Brazilian soccer player, Neymar’s application to Wakanda is under review. Is Neymar black? Negro please… Is being black relative? Only if you think you aren’t… again, Negro [Neymar] please… If some authority figure is obstructing your pursuit of happiness, you’re probably black. If you find yourself being ignored, marginalized, criminalized, incarcerated, profiled, dead, you are black etc… if a banana is thrown at you in a soccer match, it ain’t because you look hungry. Yo, you black! Although Neymar’s sentiments likening himself to an ethnicity which he isn’t is nothing profoundly new, it is still disappointing. Black people throughout the diaspora in all  hues of color are still confounded by…

A Fine Young Cannibal A fine young cannibal was walking through the woods and came up on a missionary trapped high in the tree. He yelled, “How’d you get up there? she said, I’ve been up here for two days and three nights. I’m hungry, thirsty and tired. I need some help to get down.” She explained, she’d been there endlessly with a lion circling below waiting for her to come down. But the lion had grown impatient with cleaning his paws and stretching its jaws while waiting for her to come down or fall. The lion eventually left and there she was up the tree and starving. And along…

Faces at the Bottom of the Well Derrick Bell authored a metaphorical polemic on race and struggle titled, “The Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence of Racism”, published in 1992. The book is a collection of allegorical narratives that conflates the composite of orthodox  racial thinking, and the structural/institutionalized racial plutocracy beneficial for those inherently reserving that power. “The Space Traders” aliens arrive on earth with wealth and solutions to prosperity, but will trade only if the nation can a depose of a commodity in return. “The Afrolantic Awakening” discovers an island of abundance where life thrives only skin deep. “The Racial Preference Licensing Act” enacts and…

At one point in my life I wrote for lack of a better description a “Love” poems, full of yearning and similes . I was doing a deep cleaning of files and ran across a lost poem of which I assumed some great poet had written.   A Season of Hearts  Words fall like leaves And a gentle wind blows at my heart Words fall like leaves And a gentle breeze softly touches me Words fall like leaves And a gentle wind takes me Words fall like leaves And a gentle wind moves and caresses my floating body Words fall like leaves And a gentle wind places me softly on…



Suburbs Nothing saps your energy like the suburbs! You become complacent and walk in the shadow of  anger; you are castrated by the mundane sameness of each. I look down the cul de sac and I see no one….I feel indifference coming from house to house. The only way I know someone cares is when some unknown unseen person’s dog shits in my yard. This stirs my civil action and energized my civil unrest…. I dare someone invade my pursuit of nothingness. I dare someone come into my space and shit “by golly” on me. I find more emotional connection to this place when some unknown dog shits on my…

    It stung like a jolt of lightning as she slapped me into reality. Denise was in isolation to keep the infectious bacteria from spreading. Dr Ashby or Dr Scott came early that morning, and said to my father, “she’s gone”; Denise was only four. Many years later, my mother shared that two children in the neighborhood had died, because they did not have their diphtheria shot. A boy had not had his and my sister was the other. “Nisey”, had gotten one shot, but not the other. It was a day filled with crisis, but for me at the age of six, I would experience the compression of…

With Impunity The Rape of Recy Taylor Excerpt from, The New York Times Obituaries – Recy Taylor “The next evening, Mrs. Taylor faced new threats: White vigilantes set her porch on fire. The following day, she and her husband, Willie Guy Taylor, and their daughter, Joyce Lee, moved in with her father and siblings. Mr. Corbitt, her father, would sleep in a chinaberry tree in the backyard, watching over the family while cradling a double-barreled shotgun, going inside to sleep only after the sun rose.” Inherently, cast as inhuman and lacking mental or moral judgement the Negro is regarded as property and a non-being. It seems that from the earliest…

  Based on “Ballad for Sad Young Men”, by Roberta Flack. Rising with the dawning sun Never seeing the receding light I sing a song for sad young men Crying dry tears of wine and rye Lost in their youthful years I sing a song for sad young men With mothers crying rootless tears Crying out a song for sad young men Sagging in their youth, bending under their aimless ways And mothers aching for lost sons Feeling the hurt below their feet With open graves waiting for the young I sing a song for sad young men And overgrown plots in the drenching rain I cry a song for sad…

cinéma vérité Documentary storytelling in which the lens is left open allowing for the subject or subject-matter to tell the story without the intervention of person capturing the story. Realism, not artificially manipulated; the subject is left to tell the story in their own voice. Cinéma vérité, sometimes simply “direct cinema,” its goal was essentially the capturing of the reality of a person, a moment, or an event without any intervention or arrangement before the camera. However, as unobtrusive the genre and style of storytelling, cinéma verity is produced and manipulated through focus of the lens held and directed by the person behind the lens, who ostensibly frames the storytelling. Their perspective and prejudices predicate the telling of the story with…