531 Search results for "tradition"

Television rarely comes on in my dorm room, guess that’s how it gets in college with paper after paper and the guilty slippage into partying. On those luke-warm Friday and Saturday nights I like to watch “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World,” shows that are incredible, shoes that were live for a different generation. […]

As a young black girl like most children I told lies. I told big lies. I told small lies. I told white lies. I told lies. And, even had the audacity to argue with my “all seeing all knowing” do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do black grandmother about the usage of lie over her usage of “telling a story.” What […]

Whatever the name, Black Studies, Africana studies, or African American Studies, university disciplines designed for understanding African history have a problem of attempting to be too Black. When I say “too Black” I’m not saying that Africana culture (relates to both African and African-Diaspora culture) is annoying, but that the way that scholars handle it […]

If last week’s rather desultory and occasionally poorly rendered post on The Fab Five was any indication, my love for Jalen Rose and the rest of the Fab Five is immense and endures even today.  I appreciate many of the things they symbolized.  Just like back in ’91, many do not hold this cohort of […]

When was the last time Hip Hop was this exciting and dangerous? Odd Future is the shot of badass, anti-establishment adrenaline Hip Hop desperately needs right now. Safe, parent-approved rappers are already feeling the heat; flitting around trying to figure out how to co-opt Odd Future and weather the storm. But it’s probably too late.

Here, on the pages of the Black Youth Project, us bloggers engage in a tradition of writing opinion pieces that may interest other Black youth. Often we comment on popular culture, racism (naturally), and politics; and most of the time we criticize heavilly, at least I do. Something feels incomplete, though, about the meditations I […]

Last night I caught ESPN’s 30 for 30 installment, The Fab Five.  The documentary chronicles the two years the University of Michigan men’s basketball team captured the imagination–and ire–of the sports watching public.  I was a young kid when Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, and Chris Webber revolutionized college basketball and rocked […]

Abahlali baseMjondolo or the Shack Dwellers movement began almost six years ago in Durban, South Africa. Abahlali has become (according to their website) the “largest organization of the poor” in post-apartheid South Africa. The organization was solidified through their first protest. This protest was a “road blockade organized from the Kennedy Road settlement” to speak […]

“Look into the countryside to find the truth about a city.” This I find to be a universal truth. Parallels can be made between the south or west sides of Chicago and townships in Cape Town. Comparisons can be drawn from neighborhoods like East Cleveland or Englewood (communities in the states) to the experiences of […]

Somewhere in Chicago the most promising band has its members contorting their bodies a few more times before it pries open the mouths of audiences across the world. Whether the gesture be frantic fingertips of an emcee, a rattling head of a saxophone player, or a subtle hand-to-thigh clap of a singer, the soul of […]

Greetings Black people, if you have been celebrating Kwanzaa for the first time I hope that it has been a good experience. If not and you are still considering, there are three days left. I left you earlier in the week with some ways to observe the Nguzu Saba, the seven principles of Kwanzaa. This […]

For far too long have people been forced into silence, a silence that neither yields equality or freedom. This is the silence that conjures depression, subjugation, and ostracization. A creed that keeps people quiet in the name of sustaining what traditionalist preach to be “proper.”  This silence is what keeps men on the DL, women […]