August 11 marks the anniversary of Hip Hop, tracing back to a legendary 1973 backyard party in the Bronx, where DJ Kool Herc debuted innovative turntable techniques that would become the foundation of the genre. Six years later, in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” became the first commercially successful Hip Hop single, bringing the genre to fans everywhere with unforgettable lyrics that have become ingrained in Hip Hop culture.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Tuskegee banning bonnets and durags creates the kind of environment an HBCU is supposed to have. I understand the argument about professionalism. I really do. But Black students spend most of their lives navigating spaces where they’re told to shrink parts of themselves to fit someone else’s definition of “professional.” An HBCU has always meant something different to me. It’s supposed to be one of the few places where Black students don’t have to constantly code-switch or worry that every part of their culture is being judged. It’s supposed to feel like a safe space. What bothers me isn’t that Tuskegee has a dress code. It’s that the policy feels like it’s asking students to move one step closer to whiteness in the name of professionalism. We have over a century of history showing that respectability has never been a guarantee of dignity. Black people wore three-piece suits during segregation. Black women dressed impeccably during the Civil Rights Movement. They were still denied jobs, denied service, and denied basic human rights. So when people say, “This is about self-respect,” I hear that. But I also hear the old message that if we just present ourselves the “right” way, we’ll be taken seriously. I don’t believe a satin bonnet or a durag determines someone’s character, intelligence, or future. I believe how you treat people, how you show up, and what you contribute says a whole lot more. That’s why this conversation is bigger than bonnets. It’s about what kind of Black spaces we’re trying to build and whether those spaces should ask us to become more like everyone else just to be considered respectable. If you enjoy Rissa SoFar and would like to contribute to the running of my page, please feel free to subscribe.🤎 https://www.facebook.com/rissasofar/subscribenow?surface=pinned_comments

I want to talk about the Black elite of the Gilded Age because when HBO put them on television, a startling number of Americans seemed to think the show had invented them. Black doctors, bankers, journalists, educators, business owners, and society women appeared on screen, and the comments filled with people asking whether any of this was real. That surprise is doing a lot of work. It tells us how thoroughly the American imagination has been trained to flatten Black history into two acceptable shapes: suffering and protest. Enslavement and civil rights. Chains and marches. Those are real and foundational stories, but they are not the whole archive, and treating them as such has consequences. It allows Americans to imagine that Black people spent the nineteenth century either enslaved, impoverished, or waiting to march toward freedom. Then a television show introduces a Black pharmacist with a large house and a complicated social life, and suddenly everyone needs to see the footnotes. The Black elite existed in the late nineteenth century. They built banks, schools, newspapers, businesses, churches, professional organizations, mutual aid societies, and social clubs. They hosted debutante balls, bought property, enforced dress codes, worried about family names, and developed intricate rules of social belonging that made old New York seem almost casual. They did all of this during the same years that white Americans were constructing Jim Crow, defending lynching, stripping Black citizens of the vote, and congratulating themselves on having settled the matter of slavery. That is not a contradiction in the historical record. It is the historical record. The Gilded Age was not just robber barons, railroad money, and rich white families trying to marry their daughters into richer white families. Black Americans were building institutions too, largely because the institutions around them had no intention of including them. When I say Black elite, I do not just mean wealthy families, though some were. I mean people who were educated, professionally established, socially connected, and living in cities where Black communities had built enough of their own infrastructure to support a professional class.

Black Americans can carry the weight of experiences that began long before we were born. But understanding what we carry can be a powerful first step toward healing. 🖤 Trauma expert Dr. Joan Samuels-Dennis explains how historical and racially motivated trauma can affect generations, shaping mental, physical, and emotional well-being in ways we may not always recognize. From journaling and intentional self-development to working with a Black trauma-informed therapist, she shares four ways to begin confronting inherited pain, deepening self-awareness, and reclaiming a stronger sense of identity. Read more https://www.ebony.com/4-historical-traumas-healing-tips/ 📸: SDI Productions/Getty Images