596 Search results for "comfort"

Resisting constant surveillance in my predominantly white neighborhood
By Gloria Oladipo I am tired of my white neighbors watching me, my family, and other residents of color. I’m anxious that their surveillance will get my Black family hurt, especially with the unchecked power of law enforcement in our community. They take pictures of us in the park. They mount “Blue Lives Matter” signs […]
Dear Inbetweener: Finding my place as a bisexual biracial man
Editor’s Note: June is LGBTQ Pride Month. At Black Youth Project, 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. by Andrew Keahey When your whole life is in the inbetween, you see things that other people […]
On being queer and mourning the loss of straight male friendships
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 I have always been queer as fuck, […]
The Black Lunatic
A history of forced institutionalization in service of white supremacy
Black men – we need to take the racist online harassment of Black women more seriously
by Donnie Moreland “I get harassment as a woman and I get the extra harassment because of race and being a black woman. They will call white women a ‘c*nt’ and they’ll call me a ‘n*gger c*nt’.” – Imani Gandy, Rewire.News “You’re a fucking fat ass nigger. Hang yourself bitch.” – Anonymous
Black/POC mixed race folks can reverse the anti-Blackness of mixed race narratives
By Tonya Pennington Every now and then, I’ll hear a news story about a mixed raced person that makes me sigh. This was the case recently with chef and entrepreneur Ayesha Curry, who discussed her experience with her heritage on The View. Since her mother is Jamaican-Chinese and her father is African-American and Polish, Curry […]
The Black body remembers our traumas even when we try to forget
By Najya A. Williams Throughout my childhood, my mom always scheduled early morning dental appointments to accommodate the remarkably busy lives we both led. Once I was old enough to schedule my own visits, I unsurprisingly fell back into this familiar routine. I normally don’t think twice about my check-ups, especially if I’m not experiencing […]
Used in a relentless pursuit of the elusive middle class, side hustle culture is killing Black folx
Editor’s Note: This month at BYP, we will be exploring Black Liberation & Organizing, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics. How do we hold politicians accountable to Black communities? Is that even possible? What should be our role in the electoral politics? What does abolition look like in practice? What […]
Black women, our closeted emotional needs won’t get met
by Najya A. Williams In the dark of the night, the world had fallen asleep and I was left to the comfort of my favorite recliner and a random Enneagram personality test my friend had shared with me. With the popularity of tests and quizzes meant to predict your life, I held a healthy amount […]
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 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 […]