Readers please note: this story includes descriptions of addiction, suicide, and child exploitation. If you need help, contact the National Helpline.

My mother was a crack cocaine addict for more than twenty years. Being her son was a lonely thing. It was not easy. Everyone thought it was a dirty thing. Filthy. Inhuman. Crackhead jokes sound differently when it is your own mother who walks among the ghosts that haunt street corners and lonely parking lots. You laugh at the jokes like everyone else, hoping the laughter will provide you with cover from the shame of it all.

Even as…

They speak constantly of what they will do for the people, how they will help the middle class do better for themselves. No one mentions the poor. No one mentions the lost. No one mentions the whores. You have no coins to be tossed into collection baskets.

You are where the husbands go when they are weak, when they succumb to the fangs of desire. You are those who cannot be seen, who cannot be known. Knowing even your name, is an act for which forgiveness must be attained. And as a pandemic ravages bodies and businesses, you are not…

I bought a little house a couple of years ago. It sits on a mostly quiet street in a mostly Black subdivision, with a good amount of Latinos. The larger area of Houston, of which my subdivision is a part, is called Sunnyside, and it has a reputation for being a tough neighborhood.

I was born and raised not far away, in an area called South Park. …

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. The winter storm of 2021 was abnormal for us. We are more used to hundred degree summer days and crazy humidity than winter freezes, busted pipes and power outages. Apart from the four years I lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I have spent my whole life in Texas. Like most Texans, until the winter storm of 2021 I had not known that Texas was the only state in America that had chosen to have its own separate power grid.

My father once worked for the old energy company, Houston Light &…

During the coronavirus pandemic, the great American tradition of school shootings has seemed to disappear, like a blood stain that is eventually sucked into the thirsty pavement of a gas station parking lot. The precautions taken by school districts all over America to limit the spread of covid-19, from restricting visitors, to completely closing many school campuses all together, have likely had the unintended effect of thwarting the plans of the vicious. Yet the evil thing that is within them cannot be killed with a vaccine.

But as we move forward with vaccinations and mask mandates, we should be aware…

When the story of Tessica Brown using Gorilla Glue to keep her chemically straightened hair in place went viral the whole nation laughed. Who would be stupid enough to think you could use Gorilla Glue as a substitute for hair styling gel? We all laughed. But then we saw the video of Tessica Brown.

We saw the black woman with blue contact lenses that seemed almost alien in their alarmed gaze. We saw her chemically straightened hair looking as if it were painted to her scalp — not simply because she had made the foolish mistake of using Gorilla Glue…

With the recent release of former President Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, Americans are called upon once again to evaluate the success or failure of his presidency. Black Americans, specifically, will often judge him based on his ability to force the rest of America to finally treat us as equals. In much of black America, he is evaluated not on his success as a president, but as a messiah. But no one seems to give thought to the other burden he bared, of protecting the very idea that a black person could actually be president.

Much like with the…

The NBA’s Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, had planned to stop the playing of the American national anthem before the team’s home basketball games. Mark Cuban has said that his reasoning for the plan was to acknowledge the fact that because of systemic racism, there are many Americans who feel the anthem doesn’t represent them. The Mavericks owner has written that many feel that the singing of the Anthem ignores the suffering of millions of Americans who are the victims of racially motivated police violence often against unarmed Americans of color.

The NBA, the National Basketball Association, has since issued…