fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
[Ed. note: Today (March 3, 2016) is the 25th anniversary of the beating of Rodney King by police officers. No single event of police violence has had a greater effect on me. I still can’t watch the video anymore. Before Twitter, hashtags, and #BlackLivesMatter, there was Rodney King, recorded old-school on video tape. It gave the world a glimpse…
From the Oompa Loompas, we learned the following: Who do you blame when your kid is a brat, pampered and spoiled like a Siamese cat? Blaming the kids is a lie and a shame. You know exactly who’s to blame: The mother and the father! At age 16, Ethan Couch killed four people while driving…
The homophobia that Joe Morgen, Duke Ellington’s publicist, possessed only reflected the homophobia of the society at large in the late 1950s. Around the time the New York Times ignored Strayhorn in its review of Such Sweet Thunder, a move undoubtedly engineered by Morgen, the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s daily, published a series of articles and…
Bebop hit the scene in the early 1940s and grew as the decade progressed. Rhythm and blues got more attention as the 40s rolled to a conclusion. Thus, by 1950, club owners began booking smaller R & B combos and jazz joints booked bebop combos. It was cheaper to pay 4-6 musicians than a large…
The teenage girl body slammed by former Deputy Sheriff Ben Fields at Spring Valley High School in Richland County, South Carolina recently lost her mother and is in foster care. In other words, she’s already in one institutional system and now, thanks to her trumped up, over-the-top arrest, she’s in another. Her foster mother has said…
The horrific shooting that took place at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina cannot be allowed to exist in isolation. It happened in of one of the oldest black churches in the country, the site of past racial violence. No doubt the killer, Dylann Storm Roof, knew this. The Daily Beast quickly put together a…
I went to a talk by legendary former South African jurist Albie Sachs the other day. He spoke about his role in bringing marriage equality to South Africa. Albert “Albie” Sachs was born in South Africa and early in his youth, he explained, he began resisting the racist apartheid government of his country. For his…
A long-lived urban legend states that cities have a quota system in place for parking enforcement officers. One retired traffic officer in LA recently said that this is no legend, but a hard fact. In particular, says the retired officer, at the end of the year, when the LA Department of Transportation is preparing to close…
After the first instance of racially motivated violence during Selma, I wanted to start shouting “Black Lives Matter.” I held my tongue, so as not to disturb others in the theater. But I wondered if others in the audience saw the obvious connections between the racial violence of 50 years ago and the violence we’ve…
My husband and I went to dinner last night at one of our favorite restaurants in Berkeley. On the way, we saw a group of about 8 or more motorcycle cops gathered at a corner gas station just down the block from where we were going. As we waited for the light to change so…
