51 Search results for "a nation under our feet"

I was 23 and at a birthday party the first time it registered that I was having a panic attack. I locked myself in the bathroom to get away from the noise, the flashing lights, the woman who was sharing her secrets and everyone else. Initially, I thought it was a heart attack and reasoned […]

By Amber Butts As children, we are told to stay out of grown folk business. As adults and elders, we then continue that wheel and narrative, which doesn’t give space for us to build an intergenerational emotional intelligence. What if children were in more “grown folk” conversations? Could we better prepare for it if children […]

By Imani J. Jackson #Blackboyjoy sounded more like hustle than hubris earlier this week during a telephonic interview with Trevor Wilkins. The tech entrepreneur is a Southside of Chicago native and celebrant. He is also a Princeton sociology graduate who shared parts of his journey to co-creating an app with more than a half million […]

This piece was originally written by William Evans, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of BlackNerdProblems.com. ***Trigger Warning For Sexual Assault***There was a point a few years ago where I wanted to be done with period films and TV shows. Either they had so few Black people in them it was as if we were to believe they […]

BYP100’s Kai M. Green pens a short essay emphasizing the urgency of Black and People of Color Freedom Struggles NOW! The title sums it up: “If our Freedom is Criminal, We Must Change the Laws.”

It is the dead of winter in Chicago and my thoughts are drifting back to summer and the month I spent in Costa Rica. My sunny daydreams, however, have been interrupted by some no-so-sunny memories of my trip… Having just arrived and begun working on a school building project in a tiny village in Costa […]

April 6 will surely be a holiday for black nerds as the first issue of Marvel’s latest run of Black Panther, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, will be released to the public. Like a dream come true, the best black comic book character ever will be in the care of a highly esteemed writer on black identity in the […]

by Jari Bradley During the peak of the pandemic in 2020, there were numerous online poetry readings being held for the public to attend. I was just finishing my Master of Fine Arts program after three years on the East Coast, and with all the calamity that the world felt comprised of at that time, […]

by Vernon  Jordan, III She sat in the back of the joint, eyeing him. From over the shoulder of his bass, he noticed her fingers around the rim of a glass, miming the bass notes. He was the player, but so was she. Rooted, was their first glance, she minded him the way trees mind […]

by Janyce Glasper Hannah Bledsoe loved Linda Crawford. Yet Hannah desperately needed a quiet, isolated place to paint alone. One simply could not crash on a college friend’s couch forever. She found salvation in the good neighborhood— a drafty basement converted into a studio apartment. The tightly jarred windows and cracked ceilings poorly congealed together […]

By Donnie Moreland Only on nights like this, could “sweet” be an adjective to describe the air. A prize, really. All those brothers, shoulder to shoulder on the Mall, and you can imagine how much funk can stew in a day. But a soft wind started everyone on their way back from where they began […]

by Donnie Moreland “Art museums are nothing more than haunted houses.” In Demetrius’s head, the words spun like a tired wheel, as he walked the corners of the room. Like a drum, Marcus’s voice bounced as though he were still alive. “Art museums are nothing more than haunted houses. All museums are, really. But there […]