(ThyBlackMan.com) There comes a point in a man’s life when the way he dresses stops being a matter of taste and starts being a matter of self respect, and a whole lot of us blew past that exit without ever checking the sign. My cousin Reggie turned forty eight in ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Sit in any barbershop long enough and you will hear a young man’s whole character decided over the hum of the clippers. Russell Wilson got decided in mine years back, and the ruling came down the same every time somebody said his name. Soft. Too polished, too churchy, grinning ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Some deaths arrive with their circumstances already settled, and a community can mourn them cleanly. Others arrive with a hollow place at the center, where certainty ought to sit, and that hollow is where the trouble begins. The loss of an eighteen year old named Nolan Xavier Wells, of ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) A person reaches an age where he stops performing for the world and simply tells the truth. I am at that age now. So understand that I am not writing to you from some high place, like I have it all worked out. I spent the better part of ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Few artists in modern R&B pose the moral puzzle as sharply as Chris Brown. The talent is immense, the history of harm is documented and long, and the culture has spent years dodging the plain question of how those two truths are meant to share the same room. I ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There is a particular arithmetic that greets a Black man before he has spoken a word, and I have spent the better part of my life on the wrong end of it. Many brothers who look like me know the moment I mean. A room adjusts. Folks measure height ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There’s a thing that happens when you get a group of us together in a room. Could be a barbershop, could be a backyard with the grill going, could be somebody’s basement after a long week. The energy is good at first. Laughter, old stories, somebody lying about how ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I have buried friends. Sat across thick glass from men I love too, watched them grow gray under hard fluorescent light while the world kept on turning without them in it. So when I speak to you now, understand the words are coming from a heart that has already ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) A brother does not always need more weight on his shoulders. Sometimes he needs a porch, a fishing pole, a good book, and a long walk back to himself. That may sound too simple for this loud age, but simple things have saved plenty of men. A rocking chair ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) A Black father’s greatest flex is not what he owns, what he drives, or how many people praise him, but whether his children can look around and know he is still there. That may not sound flashy to folks chasing noise, but ask any grown person still healing from ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) One thing I had to learn the hard way is that a brother can be doing everything people asked of him and still not know how to enjoy his own life. That sounds strange until you have lived it. You can get up early, go to work, keep gas in ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) For many brothers growing up through the late eighties and nineties, Denzel Washington felt familiar long before most of us ever saw him in person. He carries himself like somebody you might hear speaking wisdom at a cookout, sitting on a porch late in the evening, or giving game ...