NuBlaXity Network

02/03/2023

Grants for Black Folks!

02/03/2023

Grants for Black Folks! AEGON Transamerica Foundation Grant

12/24/2021

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah gives us this powerful statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.

A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend, a new mother who wanted to know how to raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response: fifteen invaluable suggestions—direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Filled with compassionate guidance and advice, it gets right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century, and starts a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

A Skimm Reads Pick ● An NPR Best Book of the Year

07/11/2021

https://youtu.be/vHBxXC_qyHg

06/21/2021

In embracing the notion of male/female equality, we've also embraced the less worthy notion of male/female INTERCHANGEABILILTY, the idea that there are no insurmountable differences between the sexes beyond the obvious physical ones. This, despite testimony from experts that women & men tend to perceive, communicate, and value themselves in dissimilar ways. On the social front, this misbegotten notion has led to confusion and uncertainty. In families characterized by strong black women and absent black men, it has given support to the disastrous notion that maybe fathers aren’t really that necessary after all.

Of course, if one is defining fathers strictly as breadwinners and pondering a population of males for whom high unemployment is an abiding crisis, then maybe that’s a defensible conclusion. As the old expression goes, “I can do poorly all by myself.” In other words, who needs a man unless he’s in a position to contribute to the financial well-being of the household?

06/21/2021

In embracing the notion of male/female equality, we've also embraced the less worthy notion of male/female INTERCHANGEABILILTY, the idea that there are no insurmountable differences between the sexes beyond the obvious physical ones. This, despite testimony from experts that women & men tend to perceive, communicate, and value themselves in dissimilar ways. On the social front, this misbegotten notion has led to confusion and uncertainty. In families characterized by strong black women and absent black men, it has given support to the disastrous notion that maybe fathers aren’t really that necessary after all.

Of course, if one is defining fathers strictly as breadwinners and pondering a population of males for whom high unemployment is an abiding crisis, then maybe that’s a defensible conclusion. As the old expression goes, “I can do poorly all by myself.” In other words, who needs a man unless he’s in a position to contribute to the financial well-being of the household?

06/21/2021

It is not too much to suggest that one man’s propensity toward a violent marriage might come from the same place as another man’s propensity toward a peaceful one. Comes, in other words, from the behavior we see as children and our reactions to it. You only have two choices, after all: To reflect the things you saw or reject them.

So Lawrence in Washington swore he wouldn’t be the sort of man his father was, then went out and became exactly that. I swore I wouldn’t be the sort of man my father was and became instead a would-be rescuer of women I don’t even know.

Reflection and rejection. Dissimilar results from the same impulse. The one thing both have in common is that both are extreme... We forget that in the things we do—and don’t do—we mark our children. Mark them in their attitudes and behaviors. Shape who they become. The force of it can be as irresistible as gravity itself, though the result is often unpredictable.

Rejection, reflection.

06/21/2021

It is not too much to suggest that one man’s propensity toward a violent marriage might come from the same place as another man’s propensity toward a peaceful one. Comes, in other words, from the behavior we see as children and our reactions to it. You only have two choices, after all: To reflect the things you saw or reject them.

So Lawrence in Washington swore he wouldn’t be the sort of man his father was, then went out and became exactly that. I swore I wouldn’t be the sort of man my father was and became instead a would-be rescuer of women I don’t even know.

Reflection and rejection. Dissimilar results from the same impulse. The one thing both have in common is that both are extreme... We forget that in the things we do—and don’t do—we mark our children. Mark them in their attitudes and behaviors. Shape who they become. The force of it can be as irresistible as gravity itself, though the result is often unpredictable.

Rejection, reflection.

06/21/2021

Who can a man tell his misgivings to? Certainly not the woman. She comes to you with the news: “I’m pregnant” or “We’re going to have a baby,” and your heart is supposed to break free of its moorings and go floating inside your chest. You're supposed to be thrilled, lost in a time of great joy. But maybe for some men it's just as much, or even more, a time of fear. Maybe the fear comes instantly, or maybe a few hours or days later.

Either way, it steals in on cat’s paws, a silent shadow abusing hope, whispering a litany of “what ifs.” What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t afford it? What if I can’t save enough for college? And the big one: What if I fail? You try to dismiss it, perhaps, as a bad case of the jitters that are part and parcel of any crossing into a new phase of life. And maybe you’re right... Unless, that is, you’re a young black man with no firsthand idea of what and how a father is supposed to be and no one to confide this emptiness in.

06/21/2021

Who can a man tell his misgivings to? Certainly not the woman. She comes to you with the news: “I’m pregnant” or “We’re going to have a baby,” and your heart is supposed to break free of its moorings and go floating inside your chest. You're supposed to be thrilled, lost in a time of great joy. But maybe for some men it's just as much, or even more, a time of fear. Maybe the fear comes instantly, or maybe a few hours or days later.

Either way, it steals in on cat’s paws, a silent shadow abusing hope, whispering a litany of “what ifs.” What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t afford it? What if I can’t save enough for college? And the big one: What if I fail? You try to dismiss it, perhaps, as a bad case of the jitters that are part and parcel of any crossing into a new phase of life. And maybe you’re right... Unless, that is, you’re a young black man with no firsthand idea of what and how a father is supposed to be and no one to confide this emptiness in.

06/21/2021

I am missing so many things. Memories of peace. Nights of calm.

So why be surprised—any of us—that at some point the things you’re missing catch up with you? Maybe it comes when you’re struggling with the tie. Maybe when the jailhouse doors clang shut behind you. Maybe when the bullet embeds itself in your yielding flesh.

Maybe when your baby cries for the very first time.

Every day, black boys and black men become black fathers with no one to show them how fatherhood is supposed to go. And then what? Where do you go to learn this trick, to make yourself this thing you’ve never seen?

06/20/2021

I am missing so many things. Memories of peace. Nights of calm.

So why be surprised—any of us—that at some point the things you’re missing catch up with you? Maybe it comes when you’re struggling with the tie. Maybe when the jailhouse doors clang shut behind you. Maybe when the bullet embeds itself in your yielding flesh.

Maybe when your baby cries for the very first time.

Every day, black boys and black men become black fathers with no one to show them how fatherhood is supposed to go. And then what? Where do you go to learn this trick, to make yourself this thing you’ve never seen?

06/20/2021

We don’t seem to think much of black dads. Theirs is the face we have chosen as an emblem for the failure of fathers, for absence and abuse and a general inability to come to terms with the obligations of paternity. It is a portrait supported to some degree by grim statistics and, perhaps to a greater degree, by myth and misconception. Not that the exact proportion matters much in the end. The perception of black men as failed fathers is real and abiding, and so must be dealt with.

But there is another reality, one that often goes undocumented by statisticians, reporters, and academics. It is of those black men, scarred by their own upbringings, who, by force of persistence and will, make decent and honorable fathers of themselves. This is the story that gets missed.

06/20/2021

We don’t seem to think much of black dads. Theirs is the face we have chosen as an emblem for the failure of fathers, for absence and abuse and a general inability to come to terms with the obligations of paternity. It is a portrait supported to some degree by grim statistics and, perhaps to a greater degree, by myth and misconception. Not that the exact proportion matters much in the end. The perception of black men as failed fathers is real and abiding, and so must be dealt with.

But there is another reality, one that often goes undocumented by statisticians, reporters, and academics. It is of those black men, scarred by their own upbringings, who, by force of persistence and will, make decent and honorable fathers of themselves. This is the story that gets missed.

06/20/2021

... because "the solution to much of what ails African America lies in finding a way to reconnect its fathers with its families."
~by Leonard Pitts

06/01/2020

06/01/2020

Jim Crow of the North - Minneapolis, Minnesota.

05/26/2020