I love Islam and cream soda

  Let me say this plainly: I don’t visit my son. I had to check somebody on that recently while filling out paperwork. The form asked about “visitation” and who the “custodial parent” was. Nah. That might sound small to some people, but it’s not. That’s how the system quietly frames fathers before we even open our mouths. In Colorado, we don’t even use those terms anymore—at least not legally. There’s no “custody.” There’s no “visiting parent.” There is  parental responsibility . There is  parenting time . That’s intentional. That shift in language is supposed to reflect something real: both parents matter. But here’s the problem— the culture hasn’t caught up to the law . So what happens? You get professionals still using outdated language. You get systems still thinking in outdated roles. And worst of all—you get fathers who don’t push back. Let me be clear: If you don’t check the language, the language will check you. Calling it “visitation” makes you sound ...

 There’s something different about watching a man drop 33. Not just buckets. Not just highlights. Not just a career night that gets clipped up and replayed on ESPN. I’m talking about weight. Because when Terrence Shannon Jr. put up that 33-piece, he wasn’t just cooking defenders — he was cooking everything that tried to bury him before he ever got here. And I recognize that. Not from the cheap seats… but from the battlefield. --- We live in a time where an accusation can hit harder than any punch, any bullet, any prison sentence. A whisper turns into a headline. A headline turns into a narrative. And a narrative — once it gets legs — doesn’t care about truth. It cares about traction. Terrence Shannon Jr. got caught in that machine. Serious allegations. The kind that stain your name before you ever get to speak. The kind that make people look at you sideways, distance themselves, erase you before the facts even have a chance to breathe. But here’s what they don’t talk about enough: ...

By Taj Ashaheed There are moments in life when justice doesn’t arrive as a triumph. It arrives as a correction. A rebalancing. A full circle. --- My recent $240,000 settlement with the Colorado Department of Corrections might look, on paper, like a victory. But the truth is more complicated. It is the endpoint of a decade-long chain of decisions—some personal, many institutional—that reveal how easily systems meant to uphold justice can instead be bent to convenience, pressure, and protection of their own. To understand that settlement, you have to go back to 2014. --- That year, I pled guilty to harassment charges brought by my ex-wife, Dominique. The allegations were false. I intended to fight them. But fighting would have meant sitting in jail for months—possibly a year—waiting for trial. At the time, my teenage daughter was struggling deeply with my absence. So when prosecutors offered a deal—plead guilty, receive probation—I made a calculation. Not about guilt, but abo...

Let me tell you something real quick about #agenda  Instead of giving us a commercial where Magic and Larry were scientists creating the greatest basketball player, going back and forth over what they should name him: "Larry or "Johnson"... And up out of the smoke comes Larry Johnson... Reebok instead put our Muslim brother in a dress... It should not go unnoticed that the commercial didn't happen because Larry didn't want to do it... And now you see why LJ made sure he was was so prominently quoted in the book "40 Million Slave"...

🔥 A Surname Is a Brand A man’s last name is not just something he signs at the bottom of paperwork. It’s not just what’s printed on a birth certificate. It’s a brand. And I don’t mean that in some shallow, social media, logo-and-marketing kind of way. I mean it in the deepest sense—reputation, legacy, identity, and trajectory. Your last name is what your children walk into rooms carrying… before they even open their mouths. I heard NBA veteran Gilbert Arenas say something that stuck with me—that a father’s name is a brand, and that tearing that brand down hurts the children more than anybody. He was right. But I want to take it further. Because for some of us, that name was built through struggle, through survival, through transformation. My name— Ashaheed —means something. It means witness. Not just someone who sees… but someone who testifies. Someone who stands in truth, even when that truth is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or contested. A witness doesn’t get to rewrite the story bas...

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.

#RamadanMubarak  The Malê Revolt (1835) — A Legacy of Faith and Resistance This holy month we remember one of the most powerful and least discussed acts of resistance in the Americas: the Malê Revolt. In January of 1835, during the holy month of Ramadan in Salvador, enslaved and free African Muslims—many of them Yoruba, Hausa, and Nupe—organized a carefully planned uprising against Brazil’s brutal slave system. They were known as Malês, a term used in Brazil for African Muslims (from the Yoruba word Imale). What made this revolt unique was not just its courage—but its discipline, literacy, and faith. Many of the Malês could read and write Arabic, something rare in the Americas at the time. Authorities later discovered: •Qur’anic verses •handwritten Arabic plans •protective talismans and prayers These documents showed a level of organization that terrified Brazil’s slaveholding class. On the night of January 24–25, 1835, hundreds of Muslim rebels dressed in white garments—some carry...

Back in 2017, 3 things happened to highlight the danger Black people feel simply on the basis of being Black: Trump's advent, the cinematic release and popularity of Get Out , and most recently the release of the Mike Brown video of him that supports the contention that he had not committed a robbery that put him at odds with law enforcement (and his killer, officer Darren Wilson) in the first place. These incidents bring to light, once again, the historical picture that is painted about Black males, especially by White males, immediately after the Civil War. Prior to emancipation Black men were not seen as threatening - slave masters would travel throughout the country, leaving their families, especially their women, in the care and/or presence of slaves with nary a concern. After emancipation, the view of males morphed from placated servants to lascivious, dangerous predators - a consequence of guilt and fear aimed at now-free people who just might want to seek retribution for ...

Because revolutions aren't on TikTok, you probably didn't notice Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger create the AES to resist French influence. For them it's real because yearly, France is siphoning 500 billion dollars away from their former colonies while forcing them to import their goods to France and in turn, forcing them to buy back finished products, all the while investing those billions to the tune of trillions of dollars in dividends which not one nation of Africa benefits from.

Ten Years Later: From Forced Silence to Precedent — The Beard They Tried to Take, and the Voice They Couldn’t Ten years ago, I stood inside a Colorado prison intake facility and was told to do something that violated my faith, my dignity, and my humanity: shave my beard. It wasn’t about safety. It wasn’t about policy applied equally. It was about power — and the assumption that a man in custody has no voice, no rights, and no future. This month, after a decade-long legal fight, that assumption was proven wrong. I reached a settlement with the State of Colorado for $245,000 — not just compensation for what was done to me, but recognition that what happened was unlawful. More importantly, it sets a precedent for others who may face similar violations of religious freedom and human dignity. But this victory didn’t begin in a courtroom. It began with a long chain of injustice — and a refusal to be erased. The Road Back to Prison — and Back to Truth My original incarceration ste...

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 ...