Tru Nobility Apparel

09/17/2026

How much of what gets dismissed as “crazy” is really just a path nobody recognizes yet?

One of the biggest things I didn’t get into in the video is *Space Is the Place*, and I think the film actually strengthens the whole argument.

Sun Ra’s mythology wasn’t only stagecraft. In the film, his “myth” language becomes political and philosophical. He pushes on a much bigger question: if Black people have been denied full recognition inside the dominant version of reality, why should that same reality get the final word on what is possible?

That idea makes the rest of his career look different to me.

The same artist who said he came from Saturn also built Saturn Records with Alton Abraham, creating an early Black artist-owned record-label operation so he could release work without waiting for conventional industry approval. The Arkestra became a disciplined working community built around intense rehearsal and performance. On *Strange Strings*, he deliberately had musicians play instruments they didn’t know how to play. He embraced new technology early, including the Minimoog. And in 1971 he taught a UC Berkeley course that connected Black history, cosmology, scripture, Egyptology and other traditions.

That is what keeps me from treating the mythology as a funny side note.

None of those accomplishments make every claim he made about Saturn literally true. But I also don’t think that is the most interesting question.

The more interesting question is what declaring himself outside the accepted order allowed him to imagine, make and build that he might not have reached by staying inside somebody else’s definition of what was realistic.

He made the work. He owned the work. He found an audience. He built an artistic world that lasted.

I don’t think you get all of that **without the weird**.

And maybe that is the part I want to hold onto. Sometimes “be realistic” is good advice. Sometimes it just means “use a path I already recognize.”

How do you tell the difference?

09/15/2026

Maya. Toni. Alice. Zora. Octavia.

A wearable reading list for the reader in your life—or for you. This Tru Nobility shirt brought our current top 5 Black women writers into one design: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler.

Which of their books would you put in someone’s hands first?

Explore the shirt:

Meet your new favorite conversation starter: the Maya Toni Alice Zora Octavia tee. This shirt is a roll call of literary royalty. If you know, you know. And if you only know one? Trust us, you’re about to fall in love with the rest. Each name pays homage to a Black woman fiction author whose words...

09/15/2026

Before I start digging a little deeper into Sun Ra, I gotta see what y’all know. 🪐

So we’re starting with a pop quiz. No Googling.

And yes—that’s the Sun Ra tee. I had to wear it for this one. You can find it at trunobility.com.

Put your answer in the comments before the reveal. We’re just getting started.

09/07/2026

I was looking into how Labor Day became a federal holiday and one detail stopped me.

Congress and President Grover Cleveland made it official on June 28, 1894. Five days later, federal troops were sent into Chicago during the Pullman Strike.

Workers had already been celebrating Labor Day for more than a decade by then. The first parade was held in New York in 1882 and organized by unions. It wasn’t a holiday the government handed to them. They made it themselves as a way to be seen and say their work mattered.

By 1894, the government was embracing the holiday while moving against workers in one of the biggest labor conflicts in the country. It was ready to honor labor as an idea while confronting workers who were using their power in real life.

It’s easy for a holiday to get reduced to what it does for us. A day off. A long weekend. A little room to breathe. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying any of that. It just adds another layer when you know who you're celebrating.

Now you know, you're welcome. Enjoy your day!

09/03/2026

Sun Ra is next on the Freedom Studies syllabus—and this one is going to get weird fast.

Before we even get to what he built, we’re going to have to talk about Saturn. 🪐

First lesson is next. Follow along if you want to see where this goes.

09/01/2026

“Author” is true. It’s also incomplete.

Maya Angelou organized. Toni Morrison built publishing pathways. Zora Neale Hurston preserved Black stories, songs, and oral traditions. Alice Walker helped recover a neglected lineage. Octavia Butler treated imagination as rigorous intellectual work.

These women did not simply write books that entered the culture. They helped shape the conditions through which culture could be organized, published, preserved, recovered, and imagined.

Five writers. A much bigger inheritance.

Which of these forms of cultural work feels most urgent now—and which writer’s work are you returning to?

Wear the legacy. The Maya & Toni & Alice & Zora & Octavia tee is available at TruNobility

09/01/2026

Fred Hampton studied pre-law because he believed legal knowledge could help him challenge police brutality.

That detail tells us something about how he understood education: knowledge was supposed to be useful in the work of changing conditions.

That’s part of what Freedom Studies is asking too—not just what do you know, but what can you do with what you know?

Be honest: did you have B before the reveal? Drop a ✋ if you got it.

08/30/2026

A swimming pool can sound like a small issue—until you know the history.

As a teenager, Fred Hampton helped take Black children from Maywood to another suburb to swim because the nearby pool excluded them. He also organized for better recreation at home.

Pools and beaches across America have their own history of segregation. That context matters when stereotypes get repeated as if they appeared out of nowhere.

Follow Freedom Studies. We’re digging into the history underneath the stereotypes.

08/30/2026

I stopped teaching my kids Black History.

And even typing that feels wild, because knowing our history has always felt like a cultural responsibility to me.

I want my kids to know Marcus Garvey. Malcolm X. Zora Neale Hurston. Amos Wilson. I want them to know what happened before them and who fought to make their lives possible.

But I started noticing something that bothered me:

they were glazing over.

The names were becoming names.
The dates were becoming dates.
“Black History” was becoming another subject they were supposed to know because somebody told them it was important.

And I realized I might be recreating the exact problem I criticize in American education.

Knowing that Malcolm X existed isn’t the same as understanding what he was trying to solve.

Knowing a movement happened isn’t the same as understanding how people organized, why they succeeded, where they failed, and what any of it means for your life right now.

So I’m changing course.

I’m calling it Freedom Studies.

Some of the people will be the same. Some of the history will be the same. But the question we’re organizing it around is different—and it reaches beyond just the Black American struggle.

I explain what I mean in the video.

I don’t have this completely figured out. This is really me documenting what I’m learning while trying to educate my own kids better.

If that journey sounds useful to you, follow along. I think we’re going to learn a lot together.

08/29/2026

What do you do when your country says your people’s voices don’t matter?

You save them.

Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as one of our great writers. But before we reduce her to Their Eyes Were Watching God, we should understand something else she spent her life doing:

Zora was deciding what would make it into the future.

She trained as an anthropologist and traveled through Black communities collecting the things traditional histories so often left out: stories and folktales, work songs and blues, sermons and prayers, jokes, games, ways of speaking, religious practices and the everyday knowledge people carried with them.

And she didn't only preserve the parts of Black culture that dominant society considered respectable.

Hurston immersed herself in African-derived spiritual traditions, studying Hoodoo in the American South and Vodou in Haiti. She crossed boundaries that a white Christian society had already marked for her: civilized and primitive, religion and superstition, respectable and shameful.

She refused to let those judgments decide what deserved to be taken seriously.

That matters.

Because domination has never been satisfied with controlling what people do. It reaches for how people understand themselves.

We can see the machinery clearly wherever one people has attempted to dominate another: attack the language. Demonize the religion. Rename the people. Separate children from cultural transmission. Mock the customs. Devalue the stories. Teach people that advancement means becoming more like the dominant society—and less like themselves.

The particulars change.

The mechanism does not.

And that changes how we should understand what Zora was doing.

She wasn't wandering around collecting interesting artifacts from an old Black world.

She was encountering living Black culture in her present and making choices about what would be available in ours.

Think about that.

A voice she helped record could outlive the person speaking.

A story passed orally from one generation to another could enter an archive and reach people not yet born.

A spiritual tradition dismissed as primitive could leave behind testimony from someone who actually entered the community, listened and took it seriously.

Zora died in 1960. Some of what she saved is still speaking to us.

That's why history cannot simply be the cataloging of old things.

Every generation is deciding what gets added to the record of human existence—and what disappears from it.

When you preserve something oppression has marked as worthless, you aren't merely protecting the past.

You are refusing to let somebody else decide what the future gets to inherit.

That is resistance.

That is why we study freedom.

And it means this work belongs to us, too.

Record your grandmother telling the story everybody in the family knows.

Ask your uncle where that saying came from.

Write down the recipe nobody measures.

Put names and dates on those old photographs.

Document the neighborhood before it changes.

Record the song.

Ask about the tradition nobody ever thought needed explaining.

Add something to the future.

One day, you will be the ancestor.

And somebody you will never meet may understand who they are because you decided something was worth saving.

Freedom needs a memory. Preserve it. Pass it on.