By Gloria Oladipo Being around family for the various holidays this year has reminded me a lot of religion, specifically Christianity, which has been in my life since childhood. Rules based on Christian teachings were foundational to my upbringing. Using the Bible’s critique of witchcraft, my parents banned Harry Potter from our house. I wasn’t […]
by Indigo From the time I could coherently say “Yes, ma’am,” my mother told me that she would rather I tell her a painful, uncomfortable truth than to ever tell her a lie. She always said there was nothing in the world she hates more than dishonesty and deceitfulness—and that no matter how painful the […]
Following his loss to Democratic candidate Natalia Oakes, Harris County Family Judge Glenn Devlin immediately began releasing all of the juvenile offenders who had pending cases, according to the Texas Tribune. Devlin simply asked all of the defendants whether or not they planned to kill anybody, then released them from detention.
Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers of season 1 of Haunting of Hill House and discussion of suicide I don’t remember how my parents died in the nightmare, but I woke up screaming bloody murder. I had to have been about 4-years-old. I don’t think I had considered being indefinitely away from my parents before, […]
I don’t know for sure if my family knows I’m not straight, and yet I suspect they somehow knew before I did. My family, who policed my lack of femininity growing up, and punished me for being a Tomboy. Who teased me for being a “Plain Jane.” Who asked for years when I was going […]
by JaLoni Amor Owens For many Americans, one of the only days that left the nation feeling as hopeless and defeated as it did on November 8, 2016 was the day after. Those on the left, whether or not Secretary Clinton was their first choice for President of the United States and whether or not […]
On Wednesday, Oct. 24th, George Alan Bush, a 51-year old white man, entered a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky and fatally shot two Black people. He reportedly told a white bystander afterwards, “Whites don’t shoot whites.”
On Sunday morning, the New York Times obtained an unreleased Trump administration draft memo which would define gender as a person’s sex at birth. In response, LGBT activists and organizers are mobilizing to protest the memo’s proposal.
Gwinnett County is facing multiple lawsuits stemming from its rejections of 595 absentee ballots, a large number of them by African American and Asian American voters. According to CNN’s analysis of state data, Gwinnett County only makes up around 6% of the absentee ballots in Georgia, but one third of those rejected by the state, and roughly […]
“Internalized anti-Blackness has us quick to condemn, erase, and humiliate ourselves and our ancestors more than we do the people who did the actual enslaving” — Chelsea Neason My grandmother lived a long life, but I can only imagine how much longer it would have been without the struggles she fought through. She used to […]
By Amber Butts As children, we are told to stay out of grown folk business. As adults and elders, we then continue that wheel and narrative, which doesn’t give space for us to build an intergenerational emotional intelligence. What if children were in more “grown folk” conversations? Could we better prepare for it if children […]
by Daniel Johnson James Baldwin’s January 1985 essay for Playboy, ““Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”, engages with a discussion on androgyny and the American idea of sexuality in which he raises questions about the American idea of masculinity. In the essay, Baldwin affixes violence as the key to the (white) American imagination of […]