I have always wanted to be strong. Not strong as in a Strong Black Woman™—an expectation of impossible emotional and spiritual fortitude against a world imbued with misogynoir. Strong as in twenty three-time Grand Slam Champion Serena Williams. Powerful as in Olympic Shot Putter and gold medalist Michelle Carter. Formidable as in the Dora Milaje […]
39 year-old Marco Antonio Munoz, a Honduran father who was separated from his wife and child at the U.S. border, is dead after suffering a severe mental breakdown while being held in a Texas jail cell. The news was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, but instead appeared in a report by the […]
by Nathaniel Phillips This essay contains spoilers for Shonda Rhimes’ For The People. A whistleblower is hunted by the US government for stealing highly sensitive information about the deportation of undocumented immigrants—medical records that should’ve been confidential and beyond the purview of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her lawyer flips the script on the government […]
According to research from the National Endowment for the Arts, poetry readership is on the rise. A staggering 28 million adults read poetry last year, per the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts which places this number as the highest it has ever been in the last 15 years of conducting the survey. […]
by Kathleen Anaza I feel a sense of healing and reconciliation when I consider Halimat’s life outside of being my mother. My own navigations of womanhood help me contextualize her as a nuanced and fascinating individual I can relate to. Positioning her as a peer, makes it difficult to be the hypercritical daughter I’ve at […]
by Kya Warnsley Once upon a time, there seemed to be a widely-shared norm among Black families in America in which children were being forced to abide by the “What goes on in this house, stays in this house” ideology. No matter what was going on behind closed doors, it had to be handled amongst the […]
In a 1967 speech at Stanford University, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out his case for a basic guaranteed income as a moral imperative for a country of capitalists. King would later more fully develop this idea in his last book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community in which he remarks: Up […]
In 2014, Gregory Hill, a 30 year old Black man, was shot three times and killed by police in his Florida garage after complaints of loud music. To add insult to injury, last week, a federal jury awarded his family a $4 verdict in their civil case.
by Josie Pickens I first met my good friend—my sister—Hadeel through another mutual friend some years ago. Around that time, I was researching Black American towns destroyed by White vigilantes, and who were often aided by local and national governments.  She was a shorty like me, of five feet and a few inches. Wild, […]
Last month during a congressional hearing, US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families acting assistant secretary Steven Wagner told Congress that his agency was unable to account for 1,475 children who had been placed with sponsors between October and December of 2017. Though all the children unaccounted for showed up […]
Morgan Freeman, the 80-year-old actor perhaps who became a household name after his roles in Driving Miss Daisy and Along Came a Spider is the latest to face a reckoning with sexual misconduct and sexual harassment according to multiple reports. Freeman is also being accused of fostering a work environment at his company Revelations Entertainment […]
On April 29, a white woman called the police on a Black family for using a charcoal grill at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. A fellow Oakland resident, Michelle Snider, recorded the incident and accused the unidentified white woman of harassing the family because they are Black. It sparked national conversations about racism. Police came to the […]
