My black-ish recaps are live at EW.com! Here’s a snippet from my recap of “Crazy Mom”:

I would say that the horror movie conceit used throughout the episode is apt, since it really is a horror that a man can attend a work meeting late because he gave liquor store cupcakes to his children’s class and be congratulated for his fatherly duties by male peers, while a harried, overworked mother walks into the same work meeting late for the exact same reason and gets flack for it. I’m a quiet person, but some things really trigger my rage. The dismissal of a woman’s issues simply because she is a woman is one of those things.

And here’s a snippet from my recap  the latest episode, the one that spawned talk about the practice of spanking, “Crime and Punishment”:

Poor Jack puts on tons of clothes to cushion the blow as he walks towards his parents’ room, waiting for his father to enter and literally crack the whip.

But as he’s standing over his son with a belt in his hands, Andre thinks about the convoluted logic that is the basis for spanking. Hitting a child because you love him and don’t want anything bad to happen to him really is an amazing example of pretzel logic. Do parents forget or not realize that the spanking is the actual bad thing that’s happening to a kid?

Instead, Andre provides a real wake-up call for Jack; he tells him he’s disappointed in him. A parent’s words can hurt just as badly as a belt or a track piece, but they get the point across in a much deeper way than a piece of leather or plastic can.

Read these recaps and more of my work at the links above and at my author page on EW.com!