81 Search results for "traditions"

Our hair is a map to freedom: What I learned about resistance from the “1st” free Black town in the Americas
By Teju Adisa-Farrar When God made mountains He made runaway slaves — Nikki Giovanni, Chasing Utopia We were not supposed to survive. Last month, AfroPunk published an article about Argentina’s genocide of their Black populations. Unsurprisingly, Argentina is not much different from other countries who have tried to erase their Black populations or their impact […]
What do we need for a new freedom?: A proudly fat, disabled, bisexual enby’s vision for #Juneteenth
By Denarii Grace Some days I wonder if the work that I do is worth it. On the surface, Black artists/cultural workers, healers, teachers and activists who live most on the margins have the least to gain in their lines of work. And in a society based on the allure of social and financial capital, […]
Shondaland on Law and Order (and Trump’s America) in ‘For The People’
by Nathaniel Phillips This essay contains spoilers for Shonda Rhimes’ For The People. A whistleblower is hunted by the US government for stealing highly sensitive information about the deportation of undocumented immigrants—medical records that should’ve been confidential and beyond the purview of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her lawyer flips the script on the government […]
Kendrick Lamar becomes first rapper to win a Pulitzer Prize
Kendrick Lamar can now add Pulitzer winner to his impressive list of career accolades as he was awarded the prize in music for his Grammy-nominated album DAMN. The Pulitzer Prize was given to Lamar’s album for being a “virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the […]
Call me Akata: Reclaiming our birthright as Indigenous and African people born on American soil
by Chelsea Neason In 1964, Malcolm X made history with “The Ballot or the Bullet”. With this speech, he proclaimed a bone-shaking truth: Black people born in America are not Americans. In Detroit, MI during one of the most impactful decades of visible Black resistance in the United States, Malcolm declared: “We are Africans, and […]
How “Christianity is the white man’s religion” feeds the damaging disconnect between the Diaspora and Africa
By Dilara K. Üsküp “Christianity is the white man’s religion. The Holy Bible in the white man’s hands and his interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings.” — Malcolm X (Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X & Alex Haley) While the idea that Christianity […]
Like my native tongue, Wakanda bridges the cultural gap between my African ancestry and Black American life
by Antoinette Gregg Until I moved to New York City for graduate school, I had never been asked the question, “What kind of Black are you?” Growing up, there was only one kind of Black that I knew of: Geechee. A hodgepodge of Caribbean, African, and European ways of life, Geechee/Gullah is the culture, language, […]
Welcome to Wakanda: ‘Black Panther’ is a love letter between the African Diaspora and the continent
I’m wondering what words there are in existence that could be used to accurately describe Black Panther. Stunning, breathtaking, and majestic come close. This film stands firmly in a class all its own. It is not perfect (and I have many feelings about it, but you won’t find any spoilers here), but it is still […]
Anti-Blackness in preschool classrooms: Combatting conditioning early to save our kids
By Salaam Green “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” – James Baldwin, Author American axiom would posit that if a 3-year-old becomes highly interested in another 3-year-old on the playground, chances are high that they will rush over and begin to play […]
A history of white valor: How World War II stories were made to erase violence against Africa
By Lewam Dejen As a Black woman, a diasporic transplant and a student in and of the West, I find myself in a sunken place within traditions of “collective history.” I am nowhere in the stories to which I devoted my everything. Many marginalized people know the struggle of holding tightly onto what decidedly unsees […]
Reading ‘Black Museum’ and ‘Get Out’ as comparative Afrofuturist zombie slave narratives
This essay contains spoilers for Get Out and Black Mirror S4, E6, “Black Museum” Can we just agree that Get Out is obviously a lost episode of Black Mirror? More specifically, it’s a companion tale to season four’s “Black Museum” (which feels very much like a series finale) that somehow found its way into Jordan […]
The Black church isn’t one-dimensional either: How Gullah-Geechee people subvert Christianity to retain Black history
By Ari Colston-Johnson To many, the Black Church calls to mind horror stories of cisheteropatriarchy and theologies shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, and respectability politics. But coming of age in the Gullah-Geechee African Methodist Episcopal (AME) tradition, the Black Church was a foundation for my radical politics, a space for community and Afrocentric syncretism, and […]