92 Search results for "traditions"

Gender expectations are a thing of the past, especially when your name is Jaden Smith. His gender presentation has made the official entrance into fashion as he has been crowned as the new face of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear campaign.

By: Chaz Barracks, PhD In a poignant dialogue between two Black trans women who are media influencers, TS Madison and Alexis Sno Legend refuse the respectability politics and binary thinking that often constrain mainstream Black queer representation. Together, they demonstrate how Black queer people reclaim agency and use the digital space to perform and be […]

By: Amber Butts   There’s always a reason the dead had to die. This country is very practiced at explaining itself, searching the dead for a reason before it admits to killing them, rifling through whatever they left behind. Alex Pretti was thirty-seven years old, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis protesting federal immigration raids when […]

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: Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem Long before I called myself queer, I called myself gay because it was the only language I had for my attraction to men. Growing up in Nigeria, the word rarely belonged to people like me. Among young people, “gay” was less an identity than an insult, tossed around with the same […]

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 […]

by Amber Butts I take my shoes off and step into the dirt. The ground is cold, damp enough to come up through my feet and ease something that had been tight all morning. Leaves press, then give, then press again. The soil shifts under me, not giving way, just answering back. I stand there […]

by Charles Tremblay Black culture is everywhere, on runways, in music, even in the way people speak and move online. But the people who create it, especially Black women, are rarely protected when culture is copied, mocked, or commodified. This is especially apparent in K-pop, where Black aesthetics, from language to hairstyles, are often adopted […]

by Amber Butts Immigration policy in the United States has always enforced racial hierarchy, and the Trump administration further developed an aggressive removal process against Black immigrants. Expanded policing partnerships, broader detention authority, and rhetoric that cast immigrants as criminals and predators created conditions that pushed Black immigrants into detention and deportation at strikingly disproportionate […]

by Amber Butts How many Black and Brown women have been asked to hold something so everything else can keep going? Nightmares—living ones—are why many do not come forward, especially in movements that keep the abuser’s name, knowingly or not, as part of how the work understands itself. What was done stays, and the weight […]

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 […]

by Naiquan. Last summer, a friend and I realized we hadn’t seen children playing in the fire hydrant. No elder on the block with a key to unlock the “Johnny Pump”. As a child of the Brooklyn Spike Lee portrayed in “Crooklyn,” I know first-hand the feelings of protection and support from my neighbor’s grandfather, […]