by Andrew Keahey When I was young, I would intentionally avoid black and white television, except for The Twilight Zone. The show just hit all the right notes for me, even in my childhood. The wildly fantastic tales hosted by the slick man with the cigarette was part of the reason I got into writing […]
I don’t know for sure if my family knows I’m not straight, and yet I suspect they somehow knew before I did. My family, who policed my lack of femininity growing up, and punished me for being a Tomboy. Who teased me for being a “Plain Jane.” Who asked for years when I was going […]
In the same week which has seen the attempted mail bombing of prominent Democrats including Barack Obama and Maxine Waters and the shooting of two Black customers at a Louisville Kroger, there has been yet another attack by an alleged white supremacist. This time the target was a Jewish synagogue and community in Pittsburgh.
by JaLoni Amor Owens For many Americans, one of the only days that left the nation feeling as hopeless and defeated as it did on November 8, 2016 was the day after. Those on the left, whether or not Secretary Clinton was their first choice for President of the United States and whether or not […]
One day after the Saudi government denied killing U.S. based Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had been critical of it, the New York Times is reporting that they are now calling the murder of Khashoggi premeditated, as the Turkish government had already been claiming. This represents the latest in a shifting story weaved by […]
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.”
After a 40-year imprisonment for being a member of the Black liberation organization, MOVE, Michael Africa Sr. has finally been released on parole.
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. […]
The Trump administration released a report early Tuesday morning entitled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism” which attempted to establish that Socialism as a terrible idea, but makes a concession that modern Socialists “denounce state brutality and would allow individuals to privately own the means of production in many industries.” The document is confusing and ultimately […]
“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, […]
PEN America, a literary activism group comprised of thousands of writers, has taken the step of suing a sitting President for his attacks on the press. Tuesday, the organization filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that Trump “violated the First Amendment and his oath to uphold the Constitution” via what PEN refers […]
