347 Search results for "first generation"

Which came first: the derailer or the eraser? This question was inspired by pop star Camila Cabello’s pro-immigration speech to millions of viewers at the 60th annual Grammys last night. “Today, in this room full of music’s dreamers, we remember that this country was built by dreamers, for dreamers, chasing the American dream,” Cabello said […]

 by Stephanie Younger About a year ago, I had the amazing and unforgettable opportunity to meet legendary activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Angela Y. Davis.  We met at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival where I was volunteering at as a youth ambassador. This Black film festival prides itself on celebrating cinematic arts through a “global […]

By Ari Colston-Johnson To many, the Black Church calls to mind horror stories of cisheteropatriarchy and theologies shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, and respectability politics. But coming of age in the Gullah-Geechee African Methodist Episcopal (AME) tradition, the Black Church was a foundation for my radical politics, a space for community and Afrocentric syncretism, and […]

By Kleaver Cruz Two years ago, I woke up wishing I could go back to sleep and wake up to a more just and Black-loving world. I wanted to relieve myself of the pain that surfaces after watching too many news accounts of law enforcement ending the lives of Black people in the U.S., or […]

by Maximillian Matthews I wonder when my late father first observed the singularity of my gender performance. Perhaps he saw it when he took me to my first concert during Janet Jackson’s 1993 Janet tour, and noticed how I knew every word she sang on the stage. He may have seen it when he observed […]

Gwendolyn Brooks is a name synonymous with Chicago, so it is only fitting that three of the city’s brightest literary stars worked together to create a play that bottles up some of her brilliance and exposes a new generation to her timeless wonders. Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Jamila Woods spearhead the production, with Ewing […]

By michal “mj” jones She stares into the heart of the camera, a backdrop of ocean shore behind her and a swollen, pregnant brown belly below. Neck draped in seashells and her body in the watery spirits of Yemaya, she looks certain, calm, confident. As I gazed up at this photo of my partner during […]

By Ashley Nkadi Do you remember Abigail Fisher? If you are drawing a blank, allow me to refresh your memory:  Abigail Fisher is the white woman whose college rejection was heard around the world, mainly because she basically grabbed the world’s biggest megaphone and wailed into it like a toddler. When Fisher was denied entry […]

GenForward, a survey of the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, is a bimonthly report of racially and ethnically diverse young people’s perspectives. The latest report, for October 2017, entitled “The ‘Woke’ Generation? Millennial Attitudes on Race in the US”, captured some profound insights on what […]

Where I grew up, Black was the end of discussion. People clung to what law professor Juan Perea deemed the “black/white binary paradigm of race,” a bare-bones conception that acknowledged only whiteness or Blackness but did not allow for meaningful engagement with ethnicity. In college, I learned about different kinds of Black people. I met […]

By Maya King For more than two centuries, religious institutions have sat at the intersection of pain and liberation within African-American communities. Churches like Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist and Atlanta’s Ebenezer exemplified this, giving birth to the people and movements that defined the Civil Rights Era while providing political capital and a sense of stability […]

“To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up […] Each of us must find our work and do it.” — Audre Lorde I am hurting. On Saturday, as I walked through a Black gay club, a guy crossing my path grabbed between my legs. He barely reacted as […]