55 Search results for "opportunity gap"

by Josh Rivers Travis Alabanza is an electrifying talent, but that’s obvious. One need only glance in their direction to see pulsing from them the potential and possibility of art manifesting in its purest, most acute form. To sit in their glow is to be enthralled, enchanted, mesmerised. Travis is a performance artist, poet and […]

By Brittany Willis It took me seven years of teaching before I had the opportunity to work in a school where the student and staff population were both majority Black. I don’t mean “majority” as in just over half—no, literally everybody was Black except two white staff members and three Latinx children who were siblings. […]

I wasn’t prepared for the responses to my most recent essay on living intentionally as a childfree Black woman and taking ownership of my womb. I never presumed I was alone in my sentiments on this subject, of course, but I also didn’t expect my words to resonate so deeply with so many people. Writing […]

By Brittani McNeill It is common knowledge that Black children are on the low end of an ever widening racial achievement gap in this country. It’s even becoming more widely acknowledged that systemic problems and institutional neglect, as opposed to simply personal or even parental shortcomings, lead to this problem. An examination of this achievement […]

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. Collaborating with the […]

While mainstream news rooms do not comprehensively address the scope of today’s storytelling  and storytellers, these publications remain important and owe readerships a duty of quality representation. The American Society of News Editors reported last fall that  journalists of color composed about 17 percent of domestic news rooms. In online media, about one quarter of […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Sherronda J. Brown This post contains Wonder Woman spoilers and discussion of sexual violence  The last time there was this much buzz about feminism in a popular action thriller, it was following the release of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. With a story about women fleeing sex slavery, it was not difficult to […]

The journey to diversify the STEM industry has been long and hasn’t bore much fruit. Just a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg spoke to students at an HBCU about how the responsibility to do so falls solely on the industry’s leaders themselves. Google has stepped up with a major investment into the future of engineering […]

The public education system, specifically for high schools, as we know is dated.  The main problem with this is that while the education system hasn’t changed much over generations, the skills students need to succeed in the real world and the obstacles in the way of obtaining a quality education have evolved immensely. To help close […]

Four-hundred people were shot in Chicago within the span of 31 days. Ninety of them died. Multiple outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, are calling August the deadliest month the city has experienced in two decades. Some news reports implicated widespread gang violence within the city for the drastic uptick in crime, while others […]