I love Islam and cream soda

Whenever I inevitably hear someone say black people need to get over racism, I think about Thomas Thistlewood, who was a plantation owner in Jamaica and a prolific writer whose diary spanned over 14,000 pages.  Most of it was intricate details of how he tortured and raped slaves.  Thistlewood was the inventor of a particular type of torture called "Derby's dose", which entailed whipping a slave, then soaking their wounds in lime juice and salt and then forcing another slave to defecate in their mouth, bandaging their mouth shut for days.

I’ve always believed you don’t owe explanations to anyone. The people who walk with you don’t need them. And the people who don’t were never going to believe you anyway. That belief has guided me for most of my life—especially in moments when silence would’ve been more convenient, but truth was more necessary. Survival Is Not a Secret In 2020, I was shot multiple times with .40 caliber bullets by my ex-wife’s boyfriend, at her direction. I’ve never hidden that fact. Not because I enjoy reliving it, and not because I’m trying to shock anyone—but because survival is part of my story, and witnesses don’t erase chapters to make other people comfortable. I didn’t treat that moment as the end of my life. I treated it as another chapter in a long story of resilience, refusal, and survival. That honesty made some people uncomfortable. I didn’t—and don’t—care. Silence has never been my role. Witnessing is. When Chaos Escalates After the shooting, the harassment continued the way it ...

If our criminal justice system is the "New Jim Crow", and if our prisons are neo-plantations, then our network of county and city jails are akin to slave ships - the "New Amistad", if you will.  There's an appropriate visual when you consider cells like those in Colorado's Arapahoe County Detention Center that have been modified from double to triple bunks - at a glance they resemble the cramped bowels of slave ships where African inmates-as-cargo were lain in tight stacks and rows.      Appropriate analogies abound - like slaves, jail inmates are a valuable commodity; local lockups get paid per body and operate like any business by cutting costs of operation as much as possible to maintain create revenue. Slave traders made and maintained profits by providing the barest minimum for slaves to survive transport to auction, often leaving them naked with no medical care and feeding them scraps for food. Jail menus provide so minimal calories and...

In the pit of my belly, John Wick's dog just got killed - but presently, the dominate feeling up in my heart is freedom - and gratitude. There is an ayat of Quran that quotes Zakariya praying, stating to God that "I have never been unsuccessful in my prayer to You" - It is a verse that rings throughout my mind in context to my ordeal. I have questioned a lot during the last 10 months but my faith in Him seeing my thru did not waver. I am first grateful to Him, good times and bad.