1208 Search results for "community work"

Why Police and Black Community Relationships Don’t Work
Dayton Chief of Police Richard Biel and Jasiri X at the Dear Dr. Hip-Hop: Speak, Be Heard, Be Considered event in Dayton, Ohio. Photo by Andrew-Bryce Hudson (www.andrew-bryce.net) This weekend, I had an opportunity to speak and perform in Dayton, OH, with the legendary MC Lyte at an event called, “Dear Dr. Hip-Hop: Speak, Be Heard, Be Considered.” A few days before arriving, I […]
Murals and Community Art Across Atlanta
Lasalle is an Atlanta-based muralist and multidisciplinary artist whose work appears across the city’s everyday surfaces — walls, utility boxes, and street corners people pass every day. A graduate of Valdosta State University with a degree in Fine Arts, he has been part of Atlanta’s arts community since high school. His practice grows out of […]
Stop Cop City: Atlanta Organizers Reimagine Community Safety
In the United States, police kill over 1,000 and injure more than 51,000 people each year, with evidence suggesting that these figures could be underreported by as much as 55%. In addition to these numbers being substantially higher than other developed nations, unfortunately, they are also plagued by biases and systematic failures which disproportionately affect […]
How the Coalition to End Money Bond is working to help reform pretrial practices in Illinois
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 […]
How my experience as a Black man working with children was tainted by racism
Editor’s Note: This month at BYP, we will be exploring Education & Schooling, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics. What are the implications of charter and private schools in communities of color? How do we counteract anti-Black textbooks and teachers in our childrens’ education? How did you heal from bullying […]
Faced with commercialization, the Black Punk community turns to its past for a guide to keep resisting
By Monika Estrella Negra The majority of the Black punks I have talked to were drawn to (or got lost in) the Punk scene in order to escape the rigidity and heteronormative idealism of traditional Black political organizing. This is not to infer that all Black punks identify with far leftist views, nor does it […]
Juneteenth Reflections: Grief Work is Freedom Work
by Julia Mallory “…but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin.’ ” —Mary Reynolds, Texas Slave Narratives Volume XVI Part III Juneteenth began as a day of celebration commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas on June 19th, 1866. Since then, it has offered Black folks an opportunity to remember […]
Black Joy is movement work
by Gloria Oladipo Black joy is revolutionary. Full stop. Oftentimes, white people misinterpret Black liberation movements as movements only about pain, movements only about anger, only about violence and death. And, of course, they involve those things. But joy is foundational. Joy is fundamental. Joy is what we’re fighting for. Joy is what we’re fighting […]
For Black people in the face of all this death, sadness is the work
Recounting sad shit depleted me, so I stopped writing publicly for a long time. I stopped towards the beginning of this absurdity of a year, but I’m still as exhausted as ever. I got tired of feeling like for Black people in the face of all this death, there’s only so much we can do. […]
How nonprofits gaslight you into the same self-sacrificing work as capitalist corporations
by Taneasha White Nonprofit work is always seen as “God’s work.” Before they even know which organization I work with, chatty Uber and Lyft drivers immediately thank me for my service. There are things that are commonplace within nonprofits that aren’t expected in corporate settings. The idea of “ice breakers” before meetings, flex time, or […]
We need to respond to PTSD with community care
by Jamila Mitchell This article discusses suicide, r/pe, and other topics that may be triggering for some readers. For some reason, I found myself in pain on the floor of my bathroom with a closed door, empty pill bottles, and spilt bleach. Frantically, I reached out to people through my phone and Facebook contacts. All […]
How Audre Lorde taught me to love myself and my community
By Cosima Smith Audre Lorde is my personal heroine. I met her writing for the first time in my first year of university, and it has been a companion helping me work through my own internalized issues with my Blackness, my queerness, and my poorness ever since. Lorde was the first reflection of myself I […]