Soulfire Blog

  Failure does not have to be a numbing indictment against future success if it is used to your advantage, but for black women there’s a lot in the equation. And the stakes in this failure-to-success ratio couldn’t be greater. Worldwide, there is the fundamental assumption that when something happens on a grand scale that…

CHAPTER NINE NATURE’S CODE   In order to keep it real, you must tell the truth, so here’s some bad news. Even though it initially sounds so patently unfair, it can hardly be argued that black women have not selected the right company when it comes to black men. And here’s why. Throughout the entire…

CHAPTER EIGHT YOU’RE THE ENEMY TOO   Rest assured that this is not traditional bullying. No, it’s much worse. It’s psychological bullying and black women are the primary victims of this psychic warfare and it will continue unabated unless black women discover a way to combat their low self-esteem issues. Granted, there is nothing fascinating…

CHAPTER SIX     It has to be said. Black people experiment with faith. We use it as if it is some  sort of spiritual collateral to bargain our way through the work week just so we can make it to the weekend where we exhibit what we truly believe in. Many of us use…

  Another item that must be mentioned in the destruction of the black woman is her early sexualization. If you want to bet on one thing that is sure to move a black girl away from her mental assets to a focus on her physical ones is this high-octane sexual-charged atmosphere where her body generates…

THE WRITER’S EDGE 1 PRELUDE 2 WRITING   Let’s take a moment to deal with what I call “the blank page syndrome”. Just what is this syndrome, you ask? Well, it is the transition your book takes from being an actual mental byproduct into becoming an actual physical product, but before you jot down a…

 Yeah, I could have been something special, but one night I saw something that had rocked my world.             From almost the very first day that I was able to discern the nuances of speech and language, I was cautioned against going on 7th Street at night, especially a Friday night. During the day, 7th…

It would  have been a great leap of faith for me to  believe, even momentarily, that the US Pen in Atlanta would be any safer this time than it had been when I was there twenty years earlier. At twenty-six, me and my co-defendant, were the youngest convicts there with the exception of a brotha…

Sadly, in the days since I wrote the first part of this blog, two more prison officials have died from the brutal prison attack last month. I watched a news segment on local stations where a former correctional guard bemoaned the fact that these deaths occurred, but he pointed out that such incidents are sometimes…