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Where I grew up, Black was the end of discussion. People clung to what law professor Juan Perea deemed the “black/white binary paradigm of race,” a bare-bones conception that acknowledged only whiteness or Blackness but did not allow for meaningful engagement with ethnicity. In college, I learned about different kinds of Black people. I met […]

by Idiley In 1985, a conservative group called Accuracy in Academia (AIA) was established with the intent of protecting “academic freedom.” Their mission was to get schools to return to “the quest for truth,” which manifests as an active push against what they claim to be a “liberal bias” in academia. Since AIA’s inception, these points […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about porn and erotic display lately, but not in a way that brings me any pleasure. I’ve been thinking about them in an inquisitive, almost anthropological way that raises within me more questions than it does answers, and creates more discomfort and disgust than it does gratification. This is because […]

“The police aren’t equipped to deal with mentally ill patients,” Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins said. She told TMZ that police shot and killed her cousin last week. Watkins also announced that her family would file suit against Peoria Police Department for her cousin Eddie Russell Jr.’s death. Russell, Watkins said, was mentally ill.

By Maya King For more than two centuries, religious institutions have sat at the intersection of pain and liberation within African-American communities. Churches like Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist and Atlanta’s Ebenezer exemplified this, giving birth to the people and movements that defined the Civil Rights Era while providing political capital and a sense of stability […]

By Timothy Duwhite My boyfriend wants to fuck me raw. Though he hasn’t said it yet, eventually he will. Right now, however, he is just a tapestry of hints and subtleties. He asks me if he can just put the head in. He says he just wants to loosen me before slipping on the condom. […]

by Hess Stinson Unpacking respectability politics is a journey. Right now, I’m at a point in my journey where I can sit on the bench and catch a breather, but I know that soon I have to get up and keep on walking. I used to take most steps with my “best foot,” trying to […]

by Tanya Fields On a daily basis, I have to quiet the voice in my head telling me that I ain’t shit. It constantly compares me to all of the fabulous Black women whose lives I get to witness snippets of on social media and beyond. Women with the alphabet behind their name, posing for […]

Sit. Pose. Look pretty. Keep mum about systemic racism and colonial rule. Collect your coins. Rinse. Repeat. If L’Oreal Paris’s leadership expected Black transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf to blindly follow brand messaging without blasting whiteness and its effects on people of color, they learned quickly Bergdorf was not going out like that. They also […]

By George M. Johnson It was a Sunday night like many others, me sitting at Starbucks finishing up some writing due first thing Monday morning, when a text from my mother came through to our family group chat. It was a picture of me as a young boy, playing Cops and Robbers with my little […]

Shout out to growth. Shout out to forward movement. Shout out to living my best life. But first, a little background: 2014 was one of the hardest years of my life. I lost my father. I had just given birth to my third child. After months of attempting to sell our home in southern California, […]

Too often, in our hasty gestures of doling out ally and wokeness credits, we fail to turn a critical lens to the ways that performative activism rarely metes out actual social change. And while Colin Kaepernick’s recent activist work seems to be more than performance, recent protests on his behalf and his continued fight to […]