Before So You Want to Talk About Race arrived in 2018, most people navigating America's racial landscape had the feeling — the discomfort, the frustration, the nagging sense that something structural was wrong — but not the vocabulary to name it with any precision. Ijeoma Oluo changed that.
Junior Hakizumwami is back home in Rwanda, reconnecting with friends and building chemistry — and gearing up for a tournament on his home turf next week.
On Nelson Mandela International Day, Boris Kodjoe reflects on what 67 minutes of service actually means — and how the Kodjoe Family Foundation is carrying that relay forward through the LOVE ALL Scholarship, Full Circle Africa, and Tuesdays with Junior.
In October 1983, a 33-year-old military officer named Thomas Sankara became president of Upper Volta — one of the most impoverished nations on earth, a landlocked country in West Africa that the world had largely written off as an economic basket case. He had four years. He used every one of them.
The real headline this week isn't on any court. “I didn't know how much I missed my friends,” Junior admitted, and there's something honest in that sentence, the kind of thing that only surfaces once you've actually gotten it back. “It's really exciting how I'm getting connected with them. It's amazing.”
There is a question worth sitting with: what does it actually mean for a brand to be global? Not international. Not multi-market. Global — in the sense that the cultures shaping the world's energy, creativity, and consumption are actually reflected in how that brand speaks, who it speaks to, and who is building the strategy from the inside.
In 1851, three American colleges refused Edward Wilmot Blyden — not for his mind, but for his skin. He sailed to Liberia and built the intellectual foundation of Pan-Africanism instead.
Junior is home. After months at the Mouratoglou Academy in Biot, France, and his graduation in June, Junior Hakizumwami is back in Rwanda. And the first thing on his mind? The food he hasn't eaten in so long. The places he missed. That feeling of being exactly where you came from. It's grounding in a way that no amount of progress on the court can replace.
Kristen Jeffers built The Black Urbanist from scratch — a multimedia platform centered in Black Queer Feminist thought that Bloomberg CityLab and NPR have cited as a leading voice on urban equity. Her argument: a city that fails its most vulnerable residents is not a success story. It is a design flaw.
After months of grinding through the French clay season, navigating exams, and graduating from one of the world's elite tennis academies, Junior is exactly where he's supposed to be — back in the arms of his community, and stepping onto the national stage as its representative.
