WANT TO HELP BLACKS? DO THIS!

The simplest of actions, can make the greatest difference.
4.19.2015

Please allow me to bloviate about one night, a while back. Maybe 8-10 years or so.

5 Black guys enter a bar. Sounds like the beginning of a joke.

Well, it was many bars. And it wasn't regular Black dudes. It was us. SU heads. College buddies. The type of guys to buy bottles everywhere we went and not finish them.

I visited Ferguson Missouri in November of 2014, right after the riots.
This is Michael Brown's memorial. I had an eye-opening time

On this particular night, we club-hopped till about 4AM. Our last stop was this place I'd never been to before. It was on the second floor of what seemed like an office building in an area of NYC some people call, "Hell's Kitchen." Back in the day when the name became popular, the kitchens there really looked like hell. No longer. Now, it's a pretty expensive area of Manhattan.

When we got off the elevator, everybody around us became instantly South Korean. The house music was booming. Seems like our Black Buppy crew had crashed a South Korean birthday party for some rich IT guy. After a while there, I came to realize that this was a coworker of one of my buddies.

I was surprised at the amount of interaction from the folks there. Strangers where offering me drinks, the women were friendly, people started crowding around as if we were celebrities. I didn't know what the excitement was all about. My stupid caveman ass grew up in projects thinking that Asians don't like Blacks. 

WATCHING MOMMA DIE

The Long Wave Goodbye...
9.21.2014

(Note: This is a diary from an emotionally-tragic time in my life. As such, I feel a great deal of creative license and I reveal a lot about myself. My hope is that nobody feels offended, disparaged or taken aback by my frank talk. To reveal myself in this way, is an exercise of love to my community.)

On my first visits, I just sat there and held her hand.
Sometimes, crying.I think she liked me not talking
and just being there.

I write this in Homage, to my mother, The Honorable Judge Deborah Shelton Griffin, whose shoes I could never fill. 

Spoiler alert: she died after a long illness.

I remember the day I began feeling that something was really wrong with my mother. I have a terrible memory, but I believe it was in September of 2009. 

We were in France, as part of a fantastic Mediterranean cruise she had set up for her immediate family to enjoy; her, myself and my little brother, Jonathan. I forget which stop it was on the cruise. Perhaps Marseilles. Mom and I decided to escape my brother on an excursion to see the city.