20 Search results for "mammy"

    Yesterday was a huge night for Viola Davis. Her show “How to Get Away With Murder,” created by Thursday night dominator Shonda Rhimes, premiered and it was pretty much a huge hit. But a tweet during the show’s premiere has offended many. Instead of praising Viola, or just commenting about the show in […]

by Juahl Ganaway In a scene ripped from The Sugar Shack, the character Pearline (played by the stunning Jayme Lawson) stalks across the stage purring the lyrics to “Pale, Pale, Moon,” the Brittany Howard-penned song that feels more like an invocation than a performance.  “I wanna sing Like I hear the crickets do I wanna […]

Throughout my work creating collages, and scouring the web for meaningful art, I have found thousands of images of unidentified Black people. These photos of Black women, children, men, and their families, are all with unknown origins. The archives show blank faces that stare at the camera, remaining still because the slightest move will ruin […]

This essay contains discussions of sexual violence as well as racist violence and fetishization  I personally know of fewer than five Black people who identify as asexual, and I’ve only met two of them in person. The others remain virtual friends for now, but I hope to meet them someday. Of course, these are just […]

by Cosima Smith  Television, movies, and literary representations all serve to enforce, perpetuate, and reinforce the lived-realities of their subjects and audience. They also proliferate the ideas of their creators by portraying a set of characters who, ideally, undergo hardships and growth, experience love and loss, and who (work to) internalize a great deal of […]

By “DJ Ferguson” If you were to listen to “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin—really listen to the words and let their meaning sink in—it becomes clear after a few verses that despite its name the song is not about immigration. It’s about colonialism. We come from the land of the ice and snow From the […]

*A note from our editor Sherronda J. Brown: January is Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and our theme at Black Youth Project is Human Trafficking and Slavery. We are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them.* This post contains spoilers for season four of How to Get Away With Murder. […]

By michal “mj” jones She stares into the heart of the camera, a backdrop of ocean shore behind her and a swollen, pregnant brown belly below. Neck draped in seashells and her body in the watery spirits of Yemaya, she looks certain, calm, confident. As I gazed up at this photo of my partner during […]

Melissa Harris-Perry’s split with MSNBC a few weeks ago was highly publicized and had some clear parallels to an ugly breakup. Keeping with that metaphor, Harris-Perry recently appeared on ABC’s The View to provide some more detail about what led to her walking away from the network and her program.

Nate Parker broke records last week when his Nat Turner slave revolt film Birth of a Nation was picked up by Fox Searchlight for $17.5 billion. While this is exciting news, Parker’s success isn’t the benchmark for movies in this genre nor is it a logical signal to Hollywood to make more slavery era movies. […]

By Erika Dickerson While we were waist-deep in circular (yet necessary) conversations about Iggy Azalea’s Grammy Award nomination for Best Rap Album, her “blaccent,” and appropriation of Black music and culture at-large, the Grammy Awards were undermining Blk women in another way: the “tribute” performance for Ava DuVernay’s Selma. Let’s quickly recap the shameful dismissal that has […]

The faithful slave in “Gone With the Wind” is set to be revived in a prequel. The work comes more than 75 years after the publication of the novel by Margaret Mitchell.