When I was working on my Ph.D., I swore that I would not be one of those people who tripped every time someone didn’t greet them with the proper title… As a first generation college student I was not aware, during my undergraduate years, that most of my professors had a Ph.D. (or even what a Ph.D. was, or what that meant) so it was off-putting when I would be chastised for not saying Dr. ____.  At the time, when I referred to a professor as Ms. or Mr. instead of Dr., it was not because I was trying to …Read more »

  After this latest week of utter shamtastery in Hip Hop, the words of the late great Aaliyah resonate now more than ever: We need a resolution; there is so much confusion. Rick Ross thinks that drugging a woman and raping her isn’t rape, but rather a case of misunderstanding. FOH Talib Kweli thinks that the first responsibility that women in Hip Hop have to men in Hip Hop is to love to them. Despite his alleged support for Frank Ocean, Busta Rhymes remains an unrepentant and violent homophobe. From my armchair therapist’s seat, I want to ask what Busta …Read more »

Guest Post by Regina N. Bradley at Red Clay Scholar     While listening to Beyonce’s latest single “Bow Down/I Been On” an eyebrow raised in amusement along with a low “woooooord?” I couldn’t believe that Beyonce, Mrs. “Girls-Run-the-World” was talking to bitches and – gasp! – demanding they bow down. But it wasn’t Bey’s emphatic singing and ad libs that caught my attention. It was the track itself. The track, in all its “H-town vicious” glory, that briefly pulled Beyonce back south off her global stage. I contextualize Beyonce as a dichotomy of grit and grace, two polarized representations of …Read more »