Earl Simmons channelled his pain into his art — and forever changed the world along the way
The largest angels rarely live the longest. For centuries, intellects and clergymen from the Eastern Hemisphere have spoken on existence being dictated by purpose. It’s been said throughout a myriad of cultures that once a person has completed his or her education, as student and teacher, their time in human form expires. Wherever your spiritual philosophies lie, Earl “Dark Man X” Simmons being a gift not only to music, but, more importantly, to the society of music lovers should be universal comprehension. Yes, the present was DMX’s presence. Moreover, the gift was a sum of his God-given gifts. …
Black Cuomo supporters are trying to paint a parallel between Emmett Till, the Central Park Five, and New York’s governor. No, seriously.
One of the greatest weapons of systemic racism in America is the allied minds of Black people. In colloquial terms, sometimes it be your own people.
Albany, New York was a lava pit of exemplification last week, when the fight over whether New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should leave office after several accusations of sexual misconduct — the most recent and damning coming from his current aide — turned disrespectful. In an attempt to dissuade the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee from sanctioning an impeachment against Cuomo, Black supporters within the Democratic Party used analogies that were offensive to…
On the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I choose to appreciate the gifts given in the craziest year of my life
In all transparency, I spiraled at the onset of the 2020 pandemic. To be obsessed with clarity and void of valid answers is to be crazed. At the time, the words of the country’s president and medical experts were incongruent. Nurses and doctors who I called friends were also clueless, and more tired. By the second week of March, I had taught my first writing course for less than two weeks before COVID-19 shut down all NYC schools. The…
The film ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ illuminates Lady Day as an activist the U.S. government was determined to silence
Many would find it difficult to believe that it was necessary for an Emmett Till anti-lynching bill to be presented to the U.S. Senate in 2020. The bill, which came 83 years after the introduction of the first bill intended to ban lynching, has yet to be passed. The first legislation proposed to outlaw lynching was written during the peak of the Jim Crow era — that post-slavery period when White people demeaned, oppressed, tortured, and killed Blacks whenever inclined. Their go-to method of murder was hanging by noose — at times, above of an audience of men, women, and…
H-Town has a climate problem—and Bun B says the only solution is switching from red to blue
The weather in Texas this month has been more than just wintry—it’s been deadly. The calamities began in the state’s northern region on February 11, when Fort Worth temperatures dropped to the mid-twenties, freezing the I-35W expressway and causing a 100-vehicle collision. Several people died; dozens more were hospitalized. The crash was only the beginning of a hellish couple of weeks that left Houston — conditioned for average February lows in the forties — without electricity, gas, or water. Some locals went without power for several hours. More went without for several days.
Houston hasn’t been colder since 1989, when…
Movie studios and actors profit from the pain and names of political prisoners but rarely lend a hand in their fight
In 2018, the house in which Fred Hampton was assassinated went into foreclosure. Since then, his son, Fred Hampton Jr., who was still weeks away from being born when his father was killed in 1969, started a GoFundMe campaign to save his family’s Illinois home. By early February, “Save the Hampton House” had yet to reach its goal of $350,000. Promotion for the movie Judas and the Black Messiah, which chronicles the events leading up to the Black Panther chairman’s death was in full bloom. …
Stanley Nelson’s Netflix documentary opened my eyes to how much Black and Hispanic women were preyed on by the American government
If you haven’t seen Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy on Netflix, you’re missing out on the most powerful documentary of this new year. Stanley Nelson’s film does a masterful job of contextualizing the crack era of the ’80s by highlighting both its roots and branches — from the White House to inner-city street corners. Much of the information Nelson doles out isn’t new. It’s widely known that the crack-cocaine epidemic was the brainchild of then-President Ronald Reagan to keep alive some ego-driven loyalty to Nicaraguan drug dealers. I knew it was supported by both Republicans and Democrats. …
The LEVEL Man at 40
Daniel Baker developed his gifts. Desus Nice gave them to the world. Now it’s time to expand.
When your moniker is Desus Nice, you can’t afford to be mediocre. You’ve got to be quicker, wittier, more aware of and conversant with the surrounding world. You’ve got to be able to distill information, to disseminate your born knowledge to those not as learned or perceptive. You have to speak the language of your audience while raising their bar. A high-wattage smile doesn’t hurt either.
These are the attributes Daniel “Desus Nice” Baker had to accrue in order to make a living being himself. …
The luxury fashion house tried to appropriate Caribbean culture and instead disrespected Black history
Any clothing item made of 49% polyester with a $1,340 price tag is a commerce crime. That’s the ask for Louis Vuitton’s newly released Jamaican Stripe Pullover LV Intarsia. Yet, sadly, marking up the price of inexpensive materials to match one month’s rent in many major cities isn’t the fashion brand’s biggest, most recent transgression.
The shirt’s design consists of three horizontal stripes: green on top, yellow in the middle, and red down bottom. This colorway, according to the item description, was inspired by Jamaica’s national flag. The problem is that the Jamaican flag is not green, yellow, and red…
The stories of three mothers who’ve suffered irreparably due to terrible dads
“Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour for the lack of it.” — James Baldwin
I am not a father, relationship expert nor psychologist. I’m also not a big believer in coincidence. Who I am is a son, nephew and grandson of educators whose spent decades watching unhealthy parents stress the lives of their young children and my elders. I’m also a lifelong journalist with an observant eye for connective tissue. A couple years ago, I noticed a…
Bonsu Thompson
Bonsu Thompson is a writer, producer, Brooklynite and 2019 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow.
