A "Bargain Bin" Blog Post by Hilerie Lind I was lying in bed last night, exhausted. Not the kind of tired that sleep can fix, but the kind that settles into your bones when you've spent too many days watching the world burn and wondering how we got here. I turn on Finding Your Roots. It's one of my favorite shows. I love ancestry. I love history. I love watching Black people discover the resilience of their ancestors, the land they owned, the names they carried, the lives the

A Bargain Bin Post I've been quiet for the last 30 days. Not because I didn't have anything to say, but because I needed to sit with what I was witnessing. I needed to process the horror of what is happening in real time. I needed to ask myself: What is the goal for my legacy? What is the goal for how I plan to uplift my community? And where do Black people fit into this latest chapter of American empire? Because what we are witnessing right now is not just a political crisis

I've been sitting with something heavy lately, and I need to process it out loud. Because if I'm feeling this, I know you are too. I've been trying to navigate Black public and political discourse, and I'm exhausted. Not because I don't know who I am or what I stand for—I do. But because it feels like no one else does. It feels like everyone else has decided that integrity is optional, that morality is negotiable, and that the lines between right and wrong are so blurred that

There is a ghost that haunts Black culture, and his name is Ray J. The same Ray J who sung "One Wish" and "Sexy Can I". This same Ray J sat down on The Breakfast Club this week, nearly two decades after a sex tape with Kim Kardashian launched one of the most profitable empires in modern media history, and asked the culture to finally have his back. But here's the problem: Ray J spent years making deals with the very system that now treats him as disposable. He publicly supp

There’s a specific type of educated Black man many of us have encountered. He moves through the world with a particular kind of armor—a polished, yet brittle, arrogance. You find him in academia, in politics, in the corner office. He is the gatekeeper professor who questions your brilliance, the political upstart who demands loyalty but offers none, the administrator who wields bureaucracy like a weapon. He is often accomplished, undeniably intelligent, and utterly exhausting

This has been a heavy couple of weeks. As a federal employee, I’ve felt the instability of our government firsthand. But as a Black woman in America, I know that when the system shakes, our communities are the first to feel the ground give way. On November 1st, SNAP benefits are set to be shut off, and any existing balances may be wiped clean. This is not a policy debate; it is a direct and calculated assault on the survival of our most vulnerable. At the same time, the digit

By Hilerie Lind There is a weight that comes with being the one who "makes it out." It is a peculiar, heavy crown, one that is often placed on your head by the very people you love most, and yet it feels less like an honor and more like a target. I’ve been thinking about my family. I’ve been thinking about my parents, who found their way to God after walking through the fire of familial addictions and wrongful imprisonment. I’ve been thinking about my mother, who became the f