1072 Search results for "author"

by Donnie Moreland The first time I held a gun, I was afraid. The scenario was all too awkwardly cinematic to not be memorable. It was on a vacation with my mother to my grandparents’ South Carolina home. Sitting in their entertainment room, my grandfather entered with two guns. A magnum revolver and shotgun. He […]

By Terrence F. Chappell “What your mom did to you, you’re doing to me. You treat me exactly the same way your mom treated you.” My sister didn’t yell this to our mother. Her tone was much more purposeful and so it demanded much more attention. Her words authored a truth that forced my mom […]

By Quintessa Williams Originally Published: October, 2nd 2024 In 2022, when Southern red states followed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s restrictions on teaching Black history in classrooms, Black communities in the Sunshine State and beyond found a solution by bringing back Freedom Schools. The resurgence of Freedom Schools is a powerful countermeasure to the growing trend […]

by Alycia Kamil We Speak Our City Back On Language, Gentrification, and Black Presence in Chicago There are stories that arrive already smoothed out. Made digestible for funders, developers, and media outlets. The kind that trades in progress narratives and polished soundbites. This is not that kind of story. This piece opens differently. The voice […]

Dalvin Aboagye Near the end of May, the more melanin-infused parts of the internet were set ablaze by a questionable scene in the second season of She’s Gotta Have It, the Spike Lee-produced Netflix series based on his 1986 film of the same name. Within what many already saw as a weak portrayal of Black […]

This essay contains spoilers for Fast Color by Melanie Ojwang Fast Color immediately stands out as different from the comic based blockbusters I’ve grown used to over the past decade. When it was first released, I rushed to see it, fearing that it wouldn’t be in theaters past opening weekend. It turns out that my […]

By Itoro Udofia I grew up under the tutelage of The God of the Binary. He was forever in opposition to a ubiquitous outside force. He was the Good opposed to Evil. The Strong opposed to Weak. Right opposed to Wrong. There I stood, an eager and inquisitive girl child, making mistakes and looking for […]

A history of forced institutionalization in service of white supremacy

by Fania Noel The assassination of George Floyd by the police and the uprisings that followed reverberate across the Atlantic Ocean, finding resonance and solidarity in France.  Four days after the murder of George Floyd, a medical expert was called in to evaluate the case of Adama Traoré, a Black man who died while in […]

This essay contains discussion of sexual violence, gendered violence, and mention of r/pe   by Sabelo Mtsweni “khanda elixegaxegayo liyofulela abafazi; indoda iyindoda ngokuba umthetho wayo uhlonishwe ekhaya” Loosely translated, this isiZulu idiom means that a man’s authority in a household forms his very essence as a man. Before I read it in Laurence Mabuya’s […]

We’ve already been taught LGBTQ history. Unfortunately, too many of us don’t even know that we have been. We’ve already heard countless lectures about icons who happened to be queer—learned about their lives and work, read their words, recited their speeches, seen them remembered through art and poetry, and heralded them as some of the […]

by Jamila Dawn Mitchell  Every year, 90% of the 250,000 people held in Illinois jails are incarcerated pretrial, prior to actual convictions, putting the rate of pretrial incarceration far above the national average of 67%. The percentage of pretrial detentions range county to county – with 51% of the jail population in Tazewell County and […]