76 Search results for "vulnerability"

So last week Beyonce gave the people a morsel of her upcoming release and the internet went bonkers. The sonic appetizer is expectedly–I suppose–ratchet, An homage to the city where she was born and raised, “Bow Down” is chopped and screwed Beyonce-style. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4VSG1uullY Of course a whiff of Beyonce and bloggers gotta blog, adding two […]

Rhymefest on executive producing THE PLEDGE Mixtape: “Hip Hop can be used as a tool or a weapon, and I wanted to inspire more artists to use it as a tool.” The Pledge Mixtape is a 13-song compilation of various artists taking back their communal power through music.

It is no secret that hip hop can be one of the most oppressive art forms in the black community. Simultaneously, we also know that hip hop a history (of being) and potential (to be) empowering. Yet in the state we find it now, it tends to be a contradicting gray area, instead of a […]

The sentiment that Blacks “should know better” when it comes to prejudice against other groups is a product of white supremacist thinking. Being Black doesn’t imbue us with special powers to automatically understand someone else’s plight…

I work at the Chicago House and Social Service Agency as an intern for my masters. At this placement I teach students that have been impacted by poverty, HIV/AIDS, an educational crisis and other systemic issues. I have been notified that in this environment many of the students have been diagnosed with learning, behavioral, and […]

As I walked home yesterday from the market with my several bags of groceries and my godson in toe being harassed by young black men who probably could be my nephews, I finally understood why many Black men act the way they do. Why they are completely impervious to emotions. Why they can sleep with […]

Last week, Lauryn Hill announced the birth of her sixth child, a son, and then somehow found the strength to perform in LA just days after. Of course, this newest edition to Hill’s family surprised very few, since photographs of her on stage during her Moving Target tour last spring led to speculations that she was […]

Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest New York Times | July 26, 2011 WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth of any ethnic and racial group in the country during the recession, according to a study published Tuesday by the Pew Foundation. The study, which used data collected by […]

Bonded by our survival of near extinctions, Jews and Blacks always leveled with agendas for ending racism. For decades this linkage of two Diasporas endured the normal strains of any relationship; specifically, numerous occasions influenced separation of the two groups with an unbreakable extension of the nasty racial myths behind both groups. However, during times […]

By Justin Hill In 2008, when I first read “Gay is the New Black” on the cover of the Advocate, I CRINGED at its implications.  Even as I write, “Gay is the New Black,” it is unsettling because it elides, obfuscates and erases many tensions and concerns. You may be asking, “Why speak about it […]

What’s scarier than a racist that calls out “nigger” or “coon” viciously? The racist who’s night you save by being the “token blacky”. I pose two disappointments for the eager audience at a non-black party: no weed and no freestyle. Still I manage to be the life of the party, dougieing on every song, judging […]

Jimmy Santiago Baca, a leading contemporary Latino poet writing in the United States, reminds us that “Poetry’s mission is to subvert, to question, to challenge, provoke, to flail one’s vulnerability and voice into the marvelous whirlwind of poetry’s awe, flagging at the horns of the raging beast that is societies gluttonous comfort, ‘bringing social justice’…affirm […]