Writer, editor and storyteller. I have a lot of shoes and opinions.
In the predawn quiet before the world reanimated itself, my phone lit up, announcing an incoming call from a friend I absolutely love. She’s an early riser like me, so we have high-energy conversations at obnoxious hours of the morning when everyone else is still asleep. But I was on deadline this particular day, so I…
Weeks ago, as social media alerts from Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department ignited an outcry about the number of missing black girls in the District, we witnessed the synergism of our community at work.
There’s a young woman who lives on the first floor of my apartment building. She’s cute, probably in her mid-20s, although life has prematurely etched the signature of age across her face and carriage.
So many presidents tried it.
It started as a collective expression of pride. A group of young women at the School for Creative Studies in Durham, N.C., decided to wear head wraps—also called geles—to align with and honor their culture at the start of Black History Month.
Instead, they say, administrators warned that they were in violation of the…
She was born in Notasulga, Ala., but she didn’t like the way her story started, so she rewrote it and claimed Eatonville, Fla., as her birthplace instead. She wasn’t too partial to 1891, the year her mother delivered her, so she remixed it, and for the rest of her life, she took liberties with the mathematics of her…
Dear Former Employer,
How long has it been since you wrote a letter? Not an inbox message, not an email, not a mega-marathon text that breaks itself up into five installments, but a dear-you, love-me letter? The Beautiful Project, a Durham, N.C.-based collective shifting how black women and girls see themselves and how they’re portrayed in…
In A Burst of Light, her aptly titled collection of essays, Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
She had soulful eyes. Her face was an effortless kind of pretty, accented by a sunny-bright smile and a soft, suede complexion. But in all of the photos of Cherica Adams—those throwback pictures of her with beehived, sky-touching hair, the signature style of the ’90s that she’d have probably rather forgotten she’d…
Listening God,
When the murderer who embodied evil visited his bloodthirst on the good people gathered at Emanuel AME, a 5-year-old girl saved herself by lying motionless on the floor, pretending to be dead so that she could live. In the familiarity of a church where she’d been blanketed in love, she witnessed the…
When the compressed frustration of black folks spills over into physical expressions of both rage and outrage, the resulting images can be jarring. It looks like chaotic crazy, not the least bit by accident, because mainstream media absolutely loves getting hold of a story, splicing together some footage and wringing…
At the beginning of the year, the viral video of the moment that everyone was talking about showed an unsupervised boy wreaking all kinds of hell inside a Tallahassee, Fla., Dollar General store. For three recorded minutes and the untold number before he was on camera, he smacked plastic trash cans and laundry baskets…
Like many sisters, Wykesha Reid looked in her mirror and longed for a bigger butt. Nature had carved her curves, but she thought that enhancing what she’d already been gifted with would make her even more attractive. Her family says she visited a salon in Dallas for a first, then a second and then a third round of…
It’s a son forced to hold a stack of books over his head until he’s in pain as punishment for stealing.
It’s a girl wearing a “shame shirt” to school for bringing home bad grades.
It’s an old-man, Sherman Hemsley-esque haircut for a misbehaving boy.
It’s an underperforming student strolling a busy city intersection…
Moses couriered 10 commandments for every Christian to honor, but women in the black church have always operated under an additional set of implicit rules. The learning of them starts when we’re little girls: Don’t sit with your legs crossed because that’s grown, but don’t sit with them too far apart because that’s…
I am the daughter of Marie. The granddaughter of Mildred. The great-granddaughter of Ida. The great-great-granddaughter of Lula Mae. The niece of Virginia, Barbara and Janet. The object of affections showered by no fewer than 10 church mothers who smiled encouragement during my garbled Easter recitations and put…
Black girl magic is a magnetic power. It’s the phenomenal-woman effect that draws attention and makes the world watch for us.
What we wear. How we wear it.
What we say. How we say it.
What we listen to, what we watch, what we read, what we buy. Our brilliance shapes trends.
Media industrialists who churn out…
In Washington, D.C., as in many cities undergoing extreme urban makeovers, if you miss a week of moving about in certain neighborhoods, you’ll miss a whole heck of a lot. Sad times for you if you’re a landmark driver like I am, when even a short trip on familiar streets can induce a fog of confusion. Buildings go down…
When I told a friend I was writing a story on depression, he asked, “What about it?”
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