33 Search results for "sanity"

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ & the colonial obsession with salvaging a world of suffering for the sake of sanity
Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers of season 1 of Haunting of Hill House and discussion of suicide I don’t remember how my parents died in the nightmare, but I woke up screaming bloody murder. I had to have been about 4-years-old. I don’t think I had considered being indefinitely away from my parents before, […]
The Black Lunatic
A history of forced institutionalization in service of white supremacy
When the Ancestors tell you to go to therapy
There aren’t enough accessible therapists to go around. I met this reality after an Ifa divination that I got while I was in Cuba, and my dreams for an entire year afterward, told me that I needed to focus on my mental health. My ancestors were LOUD about the mental work that I needed to […]
‘Set It Off’ and the Black feminist lessons it still holds for us
This essay contains spoilers for Set It Off, and discusses sexual exploitation and state violence “Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I […]
“Who taught you to love yourself?”: How political education moved me to leave academia
By Deria Matthews “The university was not created to save my life. The university is not about the preservation of a bright brown body. The university will use me alive and use me dead. The university does not intend to love me. The university does not know how to love me. The university in fact, […]
I am a childfree Black woman and I owe my womb to no one
This essay contains discussions of death in childbirth and reproductive violences “Who she pregnant for?” This is how I remember my aunts inquiring about the potential father of any given person’s unborn child while I was growing up. Not “Who are they pregnant by?” or “Who are they pregnant with?” The question was always, Who […]
The “positive outcome” of the Starbucks arrest won’t save us because it didn’t save Chikesia Clemons
By L.N. Lewis I visit a certain website almost monthly, reading names and cross-checking news stories. It is a stark spreadsheet, a database of nightmares reaching back to May 1, 2013, titled killedbypolice.net. For April 2018, it lists 418 names. Among them: Shukri Ali Said, aged 36; Elijah James Smith, 20-years-old; and Brenda Jenette Harrison-Bumbray, […]
Learning when to cut off toxic marginalized people is imperative to Black mental health
The ways I have been hurt by white supremacy are enumerable. Its narcissism and dehumanization cut into me, day by day, like a thousand teeth in my flesh. The anti-Blackness that white supremacy permits, condones, and sustains itself through—whether it be subtle, benevolent, microaggressive, or institutionally and blatantly on display—hurts. Constantly. For me, this has […]
Stop expecting Black children to grow up straight & cisgender
By George M. Johnson It was a Sunday night like many others, me sitting at Starbucks finishing up some writing due first thing Monday morning, when a text from my mother came through to our family group chat. It was a picture of me as a young boy, playing Cops and Robbers with my little […]
“Representation matters,” but not more than everything else
I went to film school chasing a dream of telling my story to a world that always seemed not to know what to do with queer Black bois like me. A dream of forcing the world to know. But it was just a dream. At film school, I quickly learned that while you may be […]
Reflections on my thirty-four years as a Black man with mental illness
By Kelvin Easiley, Jr July is National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. This is the time when a laser focus is trained on the various complexities people of color encounter while facing mental health stigma and a shoddy healthcare system.The same healthcare system many people of color approach with grave skepticism. There are many people […]
If Black innocence never exists to the state, how can passivism and perfect victimhood save us?
[Banner photo: A headline from The Daily Kos seeming to play up the fact that Jordan Edwards was unarmed and an “honor roll student”] By Zoé Samudzi On May 20, Richard Collins III, a young Black soon-to-be graduate of Bowie State University, was murdered by Sean Urbanski, a member of a white supremacist Facebook group called Alt-Reich […]