Cop Brutality: @Memphis and Nigeria’s #EndSARS
My Memphis trauma revolves around the universe of Wiley Benton who was one of twelve children born to my maternal great grandparents, Bud and Lettie Bernette Benton…
The Incalculable Costs of California’s Mass Shootings
My closest confrontation with gunfire came at the end of what started out a normal workday. Decades back when my seventeen years of teaching middle school…
Disparaging Black American Culture in a Vague Economy
In his recent article, “Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap,” Columbia undergrad Coleman Hughes argues that activities which he regards as Black-American cultural traits…
Haiti and the US-Mexico Border
I wanted to leave Los Angeles and go to the US-Mexico border. Not 25 miles away, more like 120. I’d read about the Haitian migrants who’d made their way to the border after walking from Brazil.
Nipsey, Kobe, and PTSD in Los Angeles
The city had fatigued the soul, and we didn’t even know it. The mileage from here to there. The distance from car to car. The traffic from heart to heart is immeasurable…
How Kanye’s Jesus is King Sidelines the Liberation of the Oppressed
The latest creation from Kanye West doesn’t advocate for the liberation of oppressed people, if selections from the album, “Jesus is King,” and the pop artist’s promotion of it are used as evidence…
African Americans Move to Nicaragua
Given persistent economic inequality and disproportionate mass incarceration, in the twenty-first century African Americans require territory for a national homeland. Malcolm X is the most prominent of recent embodiments of this desire conceived of by Black Americans…
Absent African American History and a History of Frederick Douglass
On my most recent travels to Washington, D.C. I didn’t cross the Anacostia River to visit the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site which was the home of the former slave and iconic abolitionist, orator, and writer…
Descarado Brazil
Entre maneras menos flagrantes para matar a Marielle Franco existía la posibilidad del suicidio de sus antepasados Africanos. Durante su esclavizada travesía marítima, ellos podrían lanzarse a las profundidades del Átlantico en forma de cadaveres de alga marina y la semilla de Marielle nunca se hubiera establecida en tierra brasileña…
Blatant Brazil
There were less blatant ways to kill Marielle Franco/Foremost being before her African ancestors made their captured voyage to shore/they could have simply jumped ship into the depths of the Atlantic as seaweed carcasses/and her seed would have never settled in your soil…
Black Women Won’t Save the World
Despite pronouncements to the contrary, Black Women won’t save the world. Notwithstanding the circumference of the Cradle of Civilization in South Africa nestled in a locale from which all human beings originate; regardless of the excavations in Ethiopia of both Lucy and Ardi marking the evolution of homo erectus and what that signifies to the world in the evolutionary flowering of life, the act of waiting 27 years in a Mandela-like manner is far beyond the dexterity of even the most steadfast amongst us…
Meek Mill Didn’t Get Killt (Nonfiction in 3 Voices)
Voice 1: In the land of curt consolations, one that is most apparent is that Meek Mill didn’t get killt although surely that could have happened in the City of New York which garnered a recent reputation for snuffing the life out of the big man selling loosies on Long Island or the youngin confined to Rikers Island based on allegations of stealing a backpack the soul of whom was stolen from him so much so that he committed suicide…
Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and Controlling Black Bodies in the Americas
In 1770 the Municipal government of the Louisiana Territory then under Spanish rule stated it was permissible in the Territory for the Europeans to trade tobacco for African slaves. On July 17, 2014, in the formerly-liberal now neoliberal bastion of New York City, money capital of the overdeveloped world, and once the prime destination for Blacks leaving the Reconstruction South, there was no law permitting a black man to sell individual tobacco cigarettes on the street, indeed, based on city legislation, it was strategically inconceivable and legally impermissible for a black man to do so…
The Charleston Nine, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Art of Jacob Lawrence
One soul, hundreds, thousands may hear the whistle of the early-1900’s train in Jacob Lawrence Number #5. These are W.E.B. Du Bois’ “black refugees” who decades prior were also escaping the injustices of the vestiges of Southern slavery…
Cool Black Friend
At nine-percent of the city’s population and falling, living in multifarious communities throughout the City and County, Black people in L.A. have numerous opportunities to be the “Cool Black Friend.” Opportunities abound on city streets, on school and college campuses, in the workplace, on Hollywood screens, in the music industry, and at the club…
Foreign Whips and Detroit’s Decline
Inherent in Detroit’s zenith were forewarnings of its decline. Positioned as one of several U.S. magnets, Detroit drew in hundreds of thousands of desperate workers from disparate regions of the country. It was a terminus for black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South, as well as European immigrants new to America…
Audrey Shipp 