an underrated kind of guy is the 35-to-50-year-old man who brings a really high quality remote-control car to the park by himself and plays with it for a couple hours then goes home without talking to anybody. Toy Car Guys are the spiritual opposite of Drone Guys.
American Blackness is fascinating. The first Usher Raymond was just an usher named Raymond. But the fourth Usher Raymond? Global R&B and Pop sensation and superstar
Weird fact of the day: when asked to match these two nonsense words and shapes, the vast majority across most cultures call the first “Kiki” and the second “bouba”, including babies as young as four months:
If I could time travel I’d just go around giving $20 bills to black people in the 30s, set them up for life, come back to like 6 more black elite families with mysterious lore
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un
Imam Jamil Al-Amin has transitioned. His speech at the Free Huey conference helped start my politicization and my dive into the Black Radical Tradition. I am saddened that he was kidnapped and forced to spend his final years in imprisonment.
Lupita Nyong’o pulls back the curtain on the type of roles she was offered following her Oscar win:
“After I won the Academy Award, you’d think, ‘I’m gonna get lead roles here and there.’ [They’re like], ‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award. There were think pieces of ‘Is this the beginning and end of this dark-skinned black African woman’s career?’ I had to deafen myself to all these pontificators because, at the end of the day, I’m not a theory— I’m an actual person. I’d like to be a joyful warrior for changing the paradigms of what it means to be African and if that means I work one job less a year to ensure that I’m not perpetuating the stereotypes that are expected of people from my continent, then let me do that.”
The black music discourse that’s beginning on this app is going to drive me insane….. please please please stop there’s room for all of us. Stop asking people to be funk jam bands, you don’t want that and it’s ahistorical