76 Search results for "appropriation"

By Donnie Moreland It must’ve been 2015 when I first viewed Debbie Tucker Green’s Second Coming (2014). It’s a film which asks the question, what if the nativity story took place between two working class Black folks already raising a little boy in South London.  It’s a mesmerizing dreamscape of rage and longing, orbited by […]

By JeCorey Holder Is it just me or is it super fucking weird that white people insist on teaching whole classes on cultural practices that aren’t theirs? Yoga, African dance, Black/PoC Spirituality… White people will make their daily coffee money off of someone else’s entire closed practices while still pretending TO YOUR FACE not to […]

by Donnie Moreland  In my six years participating in scholastic speech and debate competition, the one lasting impression of the sport itself, less any social interaction, was that language is never fixed. Language is neither absolute, or inherent. Language is craftable, manipulatable, sellable and infinitely interpretable.  This seems obvious, but when you think of how […]

This essay discusses sexual violence and mentions r/pe by Donnie Moreland  I must have written this sentence ten times before settling on the question of this piece, as the only way to begin—what does consent look like, in a world where touch can kill? This isn’t an universal inquiry, but a meditation on that which […]

“What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I’m not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time. My uncle’s time. My brother’s and my sister’s time. My nieces and my nephews time. […]

by Cosima Smith  By now many of you will have heard the term “Digital Blackface” a term defined loosely as the movement or expansion of Blackface minstrelsy to the new-age digital platforms we frequent.  The “tradition” of minstrelsy dates back to the early 19th century and began as a form of entertainment at the expense of […]

I always think of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) whenever someone pretends to be a Black woman or disingenuously evokes our aesthetics. While there are many who outright pretend to be Black women, there are also those convinced that they can somehow actually become Black women and others who simply benefit from appropriating our […]

by Donnie Moreland My crushes, in high school, were all white girls. I used to fantasize about asking them out, kissing them, fucking them. It was about the only way by which I judged my social value—by how many of them I was of interest to. In fact, the first girl to ever hear the […]

by Donnie MoreIand I find myself humming the theme of Good Times, quite a bit. It’s calming, in the way only Black Baptist Church Choirs can be calming. In fact, I find all of it pretty calming—Good Times, that is—because it’s so unequivocally Black, that it feels a part of my cultural genome.  Now, I […]

Editor’s Note: April is Black Women’s History Month. Throughout this month, Black Youth Project is celebrating Black women. This month is also National Minority Health Month, Autism Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Child Abuse Prevention Month. We are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them. by Donnie Moreland […]

By Inigo Laguda It is the most enthralling and excruciating time to be Black. Recently, it seems, some have managed access to glide through avenues that were previously concealed from us—to break down walls that were once erected to ostracize us. We are in the belly of a Black artistic renaissance and some of these […]

By Bianca Baldridge HBO’s Insecure is one of the best series on television. Through both humor and drama, the show tackles the love and relationships of Black women, while also commenting on gentrification, cultural appropriation, white liberal racism, and education, among other things. As a former youth worker in afterschool community-based programs and a sociologist […]