380 Search results for "systems"

by Gloria Oladipo I watch the moment’s protests through bitter tears of joy. I hate that change is paved with the blood of Black sisters, brothers, and siblings. I hate how freedom never seems to be found when we’re alive. I hate cops. I hate oppression and injustice and anything that keeps Black and Brown […]

A recent report finds that almost sixty years after the Supreme Court ruled out the separation of students by race, there are still large discrepancies that exist in how the country treats its poor and minority students in education.

The Chicago Police and Mayor Rahm Emanuel want us to be calm. They want us to be quiet, hidden from plain sight. They want us pacified in the face of injustice. And, the mainstream media is great at conveying their desires. For the past year since 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was murdered by Officer Jason Van […]

Speaking to a group of black high school graduates at the Mass Black Male Graduation and Transition to Manhood ceremony in Chicago, Lupe Fiasco implored the young men to focus less on the achievement of graduating, and more on their futures and transition into manhood.

According to a scathing report released yesterday by the Justice Department, the Memphis and Shelby County juvenile justice system routinely treats black youth more harshly than their white counterparts. How do we fight the institutional racism that continues to criminalize and demonize our youth?

  At my job there are specific rules that may seem contradictory to norms that exist in society. A particular rule that I was once confused about relates to parent-child contact during youth development activities. We basically don’t allow parents in the room while we’re conducting their post-school day activities. In a world where everyone […]

By: Amber Butts Black disabled and chronically ill people are often forced to become the archive of our own bodies. We spend days, months, sometimes years trying to establish and translate what our bodies are telling us. We assemble a history that exists nowhere else, carrying the context our healing depends on, and are treated […]

By: Maya Williams As a nonbinary feminine person who uses ey/em, they/them, and she/her pronouns, I navigate misgendering—the act of being called by incorrect pronouns or phrases that do not align with a person’s gender identity—in complex ways. Usually, when a white person calls me “girl,” I feel hypervigilance arise in my body. I feel […]

By: DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D. Nobody really tells you what happens when you become “the one who made it.”  The phrase itself is complicated because “making it” is not a single destination, nor is it a journey that begins from the same place for everyone. For some, “making it” meant leaving a neighborhood where survival was […]

By Amanzi Arnett Dowdy   “This is a new meaning of family… It wasn’t a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grew up knowing as a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.” – Dorian Corey For much of my life, gender was […]

Building a culture of consent is imperative for preventing violence in our communities.  When you hear the word consent, do you automatically think about sex? Maybe you took one of those awkward seminars or workshops in college where you saw students act out being drunk at a party, and someone was unable to consent to […]

By Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its) In 2019, I dodged a death day. I don’t say that for shock value. I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand how people who once loved each other could end up consumed by rage and mistrust. The easy story would be to cast my former partner as the villain […]