What you see in the artist’s latest is a function of what you bring to it
The video for Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” may not shock everyone who encounters it, but I think it’s safe to say that it is shocking to most people who encounter it. I find this shock largely amusing, but then I’m a Prince fan who played Dungeons & Dragons in the ’80s. I’ve seen this kind of pearl-clutching before.
Everything about Lil Nas X is hilarious and his resting smirk face suggests even he thinks so. He knows what he’s doing with his music, and his videos, and his presence, and he doesn’t care that you…
To kill a word, you first have to kill an idea
The last time somebody called me a n****r, I was on holiday.
I’d just arrived in Skopje, North Macedonia, innocently searching for something to get the taste of airline food out of my mouth, when I heard a shout from across the street:
“Hey! You! Uh… you are n****r.”
I looked over and saw a boy, no more than 18 years old, sitting on his bike. He waited for my reaction, his foot poised on the pedal in case I decided to chase him. I hadn’t provoked him. He was half my size, his English was barely up to the…
This Week in Racism
It’s an embarrassment of riches in our weekly roundup of the world’s most preventable disease!
Death and taxes used to be the only two certainties in life. But no matter how much progress it feels like we’re making sometimes, the sad fact is you can probably slide racism into that list. Are we in a moment of uprising that feels like it has the potential to create real, systemic change? Yes. Do people and organizations still show their ass on a daily basis? Oh, most definitely. And to keep tabs on all that ass-showing, we created a weekly racism surveillance machine. …
The Only Black Guy in the Office
Stimmy envy is too real
One of the first rap songs I ever learned the words to was “Mo Money Mo Problems” by the Notorious B.I.G. Even as a young’un, I was fascinated by the hook Kelly Price sang: “I don’t know what they want from me / It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.”
That song came out in 1997 when I was still a kid living under my parents’ roof with nary a bill to pay; the only problems I had involved arithmetic. But growing up with two parents who worked blue-collar jobs, I did know that…
If more organizations follow the NAACP’s lead, they may be able to force the propaganda network to do better
Last week, the NAACP wrote a letter to the NFL making a request for the good of humanity: stop giving money to fucking Fox News.
Okay, that wasn’t their exact phrasing, but it captures the spirit close enough. And who could fault them? No matter how much you want to pretend Fox News doesn’t exist, the propagandist network is indeed growing more dangerous by the day, and more organizations need to confront that reality. No matter the issue — race relations, the 2020 presidential election, or the ongoing pandemic — day and night they bombard their viewers with racism, sexism…
It was a year of loss, but that’s not the only thing he’ll learn
In March 2020, my wife and I went on our last date outside the house. Here’s the story I want to tell my son about that night and all that happened during his first year of life.
Your mother and I hit up Samantha’s Tap Room in Little Rock’s River Market District and feasted on a quail appetizer, steak, and pasta. We’d been watching the news and realized this could be our last time enjoying dining out because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s the dating activity we enjoyed most.
I sipped wine and tried to savor this last night together…
We thought we could save people’s lives with the manna to be found in books — and they only got better over time
I began my journey into activism alone, a freshman at Ohio State University, still part of the city in which I was raised but a world away from everything I had known. I don’t think I was on campus a month before attending my first proper Black student event. As the African drumming and dance was winding down, I noticed a table full of books manned by a tall Black man in a suit and bowtie. I knew next to nothing about Black Muslims or the Nation of Islam and so struck up a conversation with the seller. …
Black Cuomo supporters are trying to paint a parallel between Emmett Till, the Central Park Five, and New York’s governor. No, seriously.
One of the greatest weapons of systemic racism in America is the allied minds of Black people. In colloquial terms, sometimes it be your own people.
Albany, New York was a lava pit of exemplification last week, when the fight over whether New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should leave office after several accusations of sexual misconduct — the most recent and damning coming from his current aide — turned disrespectful. In an attempt to dissuade the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee from sanctioning an impeachment against Cuomo, Black supporters within the Democratic Party used analogies that were offensive to…
Two years ago, I debated the ex-‘Good Morning Britain’ host — and he was exactly who you’d think
This month, Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan clashed on air with three Black people — his colleague, Alex Beresford, and two GMB guests — over his dismissal of Meghan Markle’s charges of racism in the royal family. Royalist Morgan was determined not to let a pesky inconvenience like white supremacy spoil his whitewashed view of England’s first family. In the space of two days, he was roundly rebuked on his show by all three, ultimately quitting GMB.
Watching the trio of YouTube clips sparked an uncomfortable flashback for me. Two years ago, I had my own on-air encounter with…
A White man’s bad day is never victimless. A White man’s bad day is terror.
Last Wednesday, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s department in Cherokee County, Georgia, stood in front of reporters to explain why Robert Aaron Long had killed eight people — six of them Asian women. “He was pretty much fed up,” Baker said, “and kind of at [the] end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Really. Bad. Day.
Given the fact that Baker himself once released racist anti-Asian merch, his implicit sympathizing with a mass murderer wasn’t even off-brand. Still, you don’t have to be that blatant of…
