1970 Search results for "love"

  As we prepare for CNN’s Black in America 2 (July 22nd & 23rd), let’s “keep it poppin’” with a discussion about some black women and black LGBT folks. In my experience, some women and black LGBT folks are into being disrespected. Disrespect for me ranges — from dancing and signing songs that screams: bitches, punk, sissy, battyman and […]

Suddenly, as I’m walking down the street, I feel 50 curious eyes on the back of my neck. As I turn around to figure out where that creepy feeling could possibly be coming from, I found myself face to face with a double-decker bus filled with white tourists.

By Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its) Let me take you back. It’s 1999, and Grandmama is in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the church congregation at Banks Chapel AME Zion Church in Belltown, Kentucky. Every Saturday night, the kitchen stood filled with homemade biscuits, bacon, sausage, fluffy eggs, potatoes, and fruit salad, all to be taken down […]

By: Amber Butts   There’s always a reason the dead had to die. This country is very practiced at explaining itself, searching the dead for a reason before it admits to killing them, rifling through whatever they left behind. Alex Pretti was thirty-seven years old, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis protesting federal immigration raids when […]

By: Jari Bradley Legend has it that, as a child, I hated dresses. I was just entering kindergarten and someone thought it would be fitting to adorn me in red ruffles for the first day of school. On my way past the stairs to my kindergarten classroom, a middle-aged Latina woman with curly black hair […]

by: Amari Murray The first time I noticed the change, it was in the mirror. Not my reflection – hers. We were getting ready to go out, Beyonce’s “Diva” spilling from a speaker on the dresser while the bass vibrated softly through the bedroom walls. Clothes covered nearly every inch of the bed: a black […]

By: Taylor Alleyn The message came in the middle of something ordinary. A notification. A man I had never met, a name I did not recognize, but a kind of voice I had learned to brace for. You know this ritual if you have lived it: the small risk of opening a message from a […]

By: Maya Williams As a nonbinary feminine person who uses ey/em, they/them, and she/her pronouns, I navigate misgendering—the act of being called by incorrect pronouns or phrases that do not align with a person’s gender identity—in complex ways. Usually, when a white person calls me “girl,” I feel hypervigilance arise in my body. I feel […]

By: DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D. Nobody really tells you what happens when you become “the one who made it.”  The phrase itself is complicated because “making it” is not a single destination, nor is it a journey that begins from the same place for everyone. For some, “making it” meant leaving a neighborhood where survival was […]

By: Alana Brown-Davis I’ve been a daughter of the South all of my life. I was born in Alabama and raised in southwest Mississippi. Being Black and Southern meant that I grew up as Christian. Our family typically attended Methodist gatherings but in an effort to get into heaven, we went wherever. The COGIC church […]

By Amanzi Arnett Dowdy   “This is a new meaning of family… It wasn’t a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grew up knowing as a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.” – Dorian Corey For much of my life, gender was […]

By Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its) In 2019, I dodged a death day. I don’t say that for shock value. I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand how people who once loved each other could end up consumed by rage and mistrust. The easy story would be to cast my former partner as the villain […]