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Judging people based on their job title is a pretty worthless bit of discrimination. I have grown to really despise the act of doing so to where sometimes I begin judging the person negatively who questioned the janitor’s intelligence just because he’s a janitor. I became annoyed with this line of thinking after knowing the “Janitors” who are financially set, have stock options and manage their money properly across from the big bad Director of the company who is living check to check and on an AMSCOT rotation monthly. A job is a job. You can slap a fancy word like “career” on there and assume that your weekly Happy Hour visits with Gayle from Marketing makes you “successful” but at the end of the day you and the Admin that you were poking fun of is dancing for a boss in order to afford a living and more. It’s all the same thing, different… [Read more]

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Recently I was enjoying some good old school reggae, when I heard Maxi Priest burst onto the air waves with the rhythmic “Hey Fatty, Fatty”.  I was always under the assumption that unlike the U.S., many African and Caribbean nations held fat women as desirable icons of beauty.  I paused to really listen to the words, only to realize Maxi Priest was actually berating her for being fat. He belts out– “Hey Fatty Fatty, why are you behaving like that (go long so)? When you come to the party/club (dance) you do your own thing! You move your hips like they are on a hinge. You do the “round-the-world”, you do the “electric move”, you do the “water-pumping”, and you say you want to “bubble” with me. You walk down the road as if you are slim, because you don’t know that in town you are the biggest thing.” As a young woman in the… [Read more]

It is one thing to show super-human aptitude for a country that loves you, but to do so for a country that deems you to be sub-human – to the point that they withhold honors earned in the line of duty is beyond belief. When you watch movies depicting D.Day (Normandy), the Allied attacks on the Nazi surge, and anything dealing with the 1940’s militarily, it is easy to forget that black people existed, let alone fought. It being very much a white man’s world during these times, blacks were kept out of books and camera view, especially when films were being made to record the military. Now think about how bad it must’ve been during World War I for African Americans who served in the Army. This sad fact led to men like Sergeant Henry Lincoln Johnson being overlooked and ignored, even when taking 21 injuries from an army of German soldiers as he… [Read more]