By Stanley Fritz Last year during Mother’s day weekend, the National Bail out Collective, a coalition of black organizers working, including participants from The Movement for Black Lives and multiple affiliated groups joined forces on an initiative whose main goal was to liberate hundreds of mothers and caregivers who had fallen victim to the criminal justice […]
In 2014, Gregory Hill, a 30 year old Black man, was shot three times and killed by police in his Florida garage after complaints of loud music. To add insult to injury, last week, a federal jury awarded his family a $4 verdict in their civil case.
ABC’s Roseanne reboot was cancelled within hours of its star making an anti-Black tweet. With her unique brand of virulent racism, Roseanne Barr targeted ex-Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett in a now-deleted posted essentially stating that Jarrett is what happens when the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes has a baby. Unfettered anti-Black racism […]
The video game Watchdogs 2 opens with you having to hack into a server and wipe your criminal record clean so the police can’t use a predictive algorithm that predicts future crimes based on past actions. The algorithm leans heavily on using facial recognition databases to keep tabs on citizens. Of note, the protagonist is Black, […]
by Tonya McKenzie This essay contains discussions and descriptions of sexual violence, child abuse, and murder There are some things that you never forget, like the sound of a car screeching down the street and slamming into one of your neighbors or the bombastic sound of a gunshot and the sight of the damage that […]
Nearly 90 years after it was first written, Zora Neale Hurston’s series of interviews with one of the last Africans brought to America from the Atlantic slave trade has arrived in bookstores across the country. Barracoon is introduced rather fittingly by Alice Walker, the woman whom we can thank for a revitalized interest and scholarship […]
In Louisiana, approximately 37,000 elderly and disabled people are at risk of losing their homes due to Medicaid cuts because of insufficient state funds. The state budget is $500 million dollars short. Notices of eviction started going out today to many in nursing homes. The Lousiana eviction has started a looming panic for the tens […]
Junot DĂaz, the award-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has been accused of sexual harassment and misogyny in the literary world by fellow woman authors Zinzi Clemmons, Monica Byrne, Carmen Maria Machado, and others.
The dismembered bodies of 21-year-olds Ramon Smith and Jarron Moreland were found in the bottom of an Oklahoma City pond just four days after their families reported the two men missing. The police arrested Kevin Garcia-Boettler, 22; Johnny Shane Barker, 43; and the unnamed 16-year-old brother of Garcia-Boettler. The mother of Garcia-Boettler, Crystal Rachelle Boettler, […]
Heroes are basically destined to fall, and so I’ve made an effort to resist bestowing that honor even upon people I admire the most. Still, the recent antics of Kanye West, inarguably one of the most influential hip-hop artists of the last two decades whose music has played a huge role in my life, have […]
Editor’s Note: This essay contains discussion of domestic violence, sexual assault, and mentions of r/pe Eldridge Cleaver was a predator—a night stalker. He practiced on “black girls in the ghetto” where he knew the crimes would not be investigated before he eventually ventured across the tracks to methodically rape white women. “Rape was an insurrectionary […]
By Mark Matlock The possibility of weed legalization can be exciting to young people like me. Especially since our country’s current policies regarding weed have increased discrimination already fueled by the War on Drugs. But excitement can make us forget that being able to consume weed doesn’t get rid of the overt anti-Blackness that comes […]
