Excellent piece.  I want to go back to Chicago after reading this! And thank you for shouting out Chicago for its blues scene! fantastic!

Very well written article, i’m proud to be an Illinois resident and i’ve been on a number of family trips to Chicago and it’s always been a great experience.

Also thank you for mentioning “Mo Money”, I always thought that film was criminally overlooked and underrated.  

I hit up that same watertower sale girl! I got the Black up Blush and the contour powder/ setting powder. whew chile you wanna talk about pigmented I definitely would suggest you give it a try it has become a new fav and I shed a tear when i just dropped the contour at the gym the other day and broke off a piece 

How dumb am I that I didn’t realize these pictures were of you?? I thought you were a model with your professionally done-up lewks! You look goooooooooood.

I love this series. I really, really, really do love it. I’m trying to get my Mother to take a break from her freakish loyalty to Fashion Fair and Zuri, when MAC just stopped making her foundation.

I’m old and listen to Miles and Dizzy but Ms. Cardi is major fabulous and she is right, she doesn’t deserve the hate. I saw some headline that her designer plagiarized the look so thank you for clarifying that. Cardi Venus was surrounded by of all kinds of art and fashion history symbolism but people gotta hate. If…

Thank you for this post. I loved every minute of behind the scenes with Cardi and Vogue. Je suis très jalouse!

honestly only cardi could pull off that look, and she looked stellar

Regina King has been killing it this awards season. She is always my best-dressed.

i love this look! you look so old Hollywood glamour. but i wonder if this could just be a daily look for me w/a bit of tinted moisturizer?

Yes, Dapper Dan! Call them to the carpet! So proud of him for handling up unapologetically. This is a prime example of why more companies need to have black people and other POCs in the board room, involved in the design process, etc.

Cabin in the Sky is prime Lena Horne (and Ethel Waters, come to think of it, in her brief good time woman scenes).

It reminds me of what happened to Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Terry Crews, when he revealed that a white male Hollywood agent sexually assaulted him at a party in 2016. Doubting Thomases asked how such a big muscular guy — make that such a big, muscular, black guy — could have ended up in a #MeToo moment.

LOVE, LOVE , LOVE Violet Botanical Skincare. Her line is truly amazing. I’m a huge fan of her body butter in particular. It’s so creamy and smooth, not greasy at all. Ingredients all natural, of the highest quality—and smell so good!

You are KILLING me! I didn’t even realize that was you in the photograph, I thought it done by a make up artist. I am now determined to try cat eyes again. 

Copying this look the next time I leave my house 😆🤗

I counter with New Jack City if we’re not basing this off reality. Harlem has a lot of black history but it’s history. Europeans bought up too much of the cheap property in the 00's and rented it out to gentrifiers to speed it along.

NOLA, Atlanta, and Baltimore would all be more deserving of being called “Chocolate…

Harlem today has changed, sure. The astronomical rents of “Money Makin’ Manhattan” have driven many of its inhabitants further north to the Bronx, or even out of its confines. It is openly very queer. Very (West) African. Very gentrified. And so it morphs into our future. It evolves as any living thing does. But its…

But it’s not even a city. It’s a neighborhood. <ducks>