Are we talking about black people globally, descendants of enslaved Africans, or Black Americans? It seems like a strange line in the sand, but it is easy to be myopic about the black experience and to laser focus on African Americans and not the whole diaspora. 

But in order to be globally black, we need to read more.

Listen closer when you disembark in the Caribbean and are greeted by the steel drum band played by musicians with bright black skin and smiling faces. Their songs that make you think of serenity and love, may just be love and activism. Not only are they musical revolutionaries, they might be telling you something.

Tribalism and belonging to a tribe are two different things. Belonging to a tribe means a community , while tribalism means that anyone outside of the group is a potential threat. Having a tribe is to have a family. Tribalism is to belong to a cult. The tribe should never trump our unique selves.

Love is not seen as war, but love is war and has always been. Sade’s “Soldier of Love” is a better explanation than this diatribe, but the lesson is that love is work and true lovers are warriors.

Donnie is part of my spiritual pantheon–an artist who moves in love.

What does it mean to be internationally famous before the first crawl, the first word, the first step?

There’s a difference between looking a person up on social media and looking them up in a police database. It felt like an abuse of his power. 

You can’t be a creative without that flash of desire to freeze the moment, everything from the sunlight to the croaking frogs (or the honking cars), and try in some way to bottle it. On paper, on canvas, or on a plate.

Christianity is supposed to be a balm for the Africans, the holy claim that all men are equal under God. But under man? Another story.

Yes, you’re selfish beyond comprehension. Oh wait, not you, look next to you. Yeah them.

Dear White People is more nuanced and clever than many people–who’ve resisted it before seeing it–believe. It’s not a long rant about racism, it is a probing look into which issues are straw men, which are still relevant, and which ones we haven’t even addressed yet.

Digital formats of African graphic novels and comics, as well as making many of them free and easily accessible to a diasporic audience, these writers, artists, and publishing companies are bringing their audience to a home

Stop clutching your pearls–I’m going to both vindicate and chastise you.

The city devours. Any city. All cities. That shit ain’t new for black folk.

The Umbrella Academy has joy in its dysfunction.

Without a cultural fantasy, foreign food is just seen as peasant food.

The Arconia is the true murderer.

Juneteenth is finally recognized as a national holiday and I feel meh. I should be thrilled—the first new and BLACK holiday since Martin Luther King Day.

The patrons cry easily into their food as they battle their past in the touching television show, Midnight Diner.

Where’s Gen X?