09.05.26
by

Haunting White Images

There’s something about the American phrase Representation Matters that doesn’t really resonate in Africa. In Kigali, Rwanda for example, there is a surprising lack of Black children on the murals of the nursery and primary schools. The depictions are of smiling Chinese kids, White kids in front of a welcome sign, Middle Eastern children with turbans on their heads, Indian kids too, but no Black children (Ok maybe there will be one token Black child on a mural with 10-15 kids). Inside the actual institutions, however, there are nothing but little Black learners. It baffles the hell out of me, but the Africans that I have spoken to about this do not take notice and generally don’t care.

About a month ago as I was coming back to Kampala from The Source of the Nile Tour in Entebbe, Uganda I decided to ask my driver about this erasure of blackness. He could barely conceal his irritation. To him I may as well have been a child asking, why is the sky blue?

“It’s just a painting,” he said.

“Yes, I know, but the kids see it every day on the way to school. I’m sure that it makes them feel unworthy to not see anyone that looks like them on the school that they go to.”

He looked around outside as he searched his brain for an answer that would best explain the Ugandan position on such matters.

“It’s like that,” he said as he pointed inside of a clothing boutique store.

 “All the mannequins in there are white. The people who shop there are black, but the mannequins are white. It’s just how it is.”

The exasperated tone with which he spoke was supposed to convey to me that it was a trivial matter that didn’t deserve any further discussion, but I wasn’t going for it. 

“The situation with the mannequins is slightly different because they are more than likely imported from white countries,” I told him. “With these paintings, an exclusively Black school paid a Black artist to paint nonblack children on a wall in an effort to enroll more Black children from a 100% Black African neighborhood. Why can’t they have images of the different tribal affiliations and ethnic groups that are present here, so the kids feel more welcome? Something feels wrong about having murals on the preschools that don’t have Black children. Then I left it. I allowed the conversation to shift as we got slammed by rush hour traffic. After all, this man was not a political theorist. He was merely trying to earn a tip in the midst of an Ebola crisis that pretty much stopped all tourism to Uganda. He did not want to be pulled into an argument, so I stopped pushing. 

I try not to preach on the matter, for I am not a colonist. I’m here on the continent to learn. I’m here to soak up game. I only wish to be restored by the birthplace of the human race. I do not wish to change anything; I only pray for the humility to allow Africa to change me. But, when it comes to portraits of white Jesus, I’m not gonna lie, I just can’t seem to chill. 

 Woefully inaccurate blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus is so ubiquitous in Africa that you would have thought the movie Malcolm X never came out. “A-hah. Ah-men.” From Elmina, Ghana to Johannesburg, South Africa to Kampala, Uganda this imposter is on local buses, in family homes, and on the walls of churches with the blackest of congregations. 

I had lunch one evening with a pretty little Buganda Queen. Well, she wasn’t literally a queen of course, but she was a proud member of the Buganda Tribe. She came from a well to do family. She had studied at a prestigious boarding school. She had been to the US on multiple occasions. Her brother is a doctor. And she owned the Airbnb that I was staying in, which is how we met. She took the time to actually greet me when I walked in the door of the apartment. It was almost like I came home to her for the first time. It was very endearing. So, a few days later, I asked her to er, erm…show me around town and she agreed.

The next day, we were sitting across from one another on the patio of this super swank jewel of a restaurant in the Kololo district when I found myself congratulating her on all of her success. She told me that she’s nowhere close to where she wants to be, but she is doing better than others because she refuses to be poor. 

I took a sip of my Sprite as she went on about how most Ugandans are perfectly fine with being poor. Then she told me about how she was ambitious enough to buy the Airbnb that I was living in from some Indian guy so she could have a steady stream of revenue coming in after she quit her job that she deemed to be too demanding. At this point, I realized in real time that if I could just keep my mouth shut and go along with what she is saying then there’s a good chance that later on we could have ummm, er, erm…gotten to know each other very well, but I just had to be me. Damn. 

“How is the person that you bought the apartment from an Indian?” I asked.

“Indians own the whole building. An Indian development firm financed it,” She shot back with eyes narrowed obviously trying to catch my meaning.

“Are there any wealthy Black Ugandans building high rises in New Delhi?”

 “No.”

“Exactly. I know a Rwandan lady who told me she lived in India for two years and they straight up told her that we don’t rent to niggers when she tried to get an apartment. All I’m saying is yes, you work extremely hard. At the same time though I think Western society is structured in a way that keeps the vast majority of Black people at the bottom.”

She did not disagree with me. She just felt the need to caution me not to blame white people or say that all white people are evil. I told her that I never said that, but I’ve been around the globe enough to know that white people share notes. The same oppression that Black folks are subjected to in East Detroit is the same form of bondage that Black people are privy to here in East Africa. And that we really need to start working on a solution.

“What is the solution?” She said with curiosity and a newly forming undercurrent of resentment. 

“Destroy all images of white Jesus. I mean like in the middle of every African city on some bonfire of the vanities type shit.”

She looked up at me with her chin down. She is a devout Christian, as am I. We listened to gospel music only in her car. She reminded me of my grandmother; it was so sweet. I asked her questions about every artist and every song that she played had a story attached to it about how she discovered it. I’m certain that she liked talking to me about this by the way that she smiled, but now I could see that I was falling out of favor. She didn’t know which category to place me in. She was bothered by the fact that she no longer controlled where we were going.

“No one knows what Jesus looks like,” she said.

 “Maybe, but we know he wasn’t a white dude with long flowing blonde hair and baby blue eyes.” 

 The certainty that left her body was born again as adrenaline in my veins. 

 “The bible doesn’t say anything about his physical appearance.” She was holding on tightly.

 I took out my phone to look up Revelations chapter 1 verses 13 and 14.

“Well, we know that historically the people of that region are not white and according to revelations his eyes were like a flame of fire, and his feet were like fine brass. The reason why white Jesus is so crucial to the imperialist’s operation,” I continued “Is because Europeans must be viewed as a savior in the mind of Africans both here and abroad, so we don’t hold him accountable for all of the ungodly acts that he’s coordinating on a daily basis. It makes us normalize his role as our natural leader while it simultaneously prevents us from seeing God in ourselves.” 

There was silence and not the comfortable kind as she blew me off. She believed that when you don’t know the race of a great person then the default should always be white. And perhaps most tragically, she believed that this is a harmless way of thinking. 

 In 2023 I took a group of Americans on a 10-day tour of Ghana. One afternoon we went to a Chinese owned store in Kumasi. One of the sisters on the tour walked down an aisle of dolls and was incredulous to see that they all were white. She was disheartened. She asked our guide, an Ashanti woman who grew up in the area, why there weren’t any Black dolls and the guide seemed to be slightly annoyed. As if she never noticed because it was such a petty thing to be concerned about.

“They just come that way,” was her response.

This Buganda woman was attractive, learned, and accomplished but after this discourse she dried up. She politely showed me the Kampala National Theater and a few other things before taking me home. A few days later I invited her to see The Odyssey on opening weekend with me. She told me that she was sick. A few days after that I checked out of her place. I was sure to give her a five-star review, but I never spoke to her or saw her again. 

I see race everywhere. America taught me to be this way. My idea of Blackness dictates the battles that I fight, the things that I see, the issues that I have, and the places that I travel. But alas, the concept of Blackness, not unlike white Jesus, is a western creation. Africans see the world differently. If African American trauma comes from being whipped on our naked backs until we dripped with blood, then African trauma comes from a complete reconfiguration of the psyche. The average African feels most abused by corrupt Black African politicians. They feel as though their respective countries are being left behind due to irresponsible Black leadership and the only answer is to flee to England, to France, to Germany, to America, to Whiteness. Whiteness being synonymous with all things good while Blackness is synonymous with incompetence.                    

This frame of mind leads to two young Black first time parents paying for their Black daughter to attend a school with paintings of children from every part of the world but Africa, because in order to make it she must leave. She gets good marks on her report card, so they buy her a pretty little white doll for her birthday. The child realizes that the baby doll is a different complexion from every single person that she sees in real life, but the doll is not unlike the children from her favorite kid shows on Netflix and YouTube. They all look so happy, so pretty, so smart, and so fair. This little girl is full of faith. Her parents taught her how to pray so every night she gets on her knees and prays to White Jesus to make her pretty like her doll, and like the children on Netflix, and like the painting of Jesus that she sees in church every Sunday. 

But alas, this can never be and the little girl comes to terms with this truth, however, she will not allow her dream to be totally deferred. As she grows into a woman she vows to get as close to White as possible. Close in looks, close in language, close in relationships, and close in proximity. For as far as her eyes and the eyes of her parents can see, this is what success looks like.  

-Roger Porter

07.22.26
by

A Conversation Between Two Grown Men

When I find out where to catch the local taxi in a country then it’s over with. That’s exactly what happened in Namibia. The audacity of the driver at the airport to charge me 350 rands for a ride to my Airbnb. It was downright disrespectful. Yes, I could afford it—I mean it’s about $20 USD—but that isn’t the point. Not only am I a traveler that likes to blend in with the people as opposed to staying in tourist traps but, more important than that, I’m just cheap. Not gonna lie, I do not like spending money. You can’t use the threat of a high crime rate to make me cough up a grip in order to stay in an all-inclusive resort. You can’t force me to commute around town in vehicles approved by the official board of tourism and charge me $20 a trip because the car has air conditioning and the seatbelts work. I’m not built that way. I do not scare easily. Blame it on my East Oakland California upbringing. 

So, I’m coming back from eating Kapana and fat cakes at a little hood spot called Wizy Man not far from The Dunes Mall in Walvis Bay.

I’m walking down the side of the main road trying to hail a taxi back to my place but for some reason they’re all passing me up which is quite weird because normally they would be honking in rhythm and screaming out of the window trying to get passengers into their van but now they’re acting all afraid. At this point a slender dark complexioned Namibian dude of about 35 years old says; 

“Eish! You can’t get a cab here. You’ll get a fine. This is a highway.” 

His warning forced me to actually talk in order to thank him, which may seem trivial but when I’m trying to blend in with a local community the last thing I want to do is speak because people instantly detect my American accent and from there it can get dicey. Maybe they ask me for money, maybe they try to scam me, maybe they ask me what the hell is wrong with Donald Trump, maybe they ask me if I know Meek Mill, either way my cover is totally blown. As was the case with this gentleman when I told him I’m from California. He was very chill about it though.             

He did ask me questions about the weather and what brought me to Namibia, however, he exuded a sense of calm in his curiosity. Then he offered to walk with me to the Taxi rank, and I obliged. As we walked through the weathered Namibian sand his line of questions got rather personal. He had already established that he worked for the gas company and he was still in his uniform. He didn’t strike me as someone that I should be afraid of. He had an upright gait and was reserved in his nature. He spoke to me about the history of Walvis Bay and how it was the one region of Namibia that the South African colonizers did not want to give up because it was so lucrative. 

We were chopping it up pretty tough which made my commitment to taking the local taxi more than worth it. He asked me if I found a woman back in Johannesburg and I opened up to him. I told him that I had. She was a pretty faced Tsonga girl from Limpopo, but I lost her and I was kind of heartbroken about it. He asked me what happened, to which I replied that we had gotten into an argument and the situation never got back to where it needed to be. He asked me whose fault it was and I stumbled with my words. I finally managed to say that it was debatable. I told him that I apologized to her twice, however, it didn’t have the desired effect. 

“She took my apology as a sign of weakness. And after that she kept doing more and more. Like, she started talking super reckless and getting bold with me.”

I struggled to confide in him. This was actually the first time I had ever spoken about it, and I wasn’t sure that I was even making sense, but he got it. 

“Yeah. Women can get that way.” He said somberly.

He slowed down half a beat as we were nearing the taxi rank. I could have hailed one on my own. We were close enough for the drivers to cruise by beeping their horns in quick succession while looking at us to see if we needed a lift. He did not need one because he lived nearby and suddenly, I had the patience to wait. I knew that whatever this man was about to say, he needed me there to listen. And that’s exactly what I did.

He and his wife were business owners but, in the beginning, their venture wasn’t doing well. They couldn’t get clients in their home turf of Walvis Bay which, by American standards, would be a rather slow, medium sized coastal town not unlike Monterrey, California. Somehow a decision was made to expand the brand to Johannesburg which, by American standards, is New York City. They decided—or she decided—that she should go to the city alone. He spoke to me with great clarity and with a bright veneer of confidence, while somehow simultaneously exuding the quiet vulnerability of a schoolboy telling his best friend about the problems that he was having at home.

“When you get married too young there’s always drama,” he said.

His face was stoic like a war veteran emotionally preparing himself to tell a combat story to civilians. It took all the power in his soul to keep him from falling apart as he spoke to me. His wife’s trips to Johannesburg grew longer and longer and to exacerbate the situation, she left him with their two small children every time she went to the city. At some point during the scaling of their business, she reasoned that it would be cheaper for her to get an apartment and live in Johannesburg part time. This is what sparked his investigation. He began checking her emails, her text messages, and eavesdropping on phone conversations. It didn’t take long for him to confirm that she was indeed having an affair. When he confronted her about it, she dug her heels into the ground. Not only did she admit to it, but she demanded a divorce.

I went mute. I did not say, Woooow. Nor did I say, Damn that’s hella crazy, under my breath. I only looked at him as he told a story that men typically never share with other men. And he did this while maintaining the utmost dignity. I just couldn’t imagine a young stranger back in the states recounting this to me while being completely sober. By now we had stopped moving. Our feet firmly planted in the sandy Walvis Bay Road. Our physical destination no longer mattered. We stood apart from all the Namibians who walked by us on either side with I just got off from work energy. His home no longer mattered and neither did my Airbnb. I listened to him as if it would save his life. And he spoke to me as though each syllable that he uttered was poison, and if he did not get it out of his system then he would surely die. 

In his tribe, divorce is not handled by the courts. It is handled by the elders. The first step in the process, he told me, was both parties agreeing that they wanted to separate. He refused. He told them flat out that he did not want to divorce his wife. There was a pause at this point of his testimony. Then he cleared his throat. I nodded to let him know that I was still with him, but I still rendered myself inaudible. They received village counseling on their marriage for weeks. In the process her lover in Johannesburg backed out of the situationship due to the steady stream of anguish that she was bringing to him now that their affair was out in the open. His only intentions were to have fun. After all, he was there for the sex and not to be her therapist. Finally, after dozens of hours of mediated conversations, they were instructed to go back home and work on their relationship in earnest.

 As soon as they settled back in together, his wife was as pleased with the marriage as she was when they were newlyweds. Her vibe was much lighter. She spoke to him with a sweetness that sounded foreign to his ears. And the more she cuddled up beside him in bed the more he realized that he was still extremely pissed with her. He told me that he had only stayed with her for the children. He also felt like she was mocking him with her joy. While she played, he tended to the children, and he worked every day at the gas company. Now that she was back it was his turn to go outside and play.

My mouth opened slightly while I moved my head closer to him in disbelief as if I was having a hard time hearing him from a mere two feet away. He had an affair; he told me with a sense of deep conviction. He is having an affair with a younger woman. His wife knows about it and does not like it, but he feels like he deserves it, for it brings him genuine joy every time he’s with this woman. He looked me directly in my eyes and with a levelheaded intensity asked me;

“Should I stop seeing my side chick because my wife doesn’t like it? Considering the fact that she has no moral ground to stand on?”

“Breh!…I mean damn. Ok. I feel like. Well first off…”

I was caught so far off guard. When I listen to someone, I listen aggressively. It requires all my strength, therefore the transition from being a listener to being a talker is always a difficult one for me to make.  

 â€śShout out to you for fighting for your marriage. I think most men, including myself…Especially myself, would have let their ego take over when she asked for a divorce and just went along with it whether we wanted to or not. You deserve all the adulation in the world for that. And then you know what? Shout out to you for even getting married at such a young age. When my daughter was on the way the adults felt like I should have married her mom, but I explicitly said I wasn’t ready and though I meant it, sometimes I wish that I would have done it just so my daughter could know that she comes from a solid union. But you stepped into your faith and that’s very commendable.”

He nodded and said thank you as he looked off somewhere over my head and into the distance. I rambled a little longer before asking him what the agreed upon terms of their healing process were. I asked him if there was a grace period where the both of you could see other people or was the expectation to be 100% committed. He said it was the latter. Then I reminded him that he gave his word as a man. 

“Once you give your word,” I went on. “Then you are beholden to it. You gotta look at it like this. You’re not giving your wife a second chance so much as God is giving your union a second chance. If you want your marriage to work, then you’re going to have to be 100% committed. You gotta let the side chick go. She’ll be alright.” 

I try really hard not to give relationship advice because I am so bad at them but there, I was at a taxi rank in Walvis Bay, Namibia trying to fill up a depleted man with words of love. He received it. He did not say as much, however, I could see it in the relaxation of his shoulders and how deeply he began to breathe. He turned to the road and hailed a taxi for me which in this case was a white Nissan that already had four people in it. He asked for the price in Oshiwambo. It was 20 Namibian dollars straight to Langstrand which is about $1.25 USD. Hell yeah! 

I gave him a quick fist bump before climbing into the backseat of the taxi. We did not share any more words with one another. The conversation was over though its qualities still resonate in my head as I’m sure it still resonates in his. We didn’t make things fake by exchanging social media or promising to hit one another up on WhatsApp. We just went our separate ways knowing that we had both made the other a better man. 

03.17.26
by

The One

On Thanksgiving, my uncle would say grace with such religious fervor, honesty, and poetic sensibility that we would forget that we were hungry. We would forget about all of his demons, and he would forget about them as well. He would wipe his glistening forehead with a handkerchief as he spoke to our heavenly father for us. And we would stand around a table full of the most flavorful dishes. Full of food that we had been smelling all day. Food that the women of the family had put all the love in their hearts into. We stood there in reverence not only to God, but to the man that expressed our collective gratitude so handsomely. We knew that every alley that he had been in, every prison cell, every crack house, every dimension of hell on Earth that he lived in made his prayer the most worthy of rejoice. For we were the 99 and he was the 1. 

12.31.25
by

We never needed them

We knew about Freddie Jackson. We knew about Luther Vandross. We knew about Jermaine Stewart. We knew about Frank Ocean too. But we still nodded our heads to the beat and did the snake when they sang the chorus. We still walked across the gymnasium floor and asked the girl to dance when we heard the first note of that ballad. We still let the bass bang hard in the trunk once we downloaded the album. Despite the fact that they maybe, probably, more than likely were singing to another man, we dedicated the record to the girl who we were with in the back seat of our mom’s Honda. We didn’t need a rainbow flag to force us to accept them. We didn’t need those five letters to make us respect the choir director and our Uncle Peaches. They were a part of our community before the colonizers made it weird. We were more progressive than history will ever remember.

11.06.25
by

No More Pain

No moment of silence will be quiet enough. No video will be somber enough. No editorial can be reflective enough to understand the suicide of Marshawn Kneeland. There will never be closure. There will never be understanding. We can only make inferences as to how a 24-year-old man could be so disenchanted with the world that he would kill himself only days after scoring his first NFL touchdown. Every little boy in America at one point or another dreams of scoring an NFL touchdown but Marshawn actually did—in real life. But alas, joy is only temporary. The feeling of euphoria comes down fast and then as quickly as you fall on a blocked punt in the end zone, you’re being pursued by police officers for a traffic violation. That’s when all the hatred, all the feelings of inadequacy, all of the trauma, and all of those insecurities ravage your consciousness at once. And you realize that you exist only in the space between how you thought success would be and what it actually feels like. It is in this chasm that Marshawn put a bullet into his 6’3 268 pound frame and ended all uncertainty.

I don’t pretend to understand. I will never actually get it. I just know that I once felt like an unforgivable burden, like a stain on my entire family and reasoned that if I were gone—If I were to leave this place then everyone else would be so much better off. Thank God I did not own a gun before my prefrontal cortex had fully developed. Thank God I had no fame. Thank God I was completely broke. Thank God no children looked up to me as if I was a hero when I was only 24 years old. Thank God millions of men around the country didn’t think that I had actually made it. I wouldn’t have been able to lie to them for that long. I wouldn’t have been able to lie to myself. For what does it mean to truly make it? To make what? To make money? To make the team? To be on nationwide television and still feel hollow. To smile through an entire interview yet feel like dying the whole time. Everyone feels like they know the formula for happiness, and although it may vary from person to person, money is always a part of the equation. No amount of money can make a person value life. There is no intervention that can save a person who is determined to kill themself. There is no reason, no rationale, no logic in this decision. All that young man knew was that he didn’t want to hurt anymore. And I just hope that he’s no longer in pain. 

RIP Marshawn Kneeland

08.03.25
by

1980s Freestyle

A beautifully spirited, slender light complexioned man with a Camel Menthol in his mouth and a pimp hat on his head helped raise me. In between his relapses he was the coolest thing walking. But when he did relapse on crack, he didn’t go to a rehabilitation center in Sonoma County, they sent his high yellow ass to San Quentin on a parole violation. This was the year 1989, way before Hunter Biden made the image of the family crackhead a brilliant yet flawed and ultimately sympathetic figure. 

My mother’s family came straight from Arkansas to the Filmore district as teenagers and then eventually moved to East Oakland where they could afford to raise their own families. My Uncle, stubborn as he was, refused to ever claim The Town. He never lost his city energy. His words came out a half beat faster, and he kept a determined gait. Unlike the average Oaklander who was much more chill, he always walked like he had somewhere important to be—even when he was going nowhere.

We would get on the BART Train at Coliseum Station and get off at Embarcadero. He took me on the bus downtown with him to run errands and we went to Candlestick Park to watch the Giants play. The lineup starred Kevin Mitchell and Will Clark. It was the year of the big earthquake. It was the year the Giants got swept by the A’s in the World Series as well, and all my classmates playfully teased me because I was raised to root for San Francisco. I tried to defend my team like my uncle did. He always stood tall. He never lost a verbal spat to anyone. He spoke to me—which in retrospect is very odd—like I was a man, but he looked after me like I was a child. He helped me tie my shoes while telling me about hoes he used to pimp. It was so bizarre. 

Everything in the 1980s was really strange. I don’t think we, as a society, had established what inappropriate truly meant. Indeed, it was the last generation where children were able to buy cigarettes for their parents. It was totally normal to see four kids and a dog in the bed of a pickup truck doing 70 mph on the 580 freeway. And we actually thought the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit was suitable for kindergartners because it had cartoons in it. Have you seen Jessica Rabbit’s titties popping out of her dress? It was wild fam. But anyway, back to my uncle.

I saw him when he had $1,000 in his pocket and wore $1,000 Gator dress shoes on his feet. I saw him when he had tickets to the Giants game, and when he had enough bread to send me and my cousins to the store with a $20 bill to get him some Camel cigarettes and let us keep the change. When he relapsed though, he became the invisible man. 

The television and all of the furniture went missing from my grandmother’s house one day while she was gone, yet no police report was ever filed. We all knew what happened. He stopped coming over on Sundays to eat with the family after church. He even stayed gone on his own birthday. The grownups spoke around him on Holidays. They let his shoe collection get dusty in the backroom of the house. I suppose we all prayed for him, but we kept our prayers between ourselves and God. We refrained from speaking his name out loud, except for a few of my other uncles who said that they were going to beat his ass when they saw him for stealing from Mama. I knew they didn’t mean it though, and I’m pretty sure they knew it too. 

One overcast Sunday afternoon while the family was over my grandmother’s house the phone rang, and she answered it. “Yes, I accept the charges.” We all looked at her from our respective spots in the kitchen. And we watched as our strong black matriarch began to cry.  

07.27.25
by

Summer Rain

I am not Carl Thomas and San Francisco is not Jamaica, or Houston, or Savannah Georgia—that is to say, we are not prepared for Summer Rain. The fog rolls in when it wants to. The cold may surprise you when the sun goes down, but actual precipitation is damn near non-existent. The tourists don’t know any better. They go the beach anyway because it’s on their schedule. They have to take pictures at the Santa Cruz, Beach Boardwalk or else they’ll be judged harshly by their social media followers. The drab sky brings a heavy depressive energy to the natives. We feel stifled. If we could protest God over this debacle then many of us would. We demand our mediocre 75-degree summers back now! We don’t want any weather patterns that would cause us to engage in introspection or even worse, one that may facilitate a process by which we would arrive at individual accountability. We don’t want to have anything to do with it. We were created to look down and not inward. This simply will not suffice.    

03.14.25
by

Why we fear Dawn

Maybe your version of happiness looks like a very well decorated prison cell to someone else. The acquisition of corporate wealth, along with a spacious condo that has a killer view, an investment portfolio, and an electric Audi in the garage may be totally unappealing to a free-spirited person. Is it conceivable that all a woman may need to find joy in life is a used car, a gym membership to take showers, and a few dollars in her pocket to buy food? For that is the life of 90s R&B singer Dawn Robinson from the hit groups En Vogue and Lucy Pearl. 

She recently put out a YouTube video in which the stated that due to a series of unfortunate events or “life was lifein” as they say, she has been living out of her car for the past three years. The tabloids and blogs picked up the story immediately and used disparaging headlines that spoke about her like she was a charity case. Headlines such as “Dawn Robinson has been living out of her car for three years” and “Dawn Robinson offered job by her ex-husband amid homelessness” are everywhere. First off, who the hell wants to work for their ex-partner? But I digress. What struck me more than anything else is that none of these articles suggest that Dawn is actually happy. After watching her video, however, one can easily conclude that she is. 

She divulged that she didn’t want to be a burden on her co-manager who had put her in a hotel room for eight months. She no longer wanted to live with her mother who she said had become angry and hostile toward her. So she took to the road, inspired by van life videos and the lives of legendary soul singers such as Marvin Gaye who had once lived out of their vehicles as well. She made a joke about being able to keep up with her hygiene by taking showers at her gym. “Just because I’m a funky diva” she said alluding to the title of En Vogue’s first album, doesn’t mean I’m funky. Her face looked unburdened, vibrant, and full of optimism. She made this video while on a very necessary spiritual journey in her life. She’s trying to determine what’s real and what isn’t. She’s totally doing away with the idea that people’s perception of her should mold her existence. She no longer cares what people think about her, and I believe that this is exactly why so many people will crucify her for her social sins. For if the mob of social reinforcement cannot bully people, and especially women, into conforming then that totally disrupts the natural order of things. 

We need to be able to tell people how to dress, how to think, how to live. We need to be able to enforce our ideas of success, what dreams are appropriate to have, and how celebrities should present themselves. Dawn must always move in a way that inspires awe in her fans. She must wear makeup, be fashionable, and look like she achieved the dream that almost every single American is in pursuit of—and that is to be famous. She can’t be sleeping on the side of a road in the Mojave Desert no matter how beautiful the scenery may be. She isn’t allowed to take a hot shower at Planet Fitness, on the contrary, she’s only relegated to the bathroom in her condo in the greater Los Angeles area, or New York, or Atlanta. Because we don’t like the optics of our celebrities looking like normal struggling people—even if they are. We don’t like it because it presents the notion that heaven may not actually be heaven. Perhaps it’s just like Earth but with a much longer stay or, even worse, perhaps it doesn’t exist. 

But if heaven doesn’t exist then why are we intentionally falling downstairs for likes and views? Why are we taking pictures as we tote pistols and show off the jewelry that we got in a high-profile robbery that we committed two days ago? And why are we posting these incriminating photos online? Why are we taking vacations for the sole purpose of gathering content to upload on our social apps? Why do we try to sneak into the shot when we see that Channel 5 News is doing a story in our neighborhood? Why did that man release his first rap album on sound cloud at the age of 41? Why does that teenage girl want to be an influencer when she grows up? We are literally willing to die to be famous, and we actually do! There are dozens of selfie deaths every single year. 

When a person is famous then they can’t be still trying to figure it out. They can’t experience the same hardships as us folk down here at the bottom. We have no empathy for people like Dawn Robinson who has the audacity to move about the world as if she is a normal human instead of being a fixed object in the sky like the star that she is. We only have sympathy for her, because having your celebrity status die while you’re still alive must be the worst thing a human-being could possibly go through. There is no satisfaction in being an average everyday person. There can’t be. This can’t be as good as life gets. In America our celebrities are like Gods in human flesh. We must always worship them. Needless to say, Dawn has rendered herself impossible to worship. And what a terrible sin.

03.02.25
by

The Likoni Ferry

I was somewhat lost, extremely confused, and kind of frustrated. I was 10,000 miles from California in a city called Mombasa on the South Coast of Kenya. I thought that I had proper instructions from my host to get to my Airbnb, but she posted directions from the train station (Mombasa Terminus), however, I was at MOI international airport. So, I had to figure out how to get to my apartment rental near Diani Beach and I didn’t like the $4,000 Kenyan Schillings price that Bolt (an international ride sharing app which is cheaper than Uber) was charging to get there. So, I decided to take a taxi about halfway there instead. This would put me back on track with the route that my host had given me. It would also require that I take the Likoni Ferry. This ferry ride would be an unexpectedly healing experience for me. It was profoundly spiritual and deeply fulfilling.

I’m aware that this must sound absurd to the average Kenyan. It must be the equivalent of someone saying they were moved to tears by the beauty of the people on the BART Train, or they had a cultural awakening on the back of an AC Transit Bus. We tend to not recognize the potency of what we see every day. Sometimes it takes looking at the world through the eyes of the tourist to see what we take for granted. My ride on the Likoni Ferry represented one of those super rare occasions when you recognize that you’re in a moment within the actual moment. I walked onto a boat with no less than 1,000 other Black people who brought bikes, had babies on their backs, and carried bags. I was no doubt the only “American” and probably the only tourist on the entire ferry. My Bolt driver advised me not to get on. I’m glad that I’m hardheaded and refused to take his advice.

I had an enormous suitcase that was 2 kilograms overweight at the airport, but the nice lady at Kenyan Airlines allowed me to slide without a penalty. I also had a huge burgundy backpack that I once used to go camping in Yosemite National Park for three days. It has several compartments, zippers, and hidden storage space. It’s great for backpacking, but it’s extremely conspicuous when it comes to city walking.  

“It’s not safe for you to take the ferry with those bags,” he said.

“Really?” I replied somewhat sarcastically.

My driver was a very long limbed but somehow average sized man named Peter. It took a few phone calls and me having chase him down in the Airport parking lot for him to see me when he arrived. This turned out to be a bonding experience for us. By the time I sat down in the backseat of his Hyundai I felt like we were homies. 

“Yeah.” He said sharply. “Anybody can go through your bag on the ferry. Be careful.”

 

Every African that I have ever met in Africa thinks Africa is the most dangerous place in the world. When I tell them that major American cities are way worse in terms of theft and violence they refuse to believe me. I once tried to explain this to a Liberian woman in Accra, Ghana. She shook her head then told me with a strong conviction; “No, America is heaven.” Of course I didn’t tell Peter any of this. I just said:

“Ok, I’ll be careful.” 

I actually appreciated his advice. It was just that my lack of speaking Swahili—the official language of Kenya— prevented me from explaining my perspective. I live my life knowing that I can be robbed, maimed, or killed any second. I’m always vigilant when I’m in public spaces and there was nothing that he could say to make me any more or any less aware of my surroundings. There was also nothing he could tell me to keep me from getting on that ferry. In fact, the more he spoke the more excited I got about boarding.

 

I was sick of being separated from normal Kenyan experiences because I was a visitor from a foreign country. The tourism industry is structured like a traveler’s ghetto in that the local government keeps you boxed in so they can control the outcome of your experience. The roads that you can walk down, the restaurants where you can eat, the people you encounter, and the way you commute is all predetermined. In the ghetto the ultimate objective is to keep you trapped at the bottom of society. In tourism the sole purpose is to manipulate your mind by giving you a watered-down version of culture while encouraging you to spend way more money than you should on items that you do not need. This stimulates the local economy and makes the billionaire hotel owners even more wealthy.

 

Think all-inclusive resorts. They keep you fenced in for most of the day. They give you a swimming pool, beach access, or both. They give you a menu with a few native foods and local juices alongside hamburgers, chicken strips, French fries and Coca Cola. They employ locals to serve you and perform for you. And they only allow you to move about the city in chartered vehicles that the hotels own. All of this while people live in squalor right outside the gates of your paid fantasy. Nah, I ain’t with it. I have never been with it. I was going to hop on that ferry with the people of Mombasa and I was ready to deal with whatever consequences came with it.

We had to get out of the car about 200 meters from the ferry station. Cars and tuk tuks are allowed on the ferry but the passengers must pay. Pedestrians and cyclists are free which was another major incentive for me to take the ride. Peter insisted on walking me to the security check-in. After I paid Peter, I was heading to the embarking point when three Kenyan security guards stopped me.

“Jambo! Jambo! You come here.”

I walked over to the men pulling my oversized suitcase behind me.

“What is in the bag?”

“My clothes. Most of them are dirty.”

“Open the bag.”

I opened my suitcase, and the main guard who was asking all the questions sifted through my belongings while noticeably avoiding touching my dirty drawers.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from California.”

“Oh, USA. Do you bring a gun?”

“No, I left all my guns at home.”

We both laughed, then he zipped up my suitcase and let me go. I walked into a large rectangular area with benches that were being quickly filled up. People had bags full of fish, beans, and clothes to sale on the other side of Kilindini Harbor. A woman walked by while gracefully balancing a large green sack on her head. A teenaged boy pulled up on his bike. A mother and father sat down with their two boys. The males in that family had clearly come straight from the barbershop because their lineups were immaculate. The people kept arriving. Each and every one of them had business to attend to on the other side. All of them moved with the familiar mundanity of a morning commute as it was about 9:30am.

 

I’m certain that they saw diversity in one another. I’m sure they could determine tribal affiliations by body type, gait, or skin tone. They could probably tell who was from the countryside and who was from the city based on accent and attire. Perhaps they could decipher who was formerly educated versus who had been working on a family farm their entire lives. I could not figure out any of these things, nor did I try to. All I saw was Black people and all I heard was the intermittent sounds of a soothing African tongue that I did not know how to speak. I was calmed by not being able to understand sentiments that might ruin my day. I was unaware of who was gossiping, who was cursing, who was being offensive, or who had a different political ideology than I do. I was blanketed by my obliviousness. I was comforted by what I did not know.  Then we began our descent.

 

It was time to be loaded onto the ship which was at the bottom of a cement hill. I walked in synchronicity with the people of Mombasa. I was in the middle of the crowd, in a country in Africa, headed into the bottom of a boat. I thought about the middle passage—the indescribably brutal tragedy that ripped my ancestors from the continent and forced them into chattel slavery for centuries—but this was not a kidnapping. This was a reconnection. This was an initiation ritual. This was a baptism into a culture that had the power to redirect my spirit. I was being reunited with everything that had been lost. I pulled my luggage behind me onto the vessel, and I carried my backpack like a thousand burdens on my back. I did not stop walking. I did not speak at all. Even when asked a question in Swahili I just shook my head, no. I did not want to speak English. I did not want to be an American. I did not want to be an individual. I wanted to be at peace. I wanted to be whole and move within a body of people striving toward a singular destination. As I found my position on the ship, I looked up to my left and saw black people going up the stairs to the next level. I was surrounded by the Kenyan people—my people, whether they knew it or not. And as the powerful motor of that ferry propelled the entire lot of us across the water, I knew that I belonged. And I knew that I was safe because everyone was far too preoccupied with their own bags to be concerned about taking mine

02.23.25
by

The Life and Death of 17-year-old Noah Scurry

I understand the “cycle of violence” that claims the lives of too many Black men. I understand it almost as a clichĂ© at this point in my life. It’s an issue that has been going on well before I was born and reached a peak in my childhood which was in the early to mid 90s. “The cycle of violence” as a term is now only relegated to community activists, local politicians, and the families of homicide victims on the news. They shout it out in front of cameras while on the campaign trail or as they grieve the lives of their lost loved ones. The television audience is dismayed up until the very second that the next news story comes on about inflation, or a restaurant shuttering its doors, or a heroic dog–then it is immediately forgotten. Nothing ever happens in terms of changing the mindset in the hood or centering the problem for long enough for it to actually be solved. We just go on about our evening as if the perilous life of Black men shouldn’t be a major concern in our country. I tend to burry the pain of living in a world where I am most likely to be killed by another Black man, deep in my subconscious mind. I know it and I see it, but I try not to think about it. However, the circumstances surrounding the death of Philadelphia teen Noah Scurry has made me think about it a lot. 

It came up on my YouTube algorithm that a 17-year-old basketball star had been gunned down in the streets of North Philadelphia. It gained national attention only because he was a talented athlete and therefore supposed to be protected from young killers in the streets. The story was told in a manner designed to demonstrate how truly depraved the Black underworld has become. This innocent kid with a bright future, only months away from making it out of the hood was gunned down as he prepared to be driven to school by his mother. What kind of a person kills a teenager in front of his mom? And not just any teenager, but a basketball player!

Noah was described as exceptional by the school district spokesperson Monique Braxton. He reportedly had the highest SAT score in the school and was an outstanding student. The more they reported on his good deeds the more savage the young Black men who presumably killed him appeared to be. “No one gets a pass. Anybody can get it. Kill them all. Make they mama’s cry.” Had to be the mantra for these urchins. But then the streets started talking, and they were saying that Noah Scurry AKA Joker was not innocent but instead he was very active in street life.

 Social media has deprivatized all hood conversations. The era of having to be affiliated with a particular neighborhood in order to know who is committing robberies, who sells weed, who pimps, and who’s a killer is over. Now it’s all in online. There are YouTubers who cover hood politics in every city across the western world. And if the video has any inaccuracies, then people from that neighborhood will make corrections in the comments. To this point, I have never actually been to Philadelphia but in the days after the murder of Noah Scurry on January 14th, 2025, I felt as connected to the Philly streets as Meek Mill and Beanie Sigel. 

Scurry, in addition to being a high school basketball player, was a rapper named JokerOTV. The day before he was killed, he had put out a rap video in a joker mask holding a gun talking about people that he had allegedly murdered. The Vlogs began to say that one of the people who Scurry killed was the son of beloved podcaster and former rapper Gillie da Kid (which was recently confirmed in an interview with Shannon Sharpe). This entire case has been extremely difficult for me to process. Indeed, it has kept me up at night. Even as the story is dying down in the blogosphere, it hasn’t relinquished in my mind.   Scurry had to be 15 when he allegedly killed Gillie’s son. He was skilled at basketball, and he paid enough attention in school to do well on his SATs but neither of those things were enough to keep him from becoming entrenched in a criminal lifestyle. It was confirmed that he had been shot and per his own admission (to the extent that one can accept rap lyrics as truth) he had shot people. The answers, it would appear, are not the answers. If school and extracurricular activities can’t save us, then what can? And why would the school district release a statement that depicted Noah Scurry as an angel when there was so much evidence that confirmed he was indeed human. He was as susceptible to the gangs in his community as anyone else. He was as tainted as we all are. He was misguided, as youth and even adults tend to be. He was trying to figure it out, but he got it wrong–all wrong. Now he lay in his casket, reunited with the Earth. His death will beget more retaliations and more trauma. 

We are all diseased. We don’t show our symptoms every day, but we are still terminally ill. The life and death of Noah Scurry has caused my sickness to flair up. It has reminded me that as hard as I have worked to become educated and somewhat successful, it really has more to do with luck than my ambition. What if I would have gotten shot as a teenager? Perhaps that would have caused me to hit the streets with all of my might and with no compassion or regard for human life. What if I saw someone get blown away as a young child? What if I had an abusive father and an emotionally unavailable mother? What if all of my uncles were in prison? What if my best friends started committing armed robberies and begged me to come with them? What if I got jumped by a group of boys from a rival neighborhood for no reason? Would I ever be to forgive them? I don’t know how many of these things happened to Scurry, but I know that even though we grew up in similar environments he was affected by it in a way that I never have been affected. Noah Scurry did not live long enough to find his purpose or to seek redemption. He did not even live long enough to go to his Senior Prom or graduate from high school. I stay up at night thinking about Noah Scurry. I wake up in the morning thinking about JokerOTV. I don’t know what could have been done to save him and that haunts me. It haunts me that we still don’t know how to stop the cycle from continuing.