Troy

I understand. This is evidenced by my own experience and the experiences related by Pioneer. However, what I think you are failing to consider is, kids today have access to so much more sexually explicit content than ever before. This video, while a great display of Black athleticism and beauty, is also overtly sexual. Something Pioneer describes as natural behavior (like polygamy) and you simply say is beautiful without really addressing the sexual nature of the video -- almost as if it were not there or did not matter. Sure, you and I are not affected by this video -- we have a content, we've been on Earth for over half a century and have seen a lot. What I question is the impact of all of this on our youth. I have not seen this, but I take you word for it. Think about the scenario in which someone takes out their cell phone to record a gang rape and THEN put it on social media. What type of society do we have were tech firms profit off of motivating people to share gang rapes... this is so f-cked up I don't even know where to begin. @Pioneer1 I saw Kim last year and told her I knew Mel. She immediately whipped out a photo of her and Mel, from back in the day :-) I took a photo of Kim's cell phone and shared it with Mel. I thought I posted it here, but I guess I did not.

@Pioneer1 "racism" is the problem, not the false idea of different so called races. I was previously unaware of Jared Taylor. The video of the "debate" between Jared and Tariq Nasheed was hard to watch because Jared made Tariq look silly (I could not watch the whole video if there is a part in which Tariq does better please share the timestamp). On another level, Jared is using Tariq to elevate his own prominence by easily dispatching with him. Jared would have much more difficulty with a scholar like Cornel West or even something who has studied the subject more deeply like Ta Nehisi Coates. Jared is potentially very dangerous. Still I think we should get rid of tracking race in this country too. Your argument that: Again, this makes little sense. The victims would have legal ground for being mistreated. All this focus on race being the motivator tends to reinforce the perceived, inherent, differences between people with different skin tones.

I'll probably attend this event Tara -- thanks.

Extraordinary Women in Publishing a Conversation Hosted by Tori. Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad; Yona Deshommes, Associate Director of Publicity at Atria Books; and Cherise Fisher, a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates Literary Management. All of these Sisters are have been supportive of AALBC for years and provide keen insight into the publishing industry

I decided to use the industry standard BISAC codes to compile my Top Lists across various categories. This will allow me to programmatically compile a very large number of lists on a variety of topic lists of books. As books win awards, obtain critical acclaim, make AALBC's best sellers lists, I'll compile this data and more into a dynamically generated and unbiased "Top Ten List." Basically I'll be parsing my list of Most Critically Acclaimed Books by their respective BISAC categories.

A buddy forwarded me this video, I watched the whole thing with interest listening to the numerous examples of white people who held racist views. It was not until the 7:38 mark where he states that we are "...supposed to think that race doesn't even exist." That I realized that I was watching white racist propaganda. This is really well done. The speaker is likeable measured and "sounds" reasonable and rational. Intrigued, I went to youtube to find more videos and my suspicions were confirmed as this video about Trump's comments about Baltimore illustrate. @Pioneer1 do you understand why a belief in "race" is so destructive? I can easily see how a white person uninformed about how Black people were treated in this country, and who also believes in the concept of race, would suck this up. Get ready for another four years of President Trump.

Yes I remember this. You haven't aged a bit! As far as the parties, I would not let my daughters have boys grinding on them in my basement with the lights off, or down low -- and now I know they could not go to a party a Ms. Hopkins house LOL! I did A LOT of things has a kid that I would discourage my kids from doing even though some of those things were fun at the time. We we went to seedy little clubs in Harlem during the early days of what would be known as "Hip Hip." I was like 12 or 13 and you go up to a girl to "dance," but basically you were just humping each other. Sometimes you put the girl in a "sandwich" with another guy -- grabbing her breasts and butt. Sometimes there would be a train of preteens just grinding on each other in a sweaty frenzy. It seems crazy as I reflect on it now, but it is what we did and there were places like this all over the city. Of course this experience informed our (young Black men in the inner city) way of dealing with women. I'll go out on a limb here and say the experience was not positive. Clearly, how we see this video is a reflection of our personal experiences. I suspect the impact, good or bad, on any individual will also be based upon individual experiences.

@Mel Hopkins yes I was beautiful, and as a gymnast the athleticism was not lost on me. Yes I remember doing the "Freak," but we were not filiming it and watching it constantly. Did you think the freak was appropriate? I know at least one guy that ejaculated while freaking (no it was not me 😎). So while I don't disagree with anything you wrote Mel, I find it hard to believe you would host a party where your teenage daughters were dressed and dancing like that. Would you you let them "freak" or dance "rub-a-dub style" in the basement with the lights off? @Pioneer1 if you are familiar with those dance styles, same question.

"Harm" many not be the right word. So I can't answer your question as posed. No the video is not XXX porn, but surely you'd agree the video is pretty provocative for prime time. If you don't find it sexually suggestive then you may be too old to have those feelings any longer :-) I know I wanna go out right now and find me a 20 something to get busy with I dunno man, I can only imagine what the average teenage boy wants to do after seeing this video. Again it is not just one video. This type of content is everywhere. This video single video will have been watched at least 20 million times in less than a week. That is more people who come to this site in an entire year. Look, scantily clad women gyrating in this manner were around when I was a teen too, but you had to go to a strip club to see this stuff. Today it is in the palm of your hand, on demand, 24/7. I'm not convinced there are no adverse consequences as a result of this -- are you @Pioneer1?

I apologize for the inconvenience. I was performing a routine upgrade to the forum's software and a change on my web host side caused the upgrade to fail midway. I was not able to remedy the problem until this morning.

From Authors Publish “These publications accept creative nonfiction, including personal essays and memoir. Most of these outlets accept other genres also, like fiction and nonfiction. A few also publish translations and artwork. All of them pay writers, from token to pro rates, and are listed in no particular order.”

Sex sells. Sure, but what are the selling @Pioneer1? I don't understand people with dark skin getting tatoos myself, but I have no "problem" with it. The only really problem I have with video is that I don't think it is appropriate for young kids and Google does not appear be exercising any control over who sees their vidoes. The video has over 14 largely due to Google pushing it. I see now that Google is selling tickets to a concert Normani is performing in... slick.

Jay Z and the NFL are strictly 'bout stackin' dat paypa -- period. Once you understand that, everything they do will make sense.

AALBC Mourns the passing of “Literary Lion” Paule Marshall, August 12, 2019 I meet Marshall once, she struck me as just a genuinely beautiful person. I think I'm a good read of people, and that was just the vibe she gave off. Marshall's passing comes less than a week after Morrison's. Her 1959 book Brown Girl, Brownstone is considered by many to be the book that launched contemporary Black women's literature.

A few moments ago I was hunting around my Google Home app trying to figure out how to change my "assistant's" voice. Google presented me with the following video. The video's preview image -- which is carefully crafted -- grabbed my attention for, what should be, obvious reasons. I watched the video in it's entirety. I'm not alone; the video was posted less than 24 hours ago and has almost 3 million views. Normally, I'm pretty good at ingoring the stuff that social media throws at me, largely because I actively avoid exposure, but this one hooked me. I don't think I'm being a "gruppy old dude" by complaining about Google's use of videos like this. I just can't image being a kid today, regularly exposed to videos like this. It must be hard not to objectify women when you see these images all the time. Now this is the same Google that banned my old discussion forums from displaying ads because of content, but they can push this in front on millions of people. I've posted a similiar video on Nicky Minaj sometime ago, so I know these video are not unusual. What seems unusual to me is that no one seems to think this is a issue. Maybe it is just me... I guess I have to ditch my Google Home too.

Sorry if I gave the impression that the show was scripted. It isn't. However, what they chose to focus on is the dysfunction. Often it is subtle, but that subtlety is what makes the show more interestingly. Maybe it is a cutaway to the weird shoes a professors are wearing or funny looking kid... it is artistic different people will see different things. The showcasing of dysfunction was spread eveningly. The head coaches -- all white -- presented like volatile, hypermasculine teenagers. Often the players were more mature. The last few seasons of GOT had a sister on prominent role. Indeed, she was involved in a relationship with... get this... another Black person. I know, rare to see Black on Black love; but it ended horribly if course 😞 I just watched season 4 episode 4 of LCU. My team lost; now I'm in a funky mood. I'm getting ready to go hang out though; Mrs. "Right Now" is waiting for me 😉

GoDaddy (AALBC's hosting company) is simply wrong for not allowing the use of the free SSL certificates. I'd go broke if I had to pay for SSL certificates on all of my websites 🙂

Well I can't speak to "acuracy," cause anytime you put cameras on front of folks you change things. But the stories were still compelling. Let us know what you think @Mel Hopkins One of my boy's sons, played on the same high school team, in Titusville, with one of the players highlighted. My boy and his wife have graduate degrees (his mom has a PhD), but the kid's mom on the show was locked up for 4 years when he was a kid. So it is a "slice" and not the full African American story. *I know you know this Mel, but I emphasized the point for other readers who might not know.

Basically the program tells the story of a couple of Junior College (JUCO) football programs. The teams roosters are made up of guys (mostly Black) who failed to make, or were kicked out of, Division 1 (D1) football programs. The guys all talented athletes with a menagerie of stories who are trying to make it back to the D1 level and ultimately to the pros. They battle with keeping their grades up and dealing with the challenges that landed them at a JUCO in some all-white-one-horse town. It spoke to my experience on some level. I could relate to the young men. I also used to teach guys this age, and background, trying to help them get a GED and it was not easy, so I could relate to the teachers that were trying to help these young men graduate. It also, indirectly, speaks to the business of collegiate football and how it really screws up the lives of so many people -- mostly Black -- without them really understanding what is happening. I don't watch sports, unless I have money on the game or am hanging out with my boys, but the way they edited the program made all of the games very exciting. Season #3 was particularly good in this regard. See I'm the kind of guy the will travel to Mississippi or Kansas just to watch these team play live and check out the communities covered. It was just a well done human interest story that speaks to the experience of everyday folks in a way that I'm not accustomed to seeing. My daughter who turned me onto the program told me not to get carried away -- "it's not like it is better than Game of Thrones." I loved GOT, but if I had to pick one. I'd pick Last Chance U.

Search engines, like Google use also use this as a ranking signal. In other words, all things being equal the site that uses https will out rank a site that simply uses http (not secure). https uses end to end encryption, which means the communications between your device and the website you are visiting is scrabbled and unintelligible to the bad guys lurking in cafes looking at your data over an unsecured wifi network. As far as I'm concerned all of the websites on the Internet should use https. You can get a free SSL certificate from https://www.sslforfree.com/ unfortunately greedy website hosts, like GoDaddy, do not allows the use of this free SSL certificate on the websites they host.

One of my kids turned me onto this show on Sunday and I've been spending 4 hours a night watching. I just finished season 3 (perhaps the best of the 1st three) and am about to start season 4. I highly recommend it.

2014 was an excellent year for critically acclaimed books written by Black authors. The number and quality of books published that year, by my reckoning, was perhaps unprecedented:

This line made me smile. This and some of the others, I bet, would not be understood by many Black people. Even this line says a lot -- at least to me -- it communicates location (use if "tennis shoes" vs "sneakers"), it communicates class and age upper middle class girls don't buy vaseline and they diffently not prepping with it before a fight for a dude...

The current mayor of Newark is Ras Baraka. I first became aware of him as a poet and the son of the icon writer Amiri Baraka. Both guys would be considered activists and far from being sellouts... But politics is such a scummy business. I don't believe anyone who enters politics today, and is elected to office, is worth a damn to the people. After seeing Ras and the rest of Newark bend over for Amazon, I was not impressed. So Newark has lead in their water (news to me BTW) and nothing is being done about it by their elected officials -- why is anyone surprised?

Hey @Milton I just added Priestess of NKu to AALBC. I also created a category called "Sword and Soul" to keep track of these books. I'm not aware of another book site categorizing books under this category. I know I have others in my database; they just need to be identified. I added a link to your site to purchase the book see below. Please post a publication date for when the book will actually be available for purchase. They will also get it on the “Books Coming Soon” page.