer life then? Fortunately, I’m currently in the midst of an Appropriately Chilled Kombucha Boy Summer, and I can share some tips on how to be more like me.

1. Drink all the kombuchas, even the ones that come in bottles.

“Wait,” I can hear you asking “there are kombuchas other than the ones that come in bottles?” This is the sort of question I’m here for because if you were already living your best Appropriately Chilled Kombucha Boy Summer, you’d already know you can get kombucha on tap. You wouldn’t even step foot twice in an establishment that didn’t have it. But, if you want to continue to slum with bottled kombuchas, both the Watermelon Wonder and the Guava Goodness flavors of GT’s KOMBUCHA are the best.

2. Randomly do 20 pushups before going to an event.

Although doing this adds absolutely, positively nothing to your look, you’ll feel like your muscles are a bit bulkier than usual, which will make you walk around with your chest out and your head high as everyone (in your head) admires the musculature you (don’t) possess. You might even offer to grab things off of shelves, so people will think, “Wow. That kombucha boy with the brolic forearms is also quite magnanimous.”

3. Wear shirts while in public.

4. Record yourself doing the laziest possible workout at the gym, and then post it to social media with a hashtag like #itsGodsfault or #blamehim.

If your work out of choice is basketball—like mine is—don’t actually record yourself playing in an actual game. But wait until everyone leaves, and see how many threes you can make in an empty gym with no defense as I did!

5. Say things like, “Are you sure that’s filtered?” and “Maybe a rug would add more heat to this room” and “Does that Uber has a changing table?”

6. Watch Euphoria.

Don’t even tell people anymore that you only watch it because it comes on after Big Little Lies and you’re too lazy to change the channel. I mean, you are too lazy to change the channel. That’s true. But even a slightly more energetic you would still watch.

7. Sleep for 13 hours a day.

Steve Harvey caught some heat for saying that rich people don’t sleep eight hours a day, but he was right! If you’re rich with appropriately chilled kombucha, you don’t even get out of bed unless it’s to restock.

8. Rock crooked sunglasses when at parties.

Of course, if you’ve developed a sunlight sensitivity over the past several years—like I have—the sunglasses are practical. But when people see you, they’re not going to think, “Look at that guy with the sunlight sensitivities.” Instead, it’ll be “Look at that Appropriately Chilled Kombucha Boy living his best life. I bet he has TSA PreCheck.” And if the glasses also happen to be crooked, then they’ll think, “I know that Appropriately Chilled Kombucha Boy ain’t a pimp, but his glasses have a lean. I bet he’s carrying a Container Store gift card in his wallet.”

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

“Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation,” Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted yesterday (July 14) to her fellow women House representatives of color: Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Barbara Lee(D-Calif.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wa.), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.). Tlaib’s response was part of a Twitter storm unleashed on President Donald Trump following a series of racist tweets on Sunday (July 14) that included the sentence: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

His comments were apparently directed at Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib—three of whom were born United States citizens, while Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and came to the U.S. as a teenager—and the representatives, and their supporters, did not hold back.

On Tuesday (July 9), oral arguments begin in a case that could result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance. And as a three-judge panel at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans listens, a contingent of Americans—from youth advocates to physicians—are making their voices heard in support of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The lawsuit at the heart of Texas v. United States​ was filed February 2018 by two Republican governors and five Republic attorneys general against the federal government. “A question at the heart of the case is whether the Affordable Care Act’s mandate requiring most Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty remained constitutional after Congress eliminated the penalty as part of the tax overhaul that Mr. Trump signed in 2017,” reports The New York Times.

If the mandate is deemed unconstitutional, it leaves open the question of whether the rest of the ACA can function without it. In December, Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Texas said it could not and that the entire law must be dismantled. The appeals court hearing will now decide if O’Connor’s decision should be overturned.

Without the ACA, there would be an increase of almost 20 million people without insurance, according to Urban Institute. An additional estimated 52 million adults ages 18 to 64 could be denied coverage that they now qualify for if ACA provisions such as the mandate that people with pre-existing conditions be insured are revoked. There also would not be a cap for out-of-pocket medical costs that insured Americans would have to pay. Since the ACA was put into effect in 2014, Black and Latinx Americans have had the greatest decrease in the number of people who are uninsured. 

The fight to save the ACA is led by many groups, including the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), which today announced a rollout of digital and print ads focused on the attorneys general who filed the lawsuit.

“President Trump may call the GOP ‘the party of health care,’ but the truth is these Republican AGs are in court this week trying to sabotage health care coverage for millions of Americans,” Farah Melendez, political director for DAGA said in an emailed statement. “These health care hypocrites are attacking the critical care people in their states rely on to go to the doctor, afford prescription medication, and take care of sick kids and family members.”

Spoilers for “Pose” follow.

On Tuesday’s (July 9) episode of “Pose”—written by series creators Janet Mock and  Ryan Murphy, who also directed the episode—viewers were confronted with the brutal reality of violence against transgender women. In an interview with Deadline, Mock and Murphy discuss the way that Candy (played by Angelica Ross) died on the show.

“We were quite sure that we didn’t want it to be necessarily anchored around the epidemic of HIV/AIDS at the time,” Mock said. “Instead, we wanted to really concentrate on the epidemic of violence that trans women are facing, not just back then but today. And we wanted to illustrate what loss looks like for this community in a very deep and impactful and grounded way.”

Per the Human Rights Campaign, 13 trans women of color (all but one identified as Black) have been killed so far this year.

“We have this duty and this burden of occupying this space on television which is so accessible to millions of people, that we needed to have our viewers that were watching, who are just being introduced to this world and to these characters, that they need to also feel that loss…someone who was beloved, someone who stole scenes and someone who had these iconic moments on the show. So, because we had all these touchstones with her for 11 episodes prior, we knew she was the right person,” Mock said.

“We spent a lot of time talking about and plotting it out and working with the actors. It’s important to talk about this issue right now in our culture when so many trans women are being killed and they’re headlines. At best, they’re on page 24 in a newspaper and then the next day they’re gone and forgotten,” said Murphy. “We didn’t want to do anything gratuitous. We wanted you to know the characters, we wanted you to be invested in them. Because I feel so many times there is the trope of ‘kill your LGBTQ characters.’ Sometimes as a plot point, as opposed to a character development point.”

Read the full interview here.

Source: https://www.colorlines.com/

Marion Stokes privately recorded television twenty-four hours a day for over thirty years.

Stokes is the subject of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a new documentary that highlights her work as an archivist, but paints a complex picture of a woman who was brushed off as an eccentric for most of her life. For thirty-plus years, multiple tapes (sometimes as many as eight) would record concurrently across multiple televisions as Stokes personally watched two monitors at once.

Former librarian Stokes, who became independently wealthy through technology and real estate investments, began casually recording television in 1977 and taped a variety of programs, but thought news was especially important.

In 1979 during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, which coincided with the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, Stokes began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time. Marion single-handedly built an archive of network, local, and cable news from her Philadelphia home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died.

https://i2.wp.com/goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Recorder-Poster-Web_381.jpg?resize=101%2C150&ssl=1 101w, https://i2.wp.com/goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Recorder-Poster-Web_381.jpg?resize=203%2C300&ssl=1 203w" alt="" width="310" height="459" data-attachment-id="26499" data-permalink="https://goodblacknews.org/2019/05/05/documentary-recorder-the-marion-stokes-project-tells-story-of-marion-stokes-activist-and-archivist-who-single-handedly-preserved-over-30-years-of-tv-history/recorder-poster-web_381/" data-orig-file="https://i2.wp.com/goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Recorder-Poster-Web_381.jpg?fit=381%2C564&ssl=1" data-orig-size="381,564" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="-Recorder-Poster-Web_381" data-image-description="" data-medium-file="https://i2.wp.com/goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Recorder-Poster-Web_381.jpg?fit=203%2C300&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i2.wp.com/goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Recorder-Poster-Web_381.jpg?fit=381%2C564&ssl=1" />The taping ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Stokes passed away from lung disease at the age of 83. In between, she recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today.

“She was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions,” says the film’s director, Matt Wolf.

Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer.

From 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, (which itself was recently recovered and digitized) a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband.

Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day. Marion also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts.

“Our vision is really aligned with Marion’s,” says Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive. “It’s really bold and ambitious: universal access to all knowledge.” Marion’s son had contacted the Internet Archive when he was trying to find a home for her tapes in 2013.

Macdonald immediately seized the opportunity. Those tapes were soon donated to the Internet Archive and are still in the process of being organized and digitized.

Source: https://goodblacknews.org/

According to Variety.com, since signing a lucrative overall production deal with Netflix and after years at ABC, “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barrishas lined up his first series for the streaming giant.

Netflix has ordered the single-camera comedy “Black Excellence”from Barris, in which he will also star opposite “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” star and “Claws” executive producer Rashida Jones.

Inspired by Barris’ approach to parenting, relationships, race, and culture, the series is said to pull the curtain back and reboot the “family sitcom.” The series is reported to be similar to HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in tone.

Barris and Jones will executive produce with Hale Rothstein, who has previously collaborated with Barris on his ABC series “Black-ish” and the Freeform spinoff “Grown-ish.” Barris will produce via his Khalabo Ink Society.

Source: https://goodblacknews.org/

According to Yahoo! Sports, the first of what organizations intend to be an annual event will feature the North Carolina A&T Aggiesand Southern Jaguars at the Chicago White Sox Guaranteed Rate Field. It will join The Andre Dawson Classic as ways to promote HBCU schools, which are slowly watching their baseball programs fold.

Erwin Prentiss Hill, CEO of Black College Sports Group 360 (BCSG), told HBCU Sports he wants the event to “promote education opportunities to urban youth” who may not know of the schools or how to navigate the college admissions process.

 From HBCU Sports:

“Greatness comes from historically black colleges and universities. The bottom line is to get more urban youth back to our HBCU’s, so that talented young men and women can add to the legacy of our outstanding predominantly black universities.”

Baseball’s decline in lower-income communities

The cost of playing sports can add up quickly for families. It’s especially difficult to have to pay for a glove, cleats, bats and even uniform costs, now that there are fewer programs supported through park or school programs.

Participating on a travel team is even costlier and can require more shuttling around from parents, who might already be working multiple jobs to get by. Little League is so high-stakes it’s must-see TV in August.

Billy Witz covered the lack of African-American players on HBCU rosters Monday for the New York Times and noted the decline of baseball through the eyes of Bethune-Cookman athletic director Lynn Thompson. Thompson said places where he played sandlot ball in the 1960s were paved over for basketball courts and parking lots.

Recently, however, the percentage of black players on Major League Baseball‘s opening-day rosters in 2018 was the highest in six years at 8.4 percent. Between 2012 and 2017, 20 percent of first-round draft picks were African-American. Those numbers are in part due to MLB’s focus on its Urban Youth Academies that started in Compton, California, in 2006 and its Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, launched in 1989.

“It’s been a huge investment for us,” Renee Tirado, MLB’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, said last spring. “Obviously growing the game amongst our players is a priority, so that uptick has definitely been from a concerted effort.”

Perhaps a focus on HBCU baseball will bring those numbers even higher in the coming years.

Source: https://goodblacknews.org/

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently debuted an online database of more than 500 court cases in which enslaved persons had sued to gain their freedom. The Dred Scott case in 1857 is the most famous of such cases, but there were many more.

The project collected, digitized, and makes accessible the freedom suits brought by enslaved families in the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. African-American enslaved families accumulated legal knowledge, legal acumen, and experience with the law that they passed from one generation to the next.

The freedom suits they brought against slaveholders exposed slavery a priori as subject to legal question. The suits in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, raised questions about the constitutional and legal legitimacy of slavery, and by extension, affected slavery and law in Maryland, Virginia, and all of the federal territories.

One such case was that of Ann Williams, who leapt from the third floor window of a tavern on F Street in Washington, D.C., after she was sold to Georgia slave traders and separated from her family. She suffered a broken back and fractured her arms, but she survived.

In 2015, original documents about her came to light at the National Archives. Williams and her husband were reunited and had four more children. Then she sued for her freedom. And won. Below is a short film about her story:

The online database concentrates on cases filed in Washington, D.C. in the 1820s and 1830s. More than 100 of these cases involved enslaved persons who were represented by Francis Scott Key, the author of the “Star Spangled Banner.” As such the database is named “O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family.”

Source: https://goodblacknews.org/

Most of my thoughts in the order that I thought them while watching the second season of She’s Gotta Have It S2 E7 #OhJudoKnow on a sunny Tuesday morning in Southern California while sitting —again--  on my pink, velvet couch.  (I’m procrastinating on going to the gym.) 

For the slow folk: SPOILER ALERT!!!!! 

Wait. We’re in Puerto Rico. I’m not mad at it. But like…. How did we get here? Was a trip ever mentioned? 

LOL. Puerto Ricans hate Christopher Columbus too. They’re just like us. 

Mars needs a show on the History Channel. His take on PR history is amazing! I would watch this all day. 

And yes, America, we do need to take down the Christopher Columbus statues. Along with the rest of the confederate monuments. 

Travel note: unless it’s a dude with a proven history of good taste, NEVER let a man pick the accommodations. Men don’t have the same standards as women. 

Winny tried to slip in that handcuffs and Nutella. LOL. 

Also, his jail flashback? I love Fat Joseph Cartenga. 

Mars in day-glo swim trunks is awesome. Also, I need to know more about the tradition of the seven dips in the ocean. And this seems to be a holiday. Cause there are fireworks. Which holiday is this?

Aww. Mars vulnerability in his prayer. “I’m down to learn if you’re down to teach me.” 

Ok. They’re walking around PR giving money away to organizations in Puerto Rico. And this is dope. I’m not mad at highlighting PR, or showing what’s happening on the ground in PR. It’s interesting and the cinematography is beautiful. I’m just trying to figure out how it fits in to the actual plot of the story. 

Ok. We’re picking up the eviction storyline from like five episodes ago. 

ROSIE PEREZ looks great! 

Awww! Poor Shemecca. These butt shots are a never-ending tragedy. 

Wait. WHAT? When did Shemecca become Winnie’s girl? 

“Where did you get a pair of those hazel eyes? Jamestown?” Wait. Is that a slavery joke? 

Ma Duke says Nola and Mars are like honey and molasses. They are. I think they would be horrendous in a relationship at this point. Ain’t a bit of responsibility between the two of them. 

Mother wisdom: The paintbrush must tell the truth of who we are. You are not serving your blessing. Your blessing is to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. As an artist, I receive this. 

Wait. When did Nola’s show get confirmed? I know she was working on it, but like when did it happen? This is frustrating. 

 Free Africans in PR? What?? I need to go read. 

I love learning about the Afro-Puerto Rican culture and seeing all these beautiful, fluffy-haired black people and seeing all the Africa in Puerto Rico. And hearing this soulful music. Spike Lee is learning me something good today. And I need to go back to Puerto Rico and not just walk through Old Town and shop/eat. That said… 

There is no story here. It’s a bunch of beautiful, culture-filled scenes cobbled together. Like, if Spike wants to make a documentary about Puerto Rico as seen through the eyes of various characters he’s created over the years. I’m down for it. But doing it in the middle of another story is…. I appreciate the information. Just not the time/place for it. 

Ok. Mecca is talking about liking Winny and having issues with him running a burlesque club. But like, this conflict NEVER goes anywhere. They keep introducing conflicts and storylines that don’t go anywhere.  Whyyyyyyy?

The woman dressed as Oshun? Beautiful. And I’m probably expected to know who Oshun is, but honest to God, before everyone started making all the references after Lemonade came out, I had no real idea. Like, I knew of the orishas in theory, but not in any detail.  

Everyone keeps telling Nola that she is Oshun’s daughter and I don’t get the significance of this. I do not know what this means. I need someone in the story to spell it out for me. 

What ritual is Nola performing where she is dancing in white. I know it’s a ritual because of the white and the circle and the drums and the chanting. The lack of context is killing me here. Also, Africa is everywhere. 

Nola looks so beautiful. She’s a pretty woman. But something about travelling makes her even prettier. I thought she was extra pretty in the Vineyard scenes too.  Also, the blond in the yellow shirt is gorgeous too. 

These shots of Nola and Mars sitting by the water are amazing. People with melanin look so beautiful in white. The drone shot is amazing. 

I’m so confused by Rosie’s confession that Mars’s father is Mookie. Like you been lying to this man about his father for all these years and he has like no reaction to this? It defies logic. Like, his reaction is to have a question, then all laughs? Huh?

 Also, I get that she’s in character from Do The Right Thing for the father to be Mookie, but this is bizarre. 

I love this scene where Mars pays his respects to Roberto Clemente and other famous Puerto Ricans. 

Yeah. I just need Spike to go ahead and do a Puerto Rico documentary. Cause this was beautiful and informative, but plotless. 

Source: http://www.demetrialucas.com/dlblog/

Most of my thoughts in the order that I thought them while watching the second season of She’s Gotta Have It  S2 E9 #IAmYourMirror on a sunny Tuesday morning in Southern California while sitting —again— on my pink, velvet couch.  (I’m procrastinating on going to the gym.) 

For the slow folk: SPOILER ALERT!!!!! 

Ok. So Nola’s art show came to fruition. Look. You never know with this series. Just because something is being built up to happen, does not mean it will happen.

My God. DeWanda’s skin look amazing. Shout out to her Mama and whoever is on lighting. 

“Yennifer Clemente” looks like Beyonce circa Austin Powers.  

What is the significance of the face mask?. A guy was wearing one at the Prince Party – was that Spike?—and then someone else, the fisherman, had one on in Puerto Rico. And then now Nola has re-painted Opal’s portrait with a goddess wearing one. 

Miss Ella talking about “don’t worry about the rent” is the most illogical sh— ever. No one who is a landlord says that. 

Awesome that Rockeletta Moss has a nice looking man. But is he really “elusive”? We’ve heard no mention if her love life thus far. This isn’t a reveal to the audience, but it seems to be to Nola. I’m happy she got love in her life, but where did this come from?  I get the feeling that a lot of story was written, shot and cut this season. Time? Episodes? Slow? Something that was supposed to happen didn’t happen.

The reactions to the art behind the curtain are so varied. I guessed that it involved a lynching just because the  therapist mentioned “strange fruit”. And I guessed it was a woman because most of the men—not all—were smiling when they came out the room. 

Source: http://www.demetrialucas.com

Demetria takes reader requests for this week's topics. The result? She muses on Dionne Warwick's questionable statements about Beyonce', Jordyn Woods' first TV role on Grown-ish, Peter Gunz's 11th child, Trey Songz's baby boy, the new season of She's Gotta Have It, and how to make a transition from an old life to a new one.

“I don’t know how you ended up so bougie when we came out of the same family,” said my baby sister one day over the phone.

I was taken aback. Me? Bougie?

And yet I was. Painfully so. And had been, at this point, for several years. But I was still offended. At the time she made this comment, I was living in Washington, D.C., chasing a short-lived stint as a decidedly non-combative TV pundit. It was a cool job n’ all, but it paid zero out of zero dollars. I was, according to my tax bracket, probably the working poor. Yet I had a large basement apartment in Capitol Hill to myself, could taste the difference between a Malbec and a Cabernet, and often frequented rooftop parties in the no-longer-Chocolate City.

She told me how on TV I spoke so “proper.” Wait, what? We’re both the children of an architectural engineer and a school teacher. How am I supposed to sound? This is my real voice!

Yet, bougie. Like, look down on Applebee’s and refuse to eat there bougie. I was bougie. And no one in my family was bougie. I was raised by a man who only purchased cars made by Ford. By a woman who thought “art” was a bunch of ceramic chickens and ducks. How did this even happen? I’m from St. Louis, Mo., spent my formative years in a mostly black working class suburb and enjoy Velveeta without irony. I can’t be bougie? Can I? I just like nice shit! Like, I’m “fancy,” but not, you know, extra fancy. I put on my palazzo pants one-leg at a time like everyone else!

But, you know? I lost this battle with my sister so long ago that I just had to accept it.

Hello, my name is Danielle Belton. I am bougie.

I’m trying to remember when this became a thing.

This bougie thing.

I was not raised to be “bougie black.” I was actually raised to be a “Terminator.” Like the Arnold Schwarzenegger kind, but not murderous. Someone who could easily move around in spaces and find success without the burden of their resume getting thrown in the trash just because your first name happened to be Keisha. I was raised to be polite. And even tempered. And rational. And even slightly boring. But not a bad kind of boring. More like a predictable kind of mundanity that comes from just focusing on career or school and avoiding “The Trap” at all costs.

“The Trap” is racism.

“The Trap” is the school-to-prison pipeline.

“The Trap” is actual prison or being a statistic—like on drugs or dead or worse. I know you don’t think there’s anything worse than death, but … trust me on this one, there are varieties of hells racism can condemn you to where you’ll wish they’d just killed you instead.

But being a Terminator meant the end game was to infiltrate the spaces most black people couldn’t get into, then open all the windows and doors and let all the other Negroes in. My father was essentially this in all his years in the aerospace industry, choosing a career in management, confident in his ability to get black people hired and paid in that lily white space.

All the piano lessons and art classes and reading The Autobiography of Malcolm Xat 13 and watching all of the documentary Eyes on the Prize on PBS when I was 16 was meant to prepare me for my life of door-and-window opening. Of looking like a “harmless” kind of black, an acceptable black, a “respectable” black when in actuality I was going to take over and run everything and free us all … somehow.

My parents had a plan for me. This plan was not to turn me into Whitley Gilbert.

The Whitley Gilbert thing was a side-effect of all their hard work of emphasizing school and career at the detriment of everything else. A boyfriend? Boys are problems. You don’t need a boyfriend. Friends? Sure, you can have them, but c’mon, are you really going to alter large portions of your life for people who aren’t your family? And family? Sure, we love you and all, but we also love you enough to let you go be a successful Terminator. Can’t stand in the way of that. Move thousands of miles away from us and conquer. We’ll still be here whenever you have time.

Time.

My mother died last December from her battle with Alzheimer’s, and all I can think is I gave up living near the people I love more than anything in the world for my career, and they encouraged it. And I’d give anything for just one more day with her, so I guess I better make this career thing count. It better be a great career. The best career. And I better Harriet Tubman this shit and get someone free in the process. Otherwise, what’s the point?

But back to this bougie thing.

The first time I was in a bougie situation I was, ironically, living in the decidedly not bougie place of Bakersfield, Calif. I was invited to a house party and there was sangria. Like really fancy, nice sangria with fruit in it. Like with “Blood Oranges” and other fruits I weren’t familiar with. At the time, I didn’t really drink and was not particularly cultured when I did drink. All I knew were wine coolers and Boones Farm. Sangria? What’s that? Who drinks Sangria, I thought. God, y’all so bougie. Y’all too good for some Bartles and Jaymes.

Then I took a sip. It wasn’t bad. And being a Terminator, I knew I needed to play it cool. To act like I’d had sangria before or knew what it was when I had not and did not. I remember calling my sister, don’t remember which one anymore (I have two), and telling her about this bougie shit these white folks were doing out in Bakersfield. I was not bougie. I did not understand it. And I did not try to.

Yet, I didn’t tell them that I liked it.

Our mother, bless her soul, did not like bougie blacks.

The dislike though wasn’t a real hate. It was a pre-hate. It was this thing where you dismiss something before it can cut you off first. My mom was born into a world of sharecropping and beans every night for dinner. She chopped and picked cotton. She helped raise her seven brothers and one sister as the eldest child in the family. She still remembered how folks of better means looked down on them or called her brothers “bad” or treated her poorly. And she carried this pre-hate with her to college, where the bougie blacks were cold. Then she carried the pre-hate to St. Louis, where she would make her home and meet my father. And she still had the pre-hate long after she became who she was the entire time I knew her, up until her diagnosis of dementia.

This was a woman who dressed up in heels and makeup to bring me my gloves at elementary school when I forgot them. This was a woman who was married to a man who worked so hard and well that she didn’t have to get a job. This was a woman who always wanted to learn how to play the piano so she made all her children play the piano, even though one-third of us was vehemently opposed to it.

This was a woman who lived in a lovely mid-’90s ranch house, who didn’t worry about money, whose favorite hobby was to go to the mall and shop. She was college educated and a member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. and used to be a school teacher and was beautiful and petite and exercised constantly. She didn’t curse, always used proper English and wanted her children to do the same. She was, in fact, the ladiest-Southern-lady-to-ever-lady. We had a living room no one ever sat in and a dining room we only ate in twice a year because, she, the neat-freak, didn’t want me, our father or my sisters dirtying it up. She couldn’t use an ATM or pump gas—these were my father’s jobs. And she was the star of her family and the light of all our lives, but she was scared to death of bougie black people.

Even though, by all appearances to those who were not bougie, she lived like one.

But she was not bougie.

She was just a country girl who happened to like nice things.

The one time during my childhood she was invited to do some bougie shit, I had to beg her to go. It was for a women’s networking group in the then fancy pants, everything-named-for-horse-racing neighborhood we’d just moved into in North St. Louis County.

Back then, there were not many black families in this new neighborhood, so the few black women living there made a little club and invited her. But my mom, being my mom, missed the old working-class neighborhood we’d lived in and her old friends who were all school teachers or letter carriers or custodians. She did not trust this new group of black ladies.

My mom fretted. She hemmed and hawed. I could look in her eyes and see the fear. That old pain of rejection. But I was ambitious, even as a child. I wanted more for both myself and my mother. Even though she’d denied me when I desired to do status humpy shit as a child. Like she wouldn’t buy us name brand clothes—my baby sister and I once had to share a Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt she gave us for Christmas that both our parents made us feel guilty for even wanting. She also was opposed to me being in the National Honors Society, Inroads or Jack and Jill, or participate in a cotillion. Despite this, I still wanted this for her. If only so she’d make some friends (my mother was a charmer, but painfully shy at times). I also didn’t understand her fear, because as I child I didn’t get that whatever happens to you as a kid sticks with you forever. Those old shames. Those old hurts. Those old rejections. It didn’t matter that they all lived in the same suburb or that she was just as smart, if not smarter than those other women, or that unlike nearly every woman in that group, she was among the few who lived a life of relative leisure.

Bougie black people had this way of making all that melt away for my mother, filling her with a panic.

“What would I even talk about?” she asked me.

“Talk about your kids! Talk about politics!” I said, knowing my mother LOVED reading the newspaper, going to the library every weekend to check out more books to read and loved to argue about whatever was going on politically in this country.

My mother, after all my peer pressure, went to a grand total of one women’s networking group meeting and never went back.

Even though they had begged her to attend.

All she did was complain. And she ultimately did what she always did—she chose to reject them before they could reject her, even though most of the women had a background similar to hers. But she didn’t see that. She only saw fancy cars and designer labels, even though she, too, had nice clothes and drove a Lincoln.

When I named my old pop culture and politics blog The Black Snob, it truly was a joke. A girl I went to college with once told me that I “looked stuck up” based on how happy I looked on my 19th birthday when all my then-friends brought me presents in the school’s university center. She was pregnant at the time and only 18 and felt left out, and I was just some fancy-pants kid living that whole “not pregnant” life. Once she actually met me, she realized I was pretty chill. So chill in fact that for some reason, I constantly volunteered to watch her kid when she went out to party with our friends. Again, I was raised to be blandly predictable and safe, meaning even though there was only a year difference between us, I didn’t go to clubs, drink, smoke or do anything but go to class and run the student newspaper. Of course you could leave an entire baby with me! And at that age, I adored children and could play with them for hours.

But the whole snob thing was a joke. Originally.

Still, people made their assumptions based solely on the name and my uptight, prudish nature. Plus, I had all these random things that made me seem like I was more connected or posh than the raggedy Midwesterner I actually was. The first “sign” that I was not quite as I seemed was when I, coincidentally, met Donna Brazile during her book tour back in the early days of the Obama administration. At the time I was going through a period where I’d forgotten how to dress (it happens) and was fond of just wearing whatever was comfortable. I’d just come out of a deep depression and had lost a bunch of weight. I thought, literally, nothing of the photo I published of me meeting Brazile for the first time, but one of my readers commented that I did not look how they expected me to. Namely, I did not look like the stylish daughter of upper middle class parents, let alone someone who would call themselves “The Black Snob.” I looked like, to be honest, a giant nerd, which is what I actually am.

This was my first glimpse into what would eventually become my life—the highly competitive world of fancy-pants people who regularly went to the Obama White House and enjoyed “day parties.”

What I found was since my blog’s name alone invoked an air of superiority, people were more than happy to tell me that, they too, were “black snobs.” And I, being a Terminator, just sort of let them think that I was too, for better or worse. I eventually would move to Washington, D.C., blow a bunch of money on a slightly better wardrobe where at least I looked like I cared, and rediscovered the same girl who once argued with her parents over…well, to be honest, literally everything...as I desired more than they could ever give me, coupled with my own desire to be a highly competitive black nerd in a magical land of bougie black nerds in D.C.

What was “magical” was that since everyone was basically just a well-dressed nerd in the District, I finally, for the first time since never, felt seen and heard. People wanted to be my friend. People wanted to hear what I had to say. People wanted to get to know me, for me. My experience with the status humpers and the elites alike was not negative, as it was for my mother; it was affirming. In me they saw a sister, a friend, a colleague, a peer. Or, if nothing else, a fellow overly educated black in the land of overly educated black people. But for the first time since never, it seemed like it was a good thing to be Danielle Belton, in all her “snobbery,” whereas in St. Louis, it had been bad to be me.

St. Louis was a tough experience for me growing up. I didn’t fit in. I was ostracized and bullied in school. I was an outcast for almost my entire time living there, until college. And, again, in college, I was boring. The only “un-predictable” thing I did was join Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., which, considering both my mom and eldest sister are Zetas, shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was to people, as I’m not really a joiner, thanks to feeling like an outsider most of my youth.

But as an adult, making friends is easy, as I am chatty and sociable and people seemed drawn to me, no matter my many moods. My adult friends are a varied sort. Not all of them are bougie. Not all of them are intellectuals. Not all of them are nerds or geeks or from financially stable backgrounds. But the one thing everyone has in common is a love for learning and a fondness for nice shit.

The learning is obvious: they are all well-read and up-to-date on the latest debacle in the news. The nice shit, though, could be much more varied: a limited edition Marvel figurine or a pair of Gucci shoes; a springtime venture in France or a summer trip to Martha’s Vineyard; a delicious meal at some place you’ve never heard of or a handcrafted cocktail at some speakeasy; a first class plane ticket or a nice hotel they saved up all year for. Some are great with money. Others are in debt due to their fondness for whatever their fancy vice was. Some seem to solely survive based on the kindness of their better off friends and family. But, god, they are all easier to talk than my former childhood tormentors, who also liked various signifiers of wealth but thought that’s what made a person, not, you know, actually being thoughtful or kind.

I think if my mother had tried, she would have found that not all bougie people are terrible. Don’t get me wrong—there are plenty of shallow, ridiculous people in the world of the bougie black. I just don’t befriend those assholes. I chose to surround myself with fastidious, fabulous, fun, frank and fancynegroes, as you can find those folks in absolutely any city, any state, any place and any tax bracket.

But would my mom pre-reject me, her now bougie child? Absolutely not. I was, and will always be, the Terminator she raised and poured all her love into. I don’t think my mother ever once called me bougie, no matter how high I climbed on the black social ladder. I was just Danielle, her middle daughter, her baby. It pains me that by the time I was finally stable—financially and mentally—she didn’t really get to see it, as dementia had robbed her of her memories of me, my sisters and her husband, our father. For her, my story would forever be unfinished, me riding off to live in D.C., again, in 2013, after a brief stint at home, to a fate uncertain.

But she would never say I was bougie. Because bougie is bad and nothing that ever came from my mother could ever be bad in her eyes.

She simply created a child who liked nice shit.

She simply created herself.

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

1. Well done.

2. Home run.

3. I cried.

4. Seeing again.

5. Hulk fun.

6. Ironman, fam.

7. Captain America!

8. Slow clap.

9. Fast clap.

10. Endgame proper.

John Singleton passed Monday, April 29, 2019. After suffering a stroke that left him in a coma, his family ultimately decided to take him off life support. To say it was a life gone too soon is an understatement, especially for a figure who has had such a tremendous impact on the black community at large. I grew up in a movie family, so I became an avid watcher from a young age. And as a hip-hop head, I learned a lot, visually, about the worlds I only knew from songs, thanks to John Singleton. To that end, artistically, he is easily one of the most influential artists of my life.

When Boyz n the Hood dropped in 1991, I was 12 years old. Thanks to (and probably unbeknownst to) my older sister, I was already up on NWA and Ice Cube, an early favorite rapper of mine. But listening to those tapes and occasionally seeing music videos (I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, at the time; any videos I saw were on VHS tapes sent from cousins and family members in the States) didn’t expose me to Los Angeles and the South Central Los Angeles I’d heard about in song. Just for the record, I was an extreme L.A. hip-hop head. If it was coming out of L.A., there’s a better than 75 percent chance that I was all over it, even if I didn’t quite realize those were my tastes.

But 12-year-old me didn’t know what L.A. looked like. I didn’t get it. I didn’t truly understand any of the gang culture I’d heard or knew what the streets referenced in songs looked like. I could tell you all about Compton and the police, even though I had absolutely no real-life reference point for what the city looked like. Singleton changed all of that for me. Boyz n the Hood was a look inside South Central. It was a look at the palm trees posing as the backdrop for poverty. It was confusing. How could such a beautiful place be where the rappers said so much bad shit happened?

My first time in Los Angeles was in 2004, and I was mesmerized. I wanted to see if it looked like Poetic Justice. And I wanted to see if the streets looked like they did in Boyz n the Hood, and Baby Boy, one of my absolute faves. Because we watched a lot of movies in my family and because Spike Lee was a looming presence and because so many movies were set in New York City, and Harlem in particular, my vantage point—even if unintentional (I was young)—on most things artistically, especially black, was of New York. The black world of the South I knew because of family, and where I lived largely centered there. Singleton changed all of that. He added a setting to what I thought I knew. I could visualize the world.

I saw black stories I wasn’t familiar with. I saw a world I had heard of but couldn’t place. I saw people living like me but differently. I saw people who, up to that point, were mythical. I knew Southern black life, both city and country. And I vaguely remembered Detroit. But I was in college the first time I ventured up the East Coast and was a graduate of college by the time I saw New York City and Los Angeles in person. But the art I consumed, especially once I was looking for it on purpose, was inspired by those visuals gained as a preteen and teenager.

My favorite thing about art is how it can transport you into places you might not otherwise be able to go. It’s why I’m such an avid reader. My imagination builds landscapes and buildings that house characters. Much of that is inspired by the films I’ve seen. I saw The Color Purple as a child, and Coming to Americathe same. New Jack City, too. But those weren’t worlds that I fit into or even seemed real. Boyz n the Hood and Poetic Justice were worlds not too far removed from me, just as director Doug McHenry’s Jason’s Lyric would be when it showed me the Houston I knew from The Geto Boys.

Boyz n the Hood has been a looming influence on my life ever since I first saw it. I learned about gentrification. Every time I hear The Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” I think of Furious Styles and a young Tre in the car. Even though my grandmother lived 10 minutes driving slowly from the campus of Morehouse College and Spelman College, Boyz was the first time the schools were put on my radar. I didn’t even see the campus until I’d already decided to attend, then taken on a tour by my older sister who was living in Atlanta in my grandmother’s old house that same 10-minutes-but-world’s-away distance. Oddly, Boyz drew me to Los Angeles, convincing me that somehow, I was supposed to be from there. Art is funny that way.

When John Singleton passed away, my first thought was about how much his films, the game-changing ones, affected me. Because they did, and their influence has been present ever since. I’ve never lost the feeling of how Boyz made me feel. I’ve written about it several times for that reason. John Singleton influenced my life with his vision and storytelling and desire to spotlight the world he knew. From Boyz to Poetic Justice to Higher Learning and much later to Baby Boy, John Singleton helped me see black life from new and different perspectives, and I’ve been better for it ever since.

John Singleton, you are appreciated. Rest in Power.

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

Legendary filmmaker John Singleton was laid to rest this week after he passed away at the age of 51. Naturally, it has many reflecting on his filmography. For me, I’m specifically thinking about his most important film.

We know Singleton’s most famous works: Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice and the under-appreciated Higher Learning, a film that still rings true—just visit any predominately white college or university. But to my mind, his magnum opus came next, a film that will probably not be deeply discussed in the wake of his going to be with the ancestors, but should.

Rosewood, released in 1997, dramatizes the 1923 massacre of an all-black town in Florida. John Singleton, at the height of his powers, shines a light on something that has been kept in the dark for too long, centering themes that are as timeless as racism in America.

We know the story. An economically struggling white town is next to an economically prosperous black town. A white woman in the white town is viciously attacked in her home by a man with whom she is having an affair, and instead of allowing her husband to discover the truth, she blames it on a black man, starting a chain of events that leads to white folks destroying the all-black town.

This is Singleton’s best, most mature work. Instead of judging this woman for her misdeeds, he is intentional about exploring the way patriarchy simultaneously deifies her as a victim of domestic violence while still viewing her through the lens of misogynistic suspicion. And despite the fact that few people believe what she says (characters say as much toward the end of the film), they still use her claims as an excuse to engage in brutal violence against the black people in the film. White people are viewed as a destructive, colonizing force—they only used her claim as a reason to unleash it.

That story resonated with me. The fact that a black man would be accused of sexual assault by a white woman is something I was warned about as a kid. From the age of 15 until I went off to college, my grandmother would tell me to “leave those white girls alone.” They “had a history of screaming rape” if things went wrong, she warned me. This was the first film I’d ever seen that dramatized this black urban legend to great effect—but that is not all Singleton wanted to say.

Esther Rolle gives the best performance in the film as Aunt Sara. If a white woman had played a role with as much conviction, this performance would have garnered, at least, an Academy Award nomination. She sees what happens, knows the truth and remains quiet. When she finally speaks the truth, she is shot, killed on her porch.

Singleton masterfully shows us how the psychological trauma of racism unwittingly causes black folks to participate in and internalize the violence that is visited upon us. In his portrayal of Aunt Sara, Singleton shows us how many of our matriarchs went to their graves holding the secrets of the white families they worked for and how those secrets can hurt and, at times, kill. A great deal of research has been done that explores how hypertension, cancer and other ailments are the result of this internalization.

Rosewood is not a perfect film. The performances from some of the young actors in the cast leave much to be desired, and the movie could have been about 10 minutes shorter. But those are small quibbles. I simply do not understand how a film like Django Unchained was so successful while this shorter, more thoughtful film lost money at the box office. Perhaps it was because the former was a fantasy that did not indict white viewers while the latter told a story that happened all too often (especially during the Red Summer of 1919), and did not let its white viewers off the hook. America has not truly dealt with the race massacres that happened far too often early in the 20^th century, and this filmmaker, aware of that, did his part to raise awareness.

Source: https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/

For most of my adult life, I’ve been the kind of slim that inspired a stranger to tell me “If you could just eat a pork chop sandwich, you’d be alright!” In the fall of 2017, when my husband and I learned I was pregnant, I figured this baby would be that sandwich—but not anything more than that.

Nevertheless, during the first two trimesters or so, I snapped on anyone who attempted to tell me that I would likely “snap back” right after birth. “Don’t put that pressure on me; snapback culture is made up by Instagram anyway.” I reminded my husband, playfully at first, and then with more gravitas, that he had to stick with me no matter what. He joked back that he’d never leave me, but that he would start hiding food if it became necessary. As the pregnancy progressed—40, 50, then 60 pounds later—I would waddle down to Shake Shack on my lunch break, sometimes holding onto the wall, as people jumped out of my way.

I didn’t feel like a glowing giver of life. I felt like a sweaty blimp taking up more space on the sidewalk than was appropriate. I also felt invisible. I’d heard stories of women being hit on while pregnant, but somehow, I dodged that bullet. Once I was visibly with child, even the guy outside of my grocery store who typically asked for money averted his eyes and found another victim. (Small victory, perhaps?)

And so when someone I’d dated years ago texted to say “Hey, long time no speak,” I felt a dangerous thrill at the thought of someone who may not know I was pregnant talking to me. I couldn’t articulate why, but I also felt guilty, even if it was just a harmless text from someone who had no idea that I could no longer wear shoes with laces. We caught up on the basics and he congratulated me and my husband on my pregnancy, and I figured that was that.

As the weeks continued, we’d chat sporadically. “What books are you reading?... How was the baby shower?” and I reveled in the attention of this person unable to see my cheeks plumping, my ankles swelling and yet still able to see me, as trite as that sounds.

Eventually, as people from your past tend to do, he crossed a line. I’d like to say that I blocked his number, but I didn’t. Instead, I changed the subject and then stopped responding to his messages. Meanwhile, my husband constantly reminded me that I was beautiful, but I didn’t see what he saw. I just saw a swollen, carb-inhaling machine. Plus, he’s obligated to say it as my spouse and the person who knocked me up in the first place; how do I know it’s real? 

I gave birth to a beautiful, baby boy and for a while, our family of three was so wrapped up in each other, I didn’t care what I looked like. As the weeks went by and I settled into motherhood, like many predicted, I began to shed the weight I’d picked up.

Yet, when I met new people, I felt obligated to work into the conversation early “I just had a baby by the way.” I wanted everyone to know “This isn’t my real body; this is my body after a baby. Did I mention I just had a baby?...That’s why I look like this.”

Almost a year later, due to the demands of working by day and chasing a deceptively fast crawler at night, I am back to pre-pregnancy weight, but I feel like a deflated balloon, limp and stretched out. My navel is now a sort of valley between my abs that separated (yeah, this is totally a thing). I am softer, lacking the lean muscle mass I had before, and while I feel proud of what my body was capable of doing on my son’s birth day, there’s a part of me that wonders if I will ever feel the blissful joy of rocking a crop top without layering a jacket on top of it again.

So when Ayesha Curry, wife to one of the most recognizable professional athletes alive, author of cookbooks and also of one of my least favorite tweetsappeared on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk and said,

“Something that really bothers me and has honestly given me a little bit of an insecurity is the fact that, yeah, there are all these women throwing themselves [at Steph], but me, like the past 10 years, like, I don’t have any of that. Like I have zero, this sounds weird, but like, male attention. And so then I begin to internalize it, like is something wrong with me?... I don’t want it, but like, it’d be nice to know that…someone’s looking.”

I got it.

For a moment, Ayesha Curry wasn’t the eye-roll-inducing lady in a tax bracket light years away from me. She was a wife and mom who knew that in many ways she’d changed since she was 20. While I was having a moment, Ayesha Curry was learning what many women figured out a long time ago—whether you’re Mother Theresa or Amber Rose, you can get dragged for an entire news cycle or two.

Ayesha sat with her family, moderated by an Oprah-inspired Jada Pinkett Smith, and she did what black women have been doing for years when we get around a kitchen table; she used the safe space to share self-admitted insecurity, one only heightened by the public nature of her life. Maybe, for a moment, she forgot that while those at the table could empathize with the toxicity of snapback culture, unrealistic body ideals, the glamorous trophy that she is expected to be, and a thirsty media wholeheartedly committed to reminding the world of who hasn’t quite lost the baby weight, puerile meme-makers on the world wide web could not.

The critics saw a wealthy woman who previously complained about catcalls now complaining that she no longer had catcallers. I saw a woman envisioning her stock going down and questioning her value. They saw a woman who has it all—a beautiful family, light eyes, and an enviable career, including her own line of pots and pans, whining about attention she doesn’t need anyway. I saw a mother examining herself in the mirror wondering what we all wonder—“Do I still have it?”

I saw me.

In a world that sees nuance as nuisance, women are not allowed to both despise the man on the street that compliments your ass AND also feel invisible in the shadow of a man who is showered with adoration, praise and the attention of countless women.

But I’m noticing something I haven’t quite seen articulated yet.

Maybe the shade rooms are subconsciously realizing what they always suspected: even a handsome, wealthy and successful man isn’t the silver bullet to happiness for women, not even the alleged gold-digging NBA wives. Maybe women are beings with passions and insecurities that a ring and Instagram followers can’t squelch. Maybe, just maybe…women are people too.