• The Life I Planned at Eight

    As I lay in bed contemplating my existence, a random thought floated into my mind: did I ever actually want to get married, or was that desire planted there by society? When I was a little girl, I had big plans for myself. I wanted to be a lawyer—specifically a prosecuting attorney—so I could lock…


  • What is Feminism?

    Feminism is the radical, sometimes inconvenient idea that women are fully human—with minds of their own, bodies that belong to them, and lives that are not side quests in someone else’s story. Feminism is about autonomy. At its core, feminism says women deserve political, economic, social, and personal equality. Not favors. Not protection. Not pedestal…


  • Adults

    Grown folks will stomp your spirit down to the bone if you let them. Adults come loaded with agendas, unhealed wounds, power plays, side-eyes, and opinions they swear are facts but don’t know their asses from a hole in the wall. Everybody wants something. Everybody’s dumb and proud of it. I’m tired of their dirty…


  • It’s Okay to Cry

    Forty-seven years ago, my mother had just gotten out of the hospital. She had been diagnosed with diabetes, and if my cousin Cleo hadn’t taken her in when she did, she would have slipped into a diabetic coma and died. That’s the part that still makes my chest tighten, even now. While she was hospitalized,…


  • The Madonna/Whore Complex and Black Folks

    The Madonna/Whore Complex is already a cracked mirror. When you angle it toward Black people, the glass doesn’t just crack—it shatters, because race rewires the whole thing. Quick grounding: the Madonna–Whore Complex is the psychological habit (popularized by Freud, refined by feminists) of splitting women into two moral bins. One is pure, nurturing, worthy of…


  • The Social Construct of Masculinity

    Masculinity is a social construct—and that doesn’t make it fake. It makes it designed, like money, borders, or the concept of “professionalism.” Real in its effects. Invented in its rules. Biology gives us bodies: hormones, muscle distribution, voices that drop or don’t. That’s the raw clay. Masculinity is what societies sculpt out of that clay…


  • Happy Thanksgiving

    Earlier this year, I learned that I had a mass in my right breast and had to have an immediate following mammogram. When I received the abnormal results, I put it away in the part of the brain where you put information that you’re not ready to deal with but late at night, I would…


  • The Normalization of Foolishness

    I will be 55 years old next month if the creek don’t rise, and I’ve never seen such foolishness from a standing president of the United States in my whole damn life. And people are acting like this shit is normal. Somewhere along the way, we got desensitized. Outrage fatigue set in. Every new scandal,…


  • Scrambled Eggs, Lightly Dusted

    I’ve been watching MeTv Toons for over a year and whenever I hear the familiar voices of Magilla Gorilla, Woody Woodpecker, and so many others, I’m taken aback to living at 7246 South University back in the seventies. I am a little girl again. It’s Saturday morning and I’m nagging my mother to make me…


  • A Message for My People

    Most Black folks are regular people. We go to work and take care of our families. We have regular friends and family members. We live in regular neighborhoods. We lead regular lives. I know that the social media has destroyed the brain cells of so many people and got them thinking stupid shit but damn.…