KaDeWo - The Joy Advocate

 Read with India.Arie's Good Mourning playing in the background...Love that song! (Just woke up with this on my mind) I recall where we were a year ago this day and my advice to others is... Refrain from engaging in things that will cloud your judgment and delay your progress with its tantalizing elements. Love possesses so much power that it seduces the innocent into believing that its purpose is to enhance the lover's life, when in fact it will temporarily do this and later cause insanity. A thoughtful human once summarized insanity as, committing the same act again and again, expecting a different outcome . Is this not what people gambling on love do? I CAN tell you exactly how many times I have entered into a fresh relationship with hope and desire. This seems absurd due to the fact that all beginnings must have their end. [...Mislead by society to believe that each relationship will lead to marriage.] How many times have you willingly decided to take a chance on mat...

This question was posed to my Harlem Renaissance class: Which of the character/s in Langston Hughes' novella The Ways of White Folks' story titled Father and Son was the most disturbing to you? This is not an easy question for me to answer. Set on the Big House Plantation in Georgia during Reconstruction, all the characters provoke the mind into considering why the familial "structure" was a social norm in the nation's past and how it affects the present day? Colonel Thomas Norwood with his Negro mistress Coralee Lewis, and his mulatto children, Willie; Bert; and Bertha Lewis (Norwood), that he would deny as his own before white people, as if many of them did not have similar situations in their own household, are all familiar characters to those that have studied Black Bondage in American history. However, I was not prepared for the actual discomfort I felt in reading the short, offensive interaction Cora has with Talbot and Jim, two well-known white men of ...

Thoughts after my Shakespeare course on yesterday: CUT, CUT!! Alright, who decided that Shylock the Jew of The Merchant of Venice is a (black/dark) comedy? I do not agree that Shylock is a comedic villain, nor was he a buffoon. He was a victim of differences like so many people have been for centuries (and continue to be in many parts of the world). He was persecuted by the Christians for years and when the opportunity for revenge presented itself, he attempted to gain his comfort by abiding the law of those that sought to oppress him - solely because of his religion - the system failed him! Doesn't this sound familiar??? Granted, this play was written for entertainment purposes in the late 1500s in England. Many of the spectators would probably have identified more with the (hypocritical) Christian characters. In present day, I have to see the issues I believe Shakespeare was revealing in his thought-provoking play: h ypocrisy in religion and law/court, the fault of pride and ...