144 Search results for "gates"

‘Fast Color’ was snubbed by Hollywood’s white male gatekeepers because it doesn’t fit their worldview
This essay contains spoilers for Fast Color by Melanie Ojwang Fast Color immediately stands out as different from the comic based blockbusters I’ve grown used to over the past decade. When it was first released, I rushed to see it, fearing that it wouldn’t be in theaters past opening weekend. It turns out that my […]
The internet, as a digital looking glass, can normalize violence for Black boys
by Donnie Moreland I’m entering my apartment lot, around 9:45 PM, having returned from the gym. My vision often obscured around this time, I’m hurried to brake as two figures creep along in front of me. The two feel my headlights on their backs, thus they oblige my curiosity, and turn around. They are Black […]
Richard Akuson: the ‘A Nasty Boy’ editor talks the future of his queer fashion magazine and life as an asylum seeker in the U.S.
by Kathleen Anaza Richard Akuson obtained a level of success and visibility that could be the envy of many young people around the world. Before the age of 25, he was a licensed lawyer and opened a boutique PR firm within the Nigerian economy’s all-time highest youth unemployment rate. With all this success, his most […]
Steve McQueen’s ‘Bear’ is an exploration of intimacies among Black men
by Donnie Moreland Two Black men, their naked bodies shifting in-between spaces where shadows were not obstructed by an abrasive key-light. The slow moving image stripped bare of any noise aside from my own breath. Even still, their bodies colliding, their grunting, their moaning—though I could not hear—shook me as thunder might. I was disquieted, […]
How Black people mourn the loss of a Superhero
The day I thought that Chadwick Boseman was James Brown, he lit up the screen with his rosewood colored skin and small gap. He was not the real James Brown except that he was, for over two hours he was James Brown. “Get On Up” was the first time I’d seen Chadwick’s acting skills, but […]
Black and in Vietnam, my hair is not a spectacle
by Adam Mahoney I’ve been living in Vietnam for four months and from the first 30 minutes I arrived in the country, my hair was a problem. I’m a 20 year old junior in college, so when the opportunity to not be in a classroom full of wealthy, white peers presented itself, I jumped at […]
Protecting Black children should never mean re-injuring them, owning them, or denying their sexual autonomy
by Donnie Moreland This essay contains discussions of domestic violence and sexual assault Ruminations of my daughter’s hypothetical death play on repeat, ever since her birth. I’ve accepted them as inescapable conditions of parenthood—Black parenthood especially. I also believe the story of Julia Martin’s death in 2016 partially informs my anxieties in raising a daughter. […]
LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately vulnerable to homelessness and survival sex work
by Maximillian Matthews This essay contains discussions of racialized sexual violence and mentions r/pe “There is probably no greater (or more misleading) body of sexual myths in the world today than those which proliferated around the figure of the American Negro. This means that he is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people […]
On being a Black cynic when the world’s laughter is so loud
by Donnie Moreland There is an old adage, from Black folk, which goes as follows, “We laugh to keep ourselves from crying.” It is strange that such a crudely simple sentiment could provide such a weighted testament to the trepidations, and fears, of an entire people. And yet I can think of very few words […]
Maryland Democratic lawmaker Mary Lisanti censured for calling a district the “n****r district”
On Thursday, the Maryland House of Delegates enacted its second-harshest penalty against Delegate Mary Ann Lisanti for describing the Prince George district as the “n—– district.”
How hip-hop helped reimagine Black presence in horror
by Andrew Keahey I can remember the exact moment that hip-hop and the horror genre intersected for me. I was spending the night with a friend. We had played some games and listened to the local chart-topper radio station, then he suggested we watch The Fly (1986). I recall telling him that I wasn’t sure […]
How tourists make cultures like Salvador’s into “exotic” commodities for their consumption
by Kathleen Anaza In the old tale of tourism, when the needs of a city’s residents are leveraged against the wants of its visitors, it’s the residents who lose. The recent Fyre Festival scam is a prime example of unequal power in tourism interests. A con man from the United States finessed hundreds of celebrities, […]