I Used to Love Her: Our Beloved HBCUs and Respectability Politics

The Griot Speaks: From the Nephilim, to the Jezebel, and Claressa Shields

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 the Civil Rights Movement. But The Griot goes further. Drawing on the Book of Enoch, the oldest surviving religious text of the African continent, preserved in complete form only by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, this episode argues that the Jezebel controlling image is pre-flood. That the architecture of blaming women for male desire was built before Noah's ark. That the women violated by the Watchers were never named, never given a voice, and never acknowledged as victims, and that their beauty was presented as the explanation for their own violation. This is not just ancient history. This is the operating system that is still running in Atlanta in August 2026. Because in August 2026, a world champion boxer sat down at a radio station in Atlanta to promote her fight, and was asked how long she planned to be with somebody's husband. Not the husband. The woman.

Where I'm From...

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.

I Used to Love Her: Our Beloved HBCUs and Respectability Politics

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 the question this episode is asking is not whether we love Tuskegee and Howard. We do. The question is what happens when the institutions that were built to protect us become the very rooms that require us to shrink.

Ms. Fat Booty

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 episode is about. In this episode, I use Voyant, the digital humanities text analysis tool at the center of my dissertation research — to run a comparative analysis of two songs: Mos Def's "Ms. Fat Booty" (1999) and Jay-Z's "Soon You'll Understand" (2000). The data reveals something that feels personal but is actually structural. This episode is about the difference between dominance and masculine presence. Between the Sacrificial Bargain and the Philosophy of Refusal. Between the woman who waited for the "soon", and the woman who was already whole.

A Soft Place to Land, Welcome to the Grey

"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 reduce a woman to her body. The beat is designed to make you move in ways that are not respectable. And you know all of this. You have the framework. You have read Patricia Hill Collins. You have sat in graduate seminars and written papers about controlling images and the Jezebel and the ways Black women's bodies have been commodified and policed since before this country had a name. And you turn it up anyway. Welcome To The Grey...