Another musical legend is gone. On August 16, the news dropped that Aretha Franklin made her transition at 76-years old after having suffered from pancreatic cancer. Even though the news wasn’t sudden, it was still daunting, the impact reverberating as deeply as the soul-stirring music and transporting vocals with which she left us. In true […]

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I had been wanting to write about immigration for a while now, but everytime I sat in front of my laptop, I came up short. I knew my angle would criticize the way our government is handling the situation, but my frozen fingers were a result of a something else: I wasn’t sure exactly what […]

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My mother doesn’t drive on the freeway. From as early as age nine, I remember her avoiding the freeway like the plague; and when asked her reason, she proclaimed it was because of her anxiety. Of course I shook my head, now shamefully, and just thought she was over-exaggerating. If you know my mother, then […]

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This past October, with our children, my husband and I visited Israel, his homeland. We had been planning this trip since the conception of our relationship. It was one of the few non-negotiables of being in a relationship with him (kidding, but not). I was initially opposed to the idea because of the perception of […]

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It seems the palava surrounding the question of whether or not Barack Obama did his due for black folks during his presidency has resurfaced. Was he truly for the people, or was he more concerned with preserving his legacy? While I wouldn’t say that the latter was his sole objective, I also don’t believe that […]

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I hate to sound like a pessimist, but taking down statues that represent the Confederacy will do nothing to assuage America’s race problem. This is not to say that I believe that they should be kept erect; there are several reasons, which I’ll express, why they should be taken down; however, I am not sure […]

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Many have heard President Trump’s reaction to the domestic terrorism that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th. Many are also lambasting his reaction, claiming that it lacked sincerity and empathy. Many are enraged about his audacity to compare the white supremacists’ actions to the counter-protesters’. But, one of the most common censures was Trump’s […]

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On Saturday, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of white nationalists banded together and decided that they wanted to relive a time period that inflicted some of the most monstrous pain and torture against this great nation’s black people. This time, though, with Trump-era gumption at their helms, they decided to reenact “Strange Fruit” America, un-hooded. […]

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When I became pregnant with my first born, I was equal parts excited, anxious, and in love. As time went on, however, the latter, the heart-squeezing feeling of being in love turned into suffocation. I was downright afraid and worried about events that I would have never foreseen before becoming pregnant. Things that were not […]

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I remember going home to Detroit one summer to visit family and being met with a place I didn’t recognize. My family and I went downtown one night, per usual, hoping to chop on some Coney Island or Greek cuisine and couldn’t help but notice it. That “it” was the sea of white folks in a Detroit that statistically is pretty damned black.

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