For almost 30 years, the GOP governing strategy has been “Just say no.” This makes for good sloganeering, but not alternative policies. As the GOP tries to regain power, they need voter suppression laws, because they are now a party without a platform.

Does anybody remember Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign from the 1980s? It had a slogan, “Just Say No.” I was in elementary school and clearly remember our teachers warning us about drugs and how to say “no” to dealers. …

As a general education professor for fifteen years and counting, I have no hard numbers if that is what you are searching for. But I do know from experience that Black college freshmen are as intelligent as any other group, and they leave school for five simple reasons that can be corrected in a few lectures or with an adjustment to onboarding strategies.

I have been a general education professor for five years. And way back in the BCE (before the cell phone era) days, I was a college freshman. I was young, very attractive (okay, that has nothing to…

I declare that this is not just one more cheap plug for my book, but I wrote my first book painstakingly. It was a labor of love, because I had to show the Deep South and the publishing establishment that the Caribbean is more than Marley and Sandals resorts. It has a long literary history that has gone through several movements and it deserves study.

Do we know the Caribbean past Bob Marley’s music, references to marijuana, and Sandals Resorts? I fear that most Americans don’t. Moreover, I fear that most Americans in literature do not even notice or care…

While watching a recent news story, I was truly, truly disgusted at the pride some Southern lawmakers showed at “learning about Natural hair.” While I applaud their effort, is it really that serious? Really?

Just two days ago, I was visiting with my mother (read: sitting at my mother’s house surrounded by children and eating too much junk food), and a news story appeared. Okay, it was supposed to be one of those feel-good local stories in which no one was murdered, killed in a car accident, and no home was burned down. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that…

While the world knows her as a Civil Rights activist and author of Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), I knew Anne Moody as an aunt, humanities consumer, and world literature nerd.

This is a very famous image of Civil Rights activist and author, Anne Moody. I simply downloaded it from the Internet.

Now, I have to confess something, reader. This was supposed to be my big Black history month posting. I am late, because I have a gazillion classes to teach, children, a husband, and a publication project that is behind schedule. And, this is going to be a…

Earlier this year, I wrote a plain and simple post about the plain and simple, authoritative nature of current GOP leadership desires. I was flagged by Medium and contacted via email. Being from Mississippi, I was immediately suspicious. After all, Mississippians aren’t supposed to have access to technology, according to popular culture, let alone know how to use it to critique our government and culture. However, I say this sadly, January 6, 2021 “proved” that everything I typed in that blog post was true.

Earlier this year, I posted about how Mississippians of color actually view the GOP. While it…

It is helpful to study other Black cultures in a comparative sense. No, I am not talking about learning a foreign language — as comparative studies are traditionally taught in the academy. I am talking about looking at the colonial situation throughout various points of the African Diaspora, and comparing those attempts to colonize gender divisions to African Americans.

One of the thorniest points in researching and presenting my book to potential publishers was how I classified African Americans. Let me just tell you, that my classification of African Americans alongside other, formerly-colonized Black populations garnered me raised eyebrows from…

While we hear political pundits talk about the mythical “angry white voter” or Trump supporter, we never hear about why these white folk are angry. What we are living through is a type of American language that does not line up with American history or its current present.

When I last posted, I talked about cookbooks and synonyms. As an English doc/professor/nerd, there are times when I am going to pay close attention to the language. As a reader of this blog, there are times when you have run across a number of my typos. I am accustomed to writing…