21 Search results for "metaphorical"

Black Women are Portals
by Miranda Goosby Grief isn’t always sad. Sometimes, grief is a portal. It cracks something open. It clears space. If we allow ourselves to surrender to the breaking, grief can become more than sorrow—it can reveal what’s been buried. It can offer honesty, possibility, and even joy. After the 2024 election, when yet another administration […]
Black women, our closeted emotional needs won’t get met
by Najya A. Williams In the dark of the night, the world had fallen asleep and I was left to the comfort of my favorite recliner and a random Enneagram personality test my friend had shared with me. With the popularity of tests and quizzes meant to predict your life, I held a healthy amount […]
Capitalism makes us think that having our basic needs met is revolutionary. It’s a lie.
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. -Audre Lorde I check my bank account every day, regardless of whether or not […]
Older siblings pay an unfair cost in poor Black families
by Cosima Smith Mobility is the ability to move, both physically over land (and territorial lines) and metaphorically through social and political classes and rankings. But mobility is also so much more than that: it is the chance to explore and live and interact across dividing lines, it in itself can be a lifeline when […]
Elizabeth Warren has been my Senator since 2013. I don’t recognize the woman on the campaign trail.
by Indigo On February 9, 2019 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D) announced her presidential bid, citing President Donald Trump as “just the latest and most extreme symptom of what’s gone wrong in America” and calling for “big, structural change.” In the months since announcing her presidential bid, Senator Warren has unveiled plans to […]
The ‘Charmed’ reboot and the demonization of Macy Vaughn
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 […]
From John Henry to James Evans: Black men married to hard labor in the white American imagination
by Donnie MoreIand I find myself humming the theme of Good Times, quite a bit. It’s calming, in the way only Black Baptist Church Choirs can be calming. In fact, I find all of it pretty calming—Good Times, that is—because it’s so unequivocally Black, that it feels a part of my cultural genome. Now, I […]
Chris Rock’s ‘Saw’ will continue the relationship between comedy and horror
by Andrew Keahey Comedy is not an easy gig. Your career is forged in the fire of public opinion in clubs full of drunk people who will eat you alive if you show one iota of fear or doubt. Maybe you carry around a little notebook where you write down disconnected ideas that exist nebulously […]
Delectable Negroes: On precarity, death, and the Black queer male body
by Robert Randolph, Jr., Ph.D. This essay contains discussions of sexual violence, lynching, and the serial murder of queer Black men. Writer’s Note: The Deputy Editor invited me to write about this subject and I have carried these men, the named and unnamed in my head for weeks. I blew the deadline time and time […]
What I learned about the work it takes to protect children from anti-Blackness from being homeschooled
My fiance and I are at the point in our engagement where we are pouring over every decision we might possibly ever make together to ensure we are on the same page. I actually don’t know if it’s really just a singular point, or if continual desperate preparation for all imaginable disasters simply defines what […]
The bittersweetness in Junot Diaz’s #MeToo moment and how men traumatize women on their way to healing
by Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo Content Warning: This essay mentions of r/pe of a child I just read Junot Diaz’s essay about his childhood rape and the years of sexual, romantic, and relationship trauma and toxic patriarchal behavior that followed. I applaud him opening up and owning to some really deep, dark trauma on a significantly […]
U.S. Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ In Afghanistan
After sending an air strike to destroy Syrian airfields only a few days ago, the United States government has now ramped up its efforts to fight ISIS by dropping its biggest non-nuclear bomb in Eastern Afghanistan.