459 Search results for "black boys"

The conditioning that fuels the mental health epidemic for Black men, and how to stop it
By J.R. Yussuf I began prioritizing my mental health shortly after graduating college in 2012. I still felt as though I had to keep it a secret because going to see a therapist was seen as bizarre. But I went anyway because with each passing day, life increasingly felt like a punishment and soon sleep […]
Intergenerational trauma is gendered, and other life lessons from my Black mother & sister
Editor’s Note: April is Black Women’s History Month. Throughout this month, Black Youth Project is celebrating Black women. This month is also National Minority Health Month, Autism Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Child Abuse Prevention Month. We are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them.
Facing my eating disorder: No one loves fat, Black bodies
by Indigo This essay contains discussion of a sexual assault, fat antagonism, disordered eating, and unhealthy patterned behavior associated with eating disorders. I have engaged in disordered eating for at least a decade – about half of my life. I, like most people with eating disorders, never intended to have an eating disorder. I was […]
Black queer people were never #allJussieSmollett
I want to start this off with a reminder that the police are never to be trusted—particularly when it comes to their version of a situation where harm has befallen a Black queer person (because of their explicit history of contributing to that harm, and of trying to cover it up). I want to start […]
When Black womxn finally allow ourselves to get angry
Anger is dangerous. That’s what I learned as a child, when other people’s anger meant screaming and clenched fists and scratches and bloody lips and flying objects and switches and paddles and belts. Anger is unequal, too. See, my mom and my brother were allowed to be angry. And when they were angry, they were […]
A meditation on intergenerational trauma and how we raise Black children
This essay contains discussion of suicide. by Donnie Moreland On the other side of her beautiful and hardened, bulging belly, I can feel them. My baby navigating the uterus of the woman I love, curious to the pressure of my palm on the soft brown flesh between them and I. I imagine their curiosity, or […]
Black women have to keep pushing back against internalized misogynoir
by Josie Pickens dream hampton’s Lifetime documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, continues to make Black folks do some serious soul searching and unpacking around the kinds of sexual violence too many of us have experienced in our families and connected communities. For Black women especially, much of the mental and emotional heavy-lifting has involved recalling our […]
Mother of MAGA hat wearing teen who terrorized Indigenous man blames “Black Muslims”
According to Newsweek, the mother of one of the teens from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky wrote an angry e-mail to Heavy in response to their coverage of her son and his friends’ racist treatment of an Omaha Nation elder, Nathan Phillips that was caught on viral video at a protest. The mother blamed […]
I’m tired of watching white men get away with sexual violence against Black men
by Jamila Mitchell This essay contains discussion of r/pe and sexual violence against minors. We need to talk about gay white men and how they get away with the rape and sexual violation of Black folks without society holding them accountable. Kevin Spacey, the actor recently charged with the sexual assault of a then-under […]
The excellence of Black Hollywood doesn’t need to be validated by mainstream awards
by Khaaliq Crowder As a Black millennial, I sometimes forget about the advantage that folks of my generation have as opposed to our grandparents and older relatives when it comes to media representation. Black people weren’t always in movies, and when we were, our presence was seldom. My grandparents, who grew in the 1930s and […]
Anti-Black bullying in schools devastates children. We need to invest in their healing
By Gloria O. The recent death of McKenzie Adams, a nine-year-old from Alabama who endured months of racist bullying before dying via suicide, really hurt me. It immediately evoked memories of bullying in my own childhood, reminding me of the sad fact that the world can make such little progress in so much time. Anti-blackness, […]
What Black Brits want African Americans to know about race and racism in the U.K.
By Habiba Katsha Race and racism aren’t topics that are spoken about openly enough in the U.K., and when they are mentioned it’s usually just to compare it to racism in the States. White British people look at the U.S as the epitome of a racist country, especially with Donald Trump as president. They are […]