On Wednesday, Oct. 24th, George Alan Bush, a 51-year old white man, entered a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky and fatally shot two Black people. He reportedly told a white bystander afterwards, “Whites don’t shoot whites.”
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. […]
“Internalized anti-Blackness has us quick to condemn, erase, and humiliate ourselves and our ancestors more than we do the people who did the actual enslaving” — Chelsea Neason My grandmother lived a long life, but I can only imagine how much longer it would have been without the struggles she fought through. She used to […]
by Briyana D. Clarel This summer, I attended a conference for community-minded artists in New York City. Despite the conference’s commitment to activism, days passed without any Black presenters and the few presenters of color spewed dangerous rhetoric like “We’re all immigrants” and “It’s about class, not race.” Of course, the Black contingent came through, […]
by Haillee Mason I wish I could say that I’ve always known that I deserved good sex. Or that I arrived into my twenties seeking out my own pleasure. But Black queer women like me are never taught that they deserve anything—not an orgasm, not empathy, or even apologies. I had arrived in my adolescence, […]
Content Note: This essay contains details about childhood sexual assault My parents didn’t hit me growing up. I know they hit my older siblings, but something had changed over the years before I got here. Maybe they saw it didn’t help. Maybe they even knew hitting children causes significant harm. But I like to think […]
By Amber Butts As children, we are told to stay out of grown folk business. As adults and elders, we then continue that wheel and narrative, which doesn’t give space for us to build an intergenerational emotional intelligence. What if children were in more “grown folk” conversations? Could we better prepare for it if children […]
This essay contains discussions of death in childbirth and reproductive violences “Who she pregnant for?” This is how I remember my aunts inquiring about the potential father of any given person’s unborn child while I was growing up. Not “Who are they pregnant by?” or “Who are they pregnant with?” The question was always, Who […]
Black women organizers in Washington D.C. and New York City marched, protested and called upon the nation this weekend to call for a “new social contract” with an emphasis on issues facing Black women. As Black Women’s Blueprint, the group organizing the lead march in Washington D.C., stated in a press release: “Black women, cis, […]
By Taylor Lamb Social media has been popular long enough that people are no longer consistently singing its praises. Instead, we’ve collectively reached a point that it’s just too much. People care too much. They post too much. They spend too much time on their phones instead of engaging in person. I feel as though […]
by Kamilah Bush I am a Queer woman with sexual desires that should and can be fulfilled. That took a lot to say. It took a long time for me to say it—precisely because it took a long time for me to even realize it. Not because I was “denying” it, not because I […]
“Officer who walked into wrong apartment and killed man faces arrest”. The headline states that the officer who killed Botham Jean mistakenly went into the “wrong apartment” as if it is fact. On the actual page, it adds “: Authorities” so at least you know who is behind what is taken as fact. It’s not […]
