The General's Briefing

In 1999, a 20-year-old woman with bleach-blonde hair and paw print tattoos walked into the center of the most testosterone-saturated collective in hip-hop and grabbed the mic. Eve didn't ask for a co-sign. She didn't perform softness to make the room comfortable. She stood on the Ruff Ryders' Ryde or Die Vol. 1 compilation, alongside DMX, The LOX, and Drag-On, and declared: "It&#3...

Jay-Z said it plainly on The Black Album in 2003: "I dumbed down for my audience and doubled my dollars." That is the Faustian Bargain named out loud by the man who made it. The trade of authenticity for capital. The moment when the hustle becomes conscious. I've been sitting with that for two weeks. Because I haven't recorded an episode in two weeks. And today I'm telling yo...

This is the finale. And today we answer the question the first two episodes created.  If the State has always operated on the assumption that Black and Indigenous life is disposable, what do we do about it? What have we always done about it?  I survived rape in undergrad. I survived domestic violence. I survived being scammed by someone I thought loved me so thoroughly that federal agents came to...

My great-grandmother had a saying she repeated her entire life.  99 and a half won't do.  She said it about effort. About commitment. About refusing to give less than everything. She was a nurse. A nursing school teacher. A charter member of Calvary Hill Baptist Church in Cleveland. She cut her own grass at 88 years old. She received a child's share of Choctaw land in Mississippi when she...

My great-grandmother hated when I called myself Black. Not because she was ashamed of my Blackness. Not because she was running from anything. But because she knew something she had carried her whole life, something her mother had carried, and her mother's mother before that. She knew who we were. Every time I said "I'm Black," she corrected me. Not harshly. With the quiet, firm...

In this episode of The General's Briefing, The Griot introduces three new theoretical concepts that she has never taught before, and grounds every single one of them in what is happening right now in Black culture. On August 24, 2026, Serayah McNeill ended her engagement to rapper Joey Bada$$ after alleging repeated infidelity, including during some of the most vulnerable moments of her life....

In this episode of The General's Briefing, The Griot gets personal. Hilerie Lind, PhD candidate, program manager, mother of two boys with disabilities, and founder of The Griot Collective, shares what it actually looks like when national policy becomes personal devastation. Her exemption from the federal return to office mandate was denied. She was told to relocate to Washington DC or resign....

In this episode of The General's Briefing, The Griot, GREE-YOT, sits down for a deep discussion that goes all the way back to before the flood. Most people know the Jezebel as a controlling image deployed against Black women in the antebellum South. Most people trace the architecture of blaming women for male desire to chattel slavery, to the medieval church, to the politics of respectability...

In this episode, I break down the Earn Your Leisure / Invest Fest controversy, and I do it in a way that differs from everyone else's. I do not take sides between EYL and Mayor Dickens. I do something harder. I do what Black feminist analysis demands: I hold both truths simultaneously.

In 1994, Common wrote a love letter to hip-hop. He called her H.E.R. He described a woman who was pure, rooted, and real, until the mainstream got hold of her and changed her into something unrecognizable. He grieved her. He named what she had become. And he never stopped loving her. In this episode, The General borrows that frame and turns it toward something closer to home: our HBCUs. Because th...

In 1999, Mos Def released "Ms. Fat Booty", a song about a man who encountered a woman who was already whole, already moving, already complete. He pursued her. He described her in 852 words, with sentences that averaged 85 words long, because she could not be reduced to a stopping point. And then she left. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. She simply moved on. That woman is who this ep...

"We need a feminism that admits we have messy, complicated, and sometimes contradictory desires." - Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (1999) There is a moment. And if you are a Black woman who loves hip-hop, who grew up on hip-hop, who has hip-hop in her body the way some people have church, you know this moment. A song comes on. And the song is objectifying. The lyrics r...

I charge you with the crime of rape, murder, and assault. For suppressing and punishing my people. I charge you with robbery for robbing me of my history." Tupac Shakur said that in 1991. He was 20 years old. Standing in a recording booth. Putting America on trial. Thirty-five years later, the verdict still stands. In this episode, I ask the question I delivered from the pulpit of Big Bethel...

"We gon' be alright." Kendrick Lamar wrote those words in 2015. In the middle of Ferguson. In the middle of Black Lives Matter. In the middle of a moment when Black people were watching themselves die on camera and the world was debating whether our lives were worth grieving. He knew something the algorithm does not want you to remember: We have been here before. And we overcame. Rig...

It's the Fourth of July. A holiday that has never fully belonged to Black people. And while America wraps itself in a flag, the conversation taking over Black social media is not about the Supreme Court stripping 350,000 Haitian people of their protected status. It's not about the systematic dismantling of civil rights. It's not about Project 2025. It's about Yung Miami's song....

I was sitting on my couch watching a documentary. Notes in my lap. Phone in my hand. Feeling like Webbie, doing what I do, what I do, what I do. Because this is what I do. I watch. I study. I connect the dots. And then I bring it to you. But somewhere in the middle of this documentary about Black and Jewish history in America, something clicked. Something connected. Something that I have been buil...

In 1990, the Broward County Sheriff's Department arrested Luther "Uncle Luke" Campbell on obscenity charges. Not for a crime. Not for violence. Not for theft. For a song. And Uncle Luke said:  No. He fought the United States government all the way to the Supreme Court. And he won.  Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music  (1994) established that commercial parody is protected under the First Am...

When I first saw the headlines about Jay-Z and Target, I felt it. That thing in your chest when someone whose work has shaped the way you think disappoints you. I have spent the last year running Jay-Z's lyrics through digital humanities software. I have tracked every word he has ever used across seven albums. I have quantified his Faustian Bargain with data. Jay-Z is not just a rapper I like....

Today, I saw an ad. John Legend. His family. Target. And I scrolled to the comments. And somebody wrote: "House slave." I understood the frustration. The community has a right to be frustrated. But "house slave"? That's the wrong word. And today, I'm going to tell you why. Because the language we use either frees us or keeps us enslaved. And when we use the wrong words,...

Early voting is underway in Georgia. June 16th is coming. And The General has a briefing you need to hear before you walk into that voting booth. This week, Nikki Porcher, Air Force veteran, founder of Buy From a Black Woman, and Democratic candidate for Georgia Labor Commissioner — called Hilerie Lind personally to say thank you for the Spook at the Door episode. That call opened a conversation t...

On May 31, 2026, a tape from Diddy's federal sex trafficking trial became public. It featured Daphne Joy, a woman believed to have anonymously testified against him. She did not choose to be in that courtroom. She did not choose to have her most intimate moments become public. She did not choose to have her body become evidence in a sex trafficking case. And within 24 hours, the father of her...

In 1935, a gangster named Dutch Schultz lay dying in a hospital in Newark, New Jersey. He had spent years trying to take over the Harlem numbers empire built by a Black Caribbean immigrant woman named Stephanie St. Clair. She sent him a telegram while he was dying. It read: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." She did not beg. She did not perform grief. She did not negotiate. She named the tru...

This episode is about the body. Who owns it. Who controls it. Who profits from it when we can't say no. And what it sounds like when Black women finally refuse. I connect the RSV lawsuit to the 105th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, where the state bombed Black economic bodies into silence, and to the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, where the city dropped a bomb on a Black radical co...

Chopped and screwed music was born in Houston, Texas. DJ Screw took records that everyone already knew, songs they'd heard a hundred times, and he slowed them down. He chopped them up. He revealed what was hiding underneath the surface. What you thought you knew, you didn't really know. Not until you heard it slowed down. That's what this episode is. Because I need you to slow down wit...

"My skin is black / My arms are long / My hair is woolly / My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain / Inflicted again and again / What do they call me? / My name is Aunt Sarah." — Nina Simone, "Four Women" (1966) In this episode, I process the outcome of the Georgia primary and what the system revealed about itself. I claim my identity as the ancestor, as Harriet and...