61 Search results for "james baldwin"

A few months ago, as I was scrolling through the ‘Explore’ page on Instagram, I came across the page of an up-and-coming Black travel group. As someone who is keen on snatching grant money and leaving the country for weeks, if not months at a time, in the name of research and scholarship (plus photo […]

Many of us make New Year’s resolutions to read a book a week or once per month. And, if you are anything like me, you want those books to come from Black authors. Now, a company called Noir Reads is making meeting those goals all the more possible by delivering books from the Black Diaspora […]

I hate the term “privilege”. Its flatness allows it to facilitate spurious claims masquerading as the work of liberation, which is why it’s so overused in neoliberal social justice spaces. It promotes dangerous assertions lacking any sort of nuance whatsoever, like “third-party voting is the height of white privilege” or “refusing to vote for Clinton […]

For black women interested in art, the opportunity to speak with like-minded peers can be few and far between. The lack of space for black women in the art world compelled Jovonna Jones and Samantha Scott to create BlacQurl, an online magazine and platform for black women and femme writers, creatives, and critics.

I’d left the hospital a few days before 2015 New Year’s following an overdose. If you’ve ever been hospitalized, you know that leaving doesn’t make you magically well or even wholly interested in living. I wasn’t.

By L.G. Parker Some poets scream, others approach the microphone with a fierce control that sits you down and reminds you of your magic and your wounds. Afro-Mexicana poet Ariana Brown is the latter. With five years of experience as a poetry mentor and workshop leader, Brown has a commitment not only to her own […]

By Eve Ewing It’s 11:20 at night. I have a lot of work to finish and I haven’t even eaten dinner yet, but like so many of my friends, my head is in Baltimore, and I’m caught in the same cycle: TV news, Twitter, Facebook, texting, repeat. Trying to piece together stories as I can, […]

                          Black August is a time of fasting, studying, reflecting, and discipline to honor our ancestors and people in the liberation struggle.  Black August originated in the slave house (prison) to honor our fallen Freedom Fighters, Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain […]

This is an essay in response to Joël Barraquiel Tan’s piece Homothugdragsterism in which he describes the lives of “Homothugs.” It is sad and disheartening that we live in a world where in order to gain acceptance, one must put on a façade. Behind these imagined posteriors lies caged butterflies that are imprisoned by their own […]

  In this day and age, some would say it’s hard to find teachers that are committed. But no one could say that about Edouard E. Plummer. He’s been guiding the youth of Harlem for half a century. 

With the recent release and acclaim of Oscar-favorite 12 Years A Slave, I found myself mentally revisiting Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino. Not because I think there are any worthwhile parallels to draw between the two films, but rather because the brilliance and scope of 12 Years actually exposed Django for what it truly was, […]

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed […]