Mel Hopkins

Thank you! And yes this is a proverbial coffee shop! What's the name of it? " "Black and Hot Brew"? Oh wait! Now, I need to steal my name! Leave it to Cynique to come up with a theme! @aka Contrarian You make AI look good! I can see that just from your conversation here. Same with Troy, which is why I'm surprised. Troy is wealth of knowledge and has great stories too! Pioneer, Cheydove, Cynique Harry...the list goes on I don't think any of us would spend our time together looking at screens. 😊🥳

Oh snap! I spent an entire holiday week with my bestie, her daughters, her daughters' fiancé, my daughters, my son-in-law, and even the neighbors came over for a bit. Not one of us had our phones out (and the girls are millennials and Gen Z). (wait there was a moment of PCs to school work but that was it) I guess I live in a smaller world where folks still engage with each other. @Troy, because you truly are a mover through various worlds, I will trust your observation. Cynique!!! Thank you! It feels so good to return to my natural state (chatting. lol) I took the summer off from school so I could write again. I love the photo! ❤️‍🔥

Oh, yes, the longer you live, the more you lose. I often wonder about those centenarians - it has to be difficult. I just saw a post about a 108-year-old woman offering advice on longevity. She has really seen a lot of folks leave this dimension. @Troy, I could be wrong, but are you dating or speaking about younger women? I can't imagine anyone my age scrolling while in the company of friends or paramours. And wow, @Pioneer1 I don't think I ever heard you speak about being in a committed relationship before - it is so beautiful that you have a stepdaughter. Aside: A lot of us learn a lot about men from what they post online. At least those of us who pay attention. I was always surprised by women who got catfished online. If you pay attention, you'll hear men tell a lot about themselves. I know you might think you're being discreet, but discreet and anonymous are two very different things. You, men, tell more than you think you do - BUT the difference is some men hide their identity, which I think is genius!

Ebby Freeman and Janie Crawford: Women Who Freed Others Without Sacrificing Themselves. A little before the Christmas rush, I finished reading Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson, and it felt like a present to myself, a present of knowing. While some readers may feel sympathy for Ebony “Ebby” Freeman, she left me feeling elevated, certain that she fully embodied the resource of Love, a love we are all created in and gifted from THE SOURCE. On the surface, Good Dirt tells the story of a Massachusetts family mourning the loss of their beloved son and brother, Edward Basil “Baz” Freeman, who is gunned down during a home invasion. Ebby, five years his junior, is the sole eyewitness to the murder. Like many who survive sudden violence, she appears to carry guilt—both for having lived and for witnessing her brother’s final attempt to protect what he loved. That Love takes form in the family heirloom known as “Old Mo,” a 20-gallon stoneware pot whose cultural significance is rooted in the family’s more than 200-year ancestral history in the United States. Baz dies trying to protect it, but Old Mo is more than an object—it is a record keeper. It holds memory, labor, survival, and devotion across generations. It is Love, the intangible force, and Old Mo, its tangible witness, that sit at the center of this novel. In nearly every chapter, a character acts either out of Love or out of fear of standing in its immense presence. Good Dirt is the perfect title because, like love itself, it is a resource of the earth. Good Dirt reminds us that something enduring, sustaining, and life-giving can be made from what appears, at first glance, to be nothing. Love as the Ultimate Stolen Resource In Good Dirt, Charmaine Wilkerson offers a deceptively quiet truth: love is the ultimate generative force. It creates people, objects, culture, memory, and continuity. Generational love serves as the interpretive key that unlocks the themes in Good Dirt, echoing across literature and shaping cultural narratives. In this narrative, in particular, one thing I noticed throughout the story is the following: Those who cannot produce love will steal what love produces; if possession fails, they will destroy the vessel that contains it. This control does not stop at adversaries; it extends inward from parents to sons and daughters. Parents who put labor, bodies, and vocations into sanctioned systems of productivity. i.e., “do this, or I’ll disown you.” We find two characters who wrestle with this fate. Ebby accepts both into her life and frees them from their indentured servitude. Ebby is the hero of this story, and her ability to love is her strength, her sustenance, and her freedom. Until we recognize this pattern in our literary heroines, we will continue to misread women’s love as weakness, sacrifice, or loss rather than as ethical power. Ebby Freeman: Love That Opens Gates but Does Not Follow Ebby Freeman is not a romantic heroine. She is a living record. Ebby is a bearer of ancestral memory who learns how to steward love without allowing extraction. Her journey begins in fracture: public violence, ancestral commodification, and personal rupture culminate when Henry abandons her at the altar. And many misread this moment as humiliation or romantic failure. In truth, it reveals a more profound incompatibility: Henry cannot stand inside the full weight of Ebby’s inheritance—historical, racial, emotional—without retreating into safety. At the same time, Ebby remains unbroken, even in heartbreak, able to create and transform herself and others. And the novel’s moral sophistication lies in what follows. Henry and Avery, Henry’s latest partner, are both controlled descendants. Henry is forced away from photography (seeing, witnessing, truth-telling) into finance (abstraction, accumulation). Avery is diverted from psychology (interiority, healing) into law (containment, legitimacy). Their respective parents have taught them that survival requires abandoning what they love. Ebby does not rescue them through possession but recognizes their true vocations without demanding allegiance, demonstrating her unpossessive love that fosters freedom. Ebby’s legacy, her heritage is the novel’s quiet thesis: ethical love liberates without colonizing the future. Ebby does not disappear nor does she follow them into those lives. Ebby remains intact, grounded, and whole. Her love moves like candlelight—shared, not consumed. Ebby reminds me of another heroine who carries this ability to liberate others through truth and love. Janie Crawford: Love That Refuses Diminishment Janie Crawford’s journey in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is often framed as a search for love. In reality, it is a refusal to accept love that requires her diminishment. Each of Janie’s marriages reveals a different mechanism of control: Logan Killicks offers security without regard for her interior life. Joe Starks offers status while silencing her voice. Tea Cake offers companionship—but also risk. What unites Janie and Ebby is not romantic success, but relational discernment. Janie learns that the love that thrives on her shrinking is not love—it is extraction. Like Ebby, Janie’s love frees others. Tea Cake becomes more alive through her, more playful, more fully himself. Yet Janie does not tether her identity to his survival. When circumstances require it, she chooses life without surrendering selfhood. Janie returns alone, but not empty. She carries what matters inwardly. Her love, like Ebby’s, does not require possession to be meaningful. Is This Your Takeaway? At the core of Good Dirt is the novel’s ethical love —an approach that prioritizes liberation and respect over possession or control. Some humans cannot produce love, so they steal what love creates. If they cannot possess it, they destroy the vessel that contains it. They cannot control hearts and minds—but they will capture hands and bodies, including their own sons and daughters, forcing them to produce without love. Those who possess love must share it like candlelight to light the world. Ebby embodies this principle in motion. She interrupts control without becoming its opposite. Without demanding loyalty, repayment, or explanation, Ebby frees Henry and Avery from the inherited obligation of obedience. She shows that love’s highest function is not attachment, but restoration. Until we understand this, we will keep misreading women’s departures as failures, their solitude as loss, and their generosity as naïveté. Their Eyes Were Watching God and Good Dirt were published 88 years apart, yet Janie told Pheobe to share her message: Therefore, the message continues because the lesson is unfinished. Until We Get It. Ebby Freeman stands at the center of this lineage because she is contemporary, legible, and unresolved. She shows us that love does not always culminate in partnership—and that this is not tragedy. Like Janie, she demonstrates that the ethical use of love is to free others without disappearing, to restore vocation without commandeering futures, and to remain whole even when love moves on. Until we get that, we must continue to tell the story. And retell it. In gratitude for the power of love. ~Mel (Orignally posted on Art ∩ MEL (December 2025) Copyright © 2025 Mel Hopkins

Yep! "Claude" mentioned the age of the site and the fact that AALBC has something like 200,000 VISITORS per month gives it incredible status Wait let me just quote Claude Brotha @ProfD I think it could be age - I've been posting here since 2010 😉

"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 borrowed heavily from the Clinton-era plan known as "Hillarycare." As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton played an instrumental role in crafting that 1993 plan, which laid out a sort of blueprint for progressive health-care reform that subsequent proposals have followed — including the plan she proposed as a presidential candidate in 2008. In fact, Hillary Clinton's "American Health Choices Plan" for her 2008 presidential campaign serves as an instructive bridge between her 1993 legislation and the achievement of its key provisions in Obamacare. Clinton is the historical author of Obamacare's principal tenets, and for more than two decades she has served as their most constant champion. In its major elements and its ethos, the passage of Obamacare was a triumph of the legislative effort that Hillary Clinton launched in 1993. And Hillarycare, in turn, can tell us a great deal about where she likely thinks Obamacare should go from here." The Clintonian Roots of Obamacare | National Affairs And here's why I mentioned it is a mix. "From 1989 Heritage Foundation archives https://www.heritage.org/social-security/report/assuring-affordable-health-care-all-americans A National Health System for America, the Heritage plan aims at achieving four related objectives: All citizens should be guaranteed universa l access to affordable health care. The inflationary pressures in the health industry should be brought under control. Direct and indirect government assistance should be concentrated on those who need it most. * * A reformed system should encourage greater innovation in the delivery of health care." It a lot of both because everyone knew the U.S. as such a developed country needed better healthcare and we almost had it.

So you have probably noticed I don't just slap any ole thing up in the forum. I recently searched for my name +journalist, and there I was splashed at the top of the Google results for my writing on aalbc. Although I have my own website, when Muckrack, the journalism aggregation website, found me -Mel Hopkins's Profile | Medium, Substack, Ebony Journalist | Muck Rack, again, it was all my popular comments from AALBC. When I write book reviews on AALBC, they become AALBC famous on the net. I've been thinking about writing excerpts from the time I flew the friendly skies - and if I were most folks, I'd probably post on Patreon and Substack - but I'm not, I'm going to post about my crazy escapades on AALBC and maybe Patreon too - but I betcha the most views will come from AALBC. Thank you, @Troy In short, Claude AI had a lot to say about AALBC. But here's a snippet: "In other words, AALBC's forum is functioning as a consensus-building document for who you are as a writer and thinker — and AI search is now reading that document alongside Google." Aside: @Pioneer1 and @ProfD y'all were genius to remain anonymous 💓

I do. But Obamacare was neither a Republican plan in full nor Hillarycare from 1993 with a new label (Aside: yes we studied Hillarycare in History class too). It was a political compromise assembled from ideas with both Democratic and conservative roots. Obama also did not have the 60 Senate votes needed to pass the ACA with a public option. The House had supported one, but the Senate coalition fell apart unless it was removed. So, the public option was not excluded because nobody wanted it. For ACA to pass, the option had to go because Obamacare did not have the votes to keep it and still pass the law.

Quote "Obama who couldn't win an illinois seat focusing on the black vote, won by splitting the black and white vote and that led to support from very wealthy donors which undid Hillary Clinton's run. As president Obama was brilliant at speaking, commercials, advertising, appearance but was woeful as a legislator, a maker of laws. the laws he made were not only poor but dysfunctional. @richardmurray I responded with facts, addressed what you wrote in your own words, and asked you to substantiate your condemnation of President Obama. What I did not anticipate was the psychosexual element you would introduce when asked for evidence. I’ll step out of the conversation and leave you two alone.

That is a sweeping claim, but where is the evidence? First, Barack Obama did not “fail to win an Illinois seat by focusing on the Black vote.” He was already an elected Illinois state senator when, in 2000, he unsuccessfully challenged longtime incumbent Congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s First Congressional District. Losing one primary to an entrenched incumbent is not proof that Obama lacked political or legislative ability. I moved to Illinois in 2002, so I did not merely read about Illinois politics after the fact. I was an Illinois voter. Second, saying that Obama later won by “splitting the Black and white vote” and obtaining support from wealthy donors is not a serious analysis of the 2008 campaign. As a marketing communications strategist, I had the opportunity to study the “Yes We Can” and “Change We Can Believe In” campaigns closely. The first campaign was a masterclass in architecting a social movement. Reducing Obama’s campaign to speeches, commercials, wealthy donors, and appearances misses the central innovation: it built a decentralized civic movement in which millions of ordinary people became organizers, fundraisers, community leaders, and co-authors of the campaign’s meaning. (Obama's Lost Army) Successful candidates build coalitions. Obama assembled a multiracial electorate, attracted major donors, and developed an unusually broad small-donor fundraising operation. That is called campaigning. It is not evidence that he somehow “undid” Hillary Clinton’s rightful possession of the nomination. No candidate possessed the nomination by right. The nomination belonged to the candidate who won the delegate contest. Now to the allegation that Obama was “woeful as a legislator” and that the laws associated with him were “poor” and “dysfunctional.” Presidents do not personally make laws. Congress drafts and passes bills. Presidents may establish policy priorities, propose legislation, negotiate with lawmakers, advocate for bills, veto them, or sign them into law. Therefore, name the specific legislation you are criticizing and quantify its allegedly woeful results. During Obama’s years in the Illinois Senate, he worked on legislation requiring the recording of interrogations in capital cases and the collection of racial data from traffic stops. In the U.S. Senate, his work included federal-spending transparency and bipartisan efforts to secure nuclear and conventional weapons. As president, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored workers’ ability to challenge continuing pay discrimination when they receive discriminatory compensation. He also signed the Affordable Care Act. You may dislike the ACA or object to particular provisions, but “I dislike it” is not evidence that the law was dysfunctional. Measurable outcomes are available for examination. According to the Obama White House’s 2016 assessment of progress in the African-American community, approximately three million uninsured, nonelderly Black adults gained health coverage after Affordable Care Act enrollment began. The report also documented 700,000 fewer Black Americans living in poverty in 2015, 400,000 fewer Black children living in poverty, historically high Black high-school graduation rates, declining incarceration rates, and 62 lifetime federal judicial appointments of African Americans. Yes, the administration itself issued that report, and its conclusions should be checked against the underlying federal data. Nor should every favorable development during an administration automatically be credited to one president or one piece of legislation. But the report still provides actual claims, measurements, and outcomes that can be investigated. That is considerably more substantive than simply declaring that Obama was “woeful” and that his laws were “dysfunctional.” I also personally obtained healthcare benefits through the Affordable Care Act, as did millions of other Americans. You cannot erase the people who benefited from a law merely by declaring the entire law a failure. And if Mayor Zohran Mamdani can be as consequential for New York City as President Obama was for the United States, then New York may be well positioned to preserve its standing as one of the world’s leading cities. There are legitimate criticisms to make of Obama’s presidency. There were compromises, policy failures, implementation problems, and unfulfilled promises. But “he gave good speeches and made terrible laws” is not an analysis. It is an unsupported opinion. So which specific bills produced the “woeful results” you claim? Which provisions were defective? What measurable damage did they cause? What evidence connects that damage to the legislation? Name the law. Identify the defective provision. Quantify the harm. If you cannot identify the law, explain the defect and provide factual evidence of the result, please do not tag me merely to repeat a political impression. I do not have time to debate accusations that their author refuses to substantiate.

My photo timestamp says 2013 🤔

I'm not sure but it appears we can no longer post updates on our profiles. This is a really good site. I'm glad you didn't dump the forum 🙏🏽

The First Chapter celebrates impactful storytelling, featuring Malaika Mutere's Bantu Waltz, where music, identity, and colonial survival intertwine through a powerful, evocative narrative. Bantu Waltz : Nya's Archangel Story by Malaika Mutere Reviewed by MELEvery writer knows: the first chapter is a promise. It’s where you bring your best pen forward. And if done right, that first chapter becomes a map, a mood, and a motive. That’s why I bring to you, The First Chapter, a feature dedicated to honoring the artistry and ambition of Chapter One. Our inaugural entry belongs to Bantu Waltz: Nya’s Archangel’s Story by Malaika Mutere—a novel that doesn’t tiptoe onto the page but dances in with rhythm, rage, and reverence. Mutere’s prose is at once a celebration and a lament, a reminder that the stories we tell about music, memory, and colonial survival are neither linear nor light. They’re layered. Underneath the first chapter’s sun-drenched opening scene—students dancing, families gathering, a new year rising—lurks a tension that is anything but decorative. In a flashback, the protagonist, Nya, shares a memory that recalls British invasion music floating over Kenyan airwaves; the reader is reminded that even joy carries the echo of conquest. It’s not just a song; it’s a symbol. That static hums with identity theft, cultural interruption, and ancestral resistance. And like any song worth listening to twice, this chapter delivers a syncopated truth: music in the wrong hands is deception. But in Mutere’s hands? It’s a key. A call. A coded language meant for the descendants of Bantu lineage—those with the ancient mitochondrial DNA to decipher the message carried in the melody. I read this chapter before Black Music Month slipped away, and I’m glad I did. Because what Bantu Waltz makes clear is that Black music is more than a beat; it’s a genealogy. And sometimes, a first chapter is more than a beginning—it’s a remembrance. So if you’re looking for fiction that blends Soul, Sorrow, and Sound into one artful opening, I recommend Bantu Waltz to readers of Soul/R&B fiction, social anthropology, and cultural memoirs dressed as novels. Because The First Chapter isn’t just a feature. It’s a feeling. Originally posted Art intersects MEL June 30, 2025

The Black man who killed my father while he was trying to prevent a robbery of his uncle store was convicted with life with no expected parole. He is free today and has been for some time, so I suspect there are a lot who are free today. But that crime spree back in the day - sent me fleeing NY so, I'm not mad at that crime bill that saved other Black families who couldn't leave New York. If there were people falsely imprisoned my heart breaks for them and I hope some liberal project got them out. But it wasn't like Black people caught up in that bill were innocent. They left a lot of Black families without fathers, sons, mothers and daughters. In other news, Hi @ProfD ! I hope you are doing well on this Memorial Day!