Counteract book bans the easy way: read and share great books — A culture of reading Father’s Day is just about here, and I pause to think of my father. His values on knowledge and reading are my guiding light these days. Such as, how do we stop and counteract all of this censorship nonsense and book banning? How? By promoting a culture of reading in…

There are millions and we are all different — Roll Call — Reginald Dwayne Betts. Martin Espada. Monica Youn. Edgar Lee Masters. Lawrence Joseph. J.P. Howard. The list is long. Millions worldwide. Poets who are also lawyers. Lawyers who are also poets. It feels like it is not a fit but it is for me. Always fit. For many, like Evie Shockley…

My favorite guided spiritual meditation — Many nights, I listen to guided meditations to fall asleep. It is how I am wired. A soft voice to put me in the present and to focus on nothing at all but the immediate. It is how to live. No worries about tomorrow, yesterday, or some bill to pay…

White Supremacists, Of Course. — “Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.” — Derrick Bell Way back in 1995, Derrick Bell, one of the key players in the Critical Race Theory movement, wrote about the attacks on the movement from many different ideological spectrums. This is back when CRT…

a literary collage on African-American culture and history — every poem always begins w/ sir joe q’s most famous: “i’ve got so much trouble on my mind…” my head back & forth like a cameo song… What is Funk? “…Funk music was the social protest discourse of the young Black poor and working-class community after the euphoria of the civil rights movement…

No matter what popular music you love, the answer is Louis Armstrong — Satchmo The most important popular musician in the history of American music is Louis Armstrong, a Black man from New Orleans. Tell that to Jann Wenner, the troubled and confused ex-publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine, who likely knows nothing of Armstrong’s gift to America as its most important popular musician. Armstrong…

Florida’s Republican leadership needs to be schooled — Governor Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in Florida do not believe systemic racism exists in the United States. It is one reason they have passed laws censoring African-American and American history. They are also censoring books on these topics to continue to conceal the country's real history on race matters. …

Every Republican’s favorite economist was low down and bigoted behind the scenes. — With no sadness, I announce that Milton Friedman, the late supply-side economist, was a racist eugenicist. While Friedman was developing his wasteful neoliberal economic ideas in the U.S., he was also destroying any chance for more equal opportunity in public education for African Americans. It does makes sense too; Friedman…

(an epigram) —