113 Search results for "complex relationship"

Black Life, Held Together
Across this series, people gather in fields, warehouses, studio spaces, and public events, carrying with them the practices that sustain everyday life. Children move between arms and laps, conversations continue while hands adjust weight and fabric, and small gestures — a hand on a shoulder, a shared glance, a phrase worn on a shirt — […]
Becoming
Ontological I see a vision in stored for much more than we give credit to even when are remised at what Heaven sent Go often days with no, repent When judgment clouds an empty brain and war is outside Just within the frame Hallowed be thy name Now tell me baby what do you see […]
Kendrick Lamar’s Unapologetic Blackness at Super Bowl LIX
Kendrick Lamar dominated the news cycle in 2024 not only with his ongoing feud with Aubrey “Drake” Graham, but also with the announcement that he would be headlining the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show. With the Kansas City Chiefs vying for a record-breaking three consecutive Super Bowl victories and Philadelphia Eagles’ running back Saquon Barkley […]
A New Education System without Police
by Mustafa Ali-Smith, Originally posted on June 30, 2020 As protests continue on both the national and global scale, widespread call-to-actions ramp up. Dismantling, defunding, and divesting from the police and providing police-free schools are becoming a part of everyday conversations. Early educational institutions have even begun to respond to these call-to-actions by ending their […]
How Black Mirror’s “Striking Vipers” episode failed bisexual men & trans women
Editor’s Note: June is LGBTQ Pride Month. At BYP, we will be exploring gender, sexuality, transgender issues and queer theory, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them. We want to hear from you! Send us your pitches at info@blackyouthproject.com This essay contains spoilers for Black Mirror […]
Why we need to stop excluding Black populations from ideas of who is “Indigenous”
*Editor’s note: This piece has been deeply informed by conversations with my friend and colleague Preston Anderson through the years, among other things. A few months ago, I posted a Facebook status regarding a viral meme featuring Disney’s cartoon version of Pocahontas and John Smith, arguing that it promoted white supremacist ideas of interracial relationships […]
Stolen bodies, Stolen land: Contemplating Blackness and Indigeneity
by Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo Today marks one year since I and a group of friends joined the frontline resistance in Standing Rock at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the ancestral lands of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Sioux people. I have spent this past year deconstructing, unpacking, learning, relearning, disconnecting, reconnecting, going through this whole process […]
How the Coalition to End Money Bond is working to help reform pretrial practices in Illinois
by Jamila Dawn Mitchell Every year, 90% of the 250,000 people held in Illinois jails are incarcerated pretrial, prior to actual convictions, putting the rate of pretrial incarceration far above the national average of 67%. The percentage of pretrial detentions range county to county – with 51% of the jail population in Tazewell County and […]
How heterosexual Black men project the psycho-sexual traumas of the plantation onto our queer brethren
This essay contains discussions of racialized sexual violence and mentions r/pe by Donnie Moreland There is this thing with us, as Black men. This war. Well, less war and more an inter-communal pogrom, wherein any Black man who shows no desire to lay with women exclusively is designated a cancer, subject to extermination. The prevention […]
‘Pose’ is a masterful piece of queer historical fiction
This essay contains spoilers for season two of Pose, as well as discussion of transmisogyny. by Avery Ware “On the heels of Pose, so many more folks are aware of ballroom culture and vogue is in vogue again,” says creator, director, and executive producer Steven Canals of FX’s hit series Pose – a drama that […]
Van Jones, language and the psuedo memory of national identity
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 […]
How the imagination of the ‘Lovecraft Country’ writer’s room failed us
by Kamilah Bush This essay discusses sexual assault and r/pe. The first episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country is possibly one of the most perfect television pilots of all time, in my opinion. The opening shot, drops us in the middle of a typical enough looking war scene—it is a familiar cinematic landscape with images we […]