Deesha Philyaw

At the Juneteenth commemoration/Antwon Rose anniversary rally someone takes a picture of my daughters taking a knee. I make a mental note to walk to Home Depot later and buy gas masks for them, which they will probably accept to placate me but not actually wear. Then I remember something about a Home Depot boycott, so I search online for specifics.
The Home Depot query sends me down a rabbit hole. Via social media I’m a virtual witness to the collective chipping away at white supremacy: boyco...

My lifelong bad habit of not reading the fine print has been rivaled only by my bad habit of ignoring relationship red flags. Ignoring the fine print landed my acrophobic ass on a pissed-off horse on the edge of a cliff in Mexico. Ignoring red flags landed me in a second marriage that should not have been a second date. I survived both situations. But only now, nearly four years after that trip to Mexico and nearly three years after I left that marriage, do I realize how the former set the st...

How do you make love to a physicist? You do it on Pi Day—pi is a constant, also irrational—but the groundwork is laid months in advance. First, you must meet him in passing at a S.T.E.A.M. conference. As a middle school art teacher, you are there to ensure the A(rts) are truly represented and not lost amid the giants of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. But as a Black woman, you are there playing Count the Negroes, as you do at every conference. He is #12, at a conference of hundreds. O...

Daz, 37
I’m a marriage-minded individual. That means I believe in marriage. I believe so strongly in everlasting marriage that I’ve added this photoshopped image of my disembodied head surrounded by interlocked wedding rings; the word “marriage” in a fancy, romantic font; a glass of red wine; a bottle of red wine; a piece of sheet music (the “Wedding March”); and a random piece of red fabric tossed ever so seductively, to represent your panties. When I’m not thinking about marrying you, I’m o...

Award-winning Syrian Canadian author and activist Danny Ramadan makes his English-language children’s book debut with Salma the Syrian Chef (Annick Press, March 10). In the book, Salma and her mama have recently arrived in Vancouver from a refugee camp in Damascus. Their new apartment is within a Welcome Center where they live with other immigrants from around the world. Salma’s mama is always busy or sad as she works to establish their new life. With the help of center staff and fellow resid...

How can you be mad at someone who’s dying of cancer? It helps if you don’t yet know she’s dying, if you think the doctors are just trying one more thing....

Not long after adopting her son August a little over a decade ago, Nefertiti Austin went to the library in search of books by, or for, Black mothers, to educate herself on raising a Black child. The librarian pointed her to two books. That was it.
Austin wasn't surprised: "My journey to motherhood as a Black woman was not part of mainstream culture's idea of motherhood, and thus, there would be no funny or ballsy mommy books written by Black mothers on the shelf." The absence of Black women's...

Your soon-to-be-second-ex-husband calls just to say “hey.” But you’ve already begun to forget how it felt to be beneath him.
Today’s forecast: Cloudy, with no chance of ever going back.
Happy hour. And you’re wearing your thigh-high boots and your favorite black sweater with the cleavage-revealing...

Parenting a picky eater can stress out even the most laid-back among us. The kitchen table becomes a battleground, and there are no winners. You’re tired of begging, threatening and bargaining with your child to get her to just try it, take two bites, eat something — anything — green.

In All the Days Past, All the Days To Come (Viking, Jan. 7), the final book in Mildred D. Taylor’s Cassie Logan series, Cassie is now a young woman experiencing love and loss amid the unfolding of the civil rights movement. Taylor’s five-book saga has centered around the Logans, an African American family in Mississippi, spanning more than 40 years...

As a single Black woman who adopted her children from the foster care system, Nefertiti Austin writes about the erasure of voices of color in media and public discourse about motherhood. Her work has been shortlisted for literary awards and featured in outlets including MUTHA, mater mea, Essence.com, Adoptive Families magazine, and PBS Parents. She holds degrees in U.S. History and African-American Studies and has trained others seeking a license to foster and/or adopt children fr...

Black women aren’t meant to shovel snow. Rhonda mumbles this as we are knee-deep in the stuff. We have to do it. When it snows heavy overnight, we wake before the sun come...

WHITING HAS BEEN CALLED the “hot dog of the sea” because it’s so cheap. But fishermen love this tasty sport fish because it grabs the lure hard and puts up a good fight.
My father said, “Every Sunday morning while your mother lies across town dying, I will make you fried whiting, grits, and cat’s head biscuits to make up for telling a judge that you weren’t mine. Something to fill your thirty-three-year-old belly for that time I tried to pass you off as my little sister to my new girlfriend, ...

I parked in the shadows behind the hospice center, and waited. I held a box of condoms on my lap, Magnum XLs. It was like being sixteen again, except this time I bought the condoms instead of relying on the boy. This time, the boy was a man I had mistaken for someone I’d gone to junior high with when our paths first crossed two weeks before at the main entrance of the hospice center. I was coming, he was going. I thought he was Daniel McMurray so I stared longer than I should have,...