K. Danielle Edwards

The process of educating our children begins the moment they enter the world. No, the foray isn’t so formal at the outset, as the primary parental motivations are the basic, essential needs of the infant – feeding, clothing, cocooning, protecting, loving, touching, bathing. We may buy organic baby food or make our own to help…

Too many black women are getting too fat. Sure, we’ve had a long love affair with our natural curves. The sway of our backsides, the projection of our hips and the generousness of our thighs are subjects of songs canonized in black culture. Think of “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” in which Carl Carlton sang,…

This week, The New York Times Magazine is running a story titled “Coming Out in Middle School.” It’s about exactly what it sounds like – kids in their pre-teens and early teens “coming out,” or declaring their non-heterosexual sexual orientation, to parents, friends, relatives, teachers and others. It’s about removing the ambiguity that may surround…

As truth-seeking and spiritually minded as my husband and I are, we neither regularly attend any church nor acknowledge membership to any particular denomination or building where church services are held. We’re not non-believers. We’re not heathens. We’re not agnostics, atheists or apologists for either. Instead, we see ourselves as being super-sensitive to truths, believing…

As stressful, tiring, demanding and unendingly involving as parenthood is, one of its many silver linings is that you begin with a fresh script. With no content on the metaphorical page to revise – other than the nuances and noise of how you were raised – you are free to parent your child as you…

Note: This is a new column by K. Danielle Edwards. The previous column by her was tltled “From the Fringe”. We anticipate it will appear weekly. Watching the train wreck that is season two of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta is really starting to rub me the wrong way. Yes, the antics and absolute…

From the time Barack Obama became a fixture on the national stage, I have eyed Michelle Obama with an uneven mix of appreciation and disappointment. It’s not about her fashion sense, though she’s been ridiculed for accentuating her hips and baring her toned arms by folks with twisted aesthetic sensibilities and outright hate. It’s not…

In recent times, a trend seems to have emerged. I call it the second wave of the not-always-so-Talented Tenth. This is constituted by an increasingly visible and vocal contingent; they are the crop of African-Americans, generally ages 23-40, who have christened themselves “professionals.” This isn’t necessarily professional in the conventional sense of careers – those…

Sometimes something happens and we are forced to confront our own presumptions, preconceived notions and faulty premises. In the corporate workplace and in a relatively homogenous social construct that often does not reflect the heterogeneity of its true broader, community composition, these moments may be few and far between. That’s because our judgments, knee-jerk reactions…