7 Search results for "headwrap"

How I use ancestor veneration to navigate my Mother’s Death
by Hess Love Sometimes I feel like a motherless child… a long way from home- Negro Spiritual Sunday is Mother’s Day. And the grief of losing my mother regularly brings me to my knees. I don’t imagine this day being any different. Sometimes my grief is a distant shore, sometimes the water of it wades […]
Finding refuge from white supremacy in our Indigenous cultures
by Djanaïna François Someone said to me once: “God created wolf first, then us, then white people—he warned that misunderstanding others is their default, from a cultural standpoint to an existential one, as they will continuously see the world through a lense of authority.” An autumnal evening sky hovered above us and I held a […]
Like my native tongue, Wakanda bridges the cultural gap between my African ancestry and Black American life
by Antoinette Gregg Until I moved to New York City for graduate school, I had never been asked the question, “What kind of Black are you?” Growing up, there was only one kind of Black that I knew of: Geechee. A hodgepodge of Caribbean, African, and European ways of life, Geechee/Gullah is the culture, language, […]
What our fixation on Michelle Obama’s hair says about the space we give Black women to breathe
I can probably count on my two hands how many times I’ve seen my mother’s hair outside of its headwrap. For modesty’s sake, she has religiously worn the garment almost every day for as long as I have been alive. To my mother, hair is an intimate experience, to be let down only in intimately […]
It’s More Than A Head Wrap For US
At the beginning of Black History Month, a group of Black girls at the School for Creative Studies in Durham, North Carolina wanted to wear “geles”, also known as head wraps, in order to celebrate their African heritage. How did the school administration respond to this celebration of Black culture? Negatively and without any consideration […]
A Southern Gul, Southern Genius Feeding Her Own Meter
Though I am ostensibly a U.S. Citizen (some days it feels tenuous as hell), I also have a Crunchy Nation green card, which means my Twitter feed was full of earth mother goddesses, headwraps, and the like drooling over Erykah Badu’s new video for “Window Seat,” the lead single from her album, New Amerykah Part […]
Roy G. Whiz
Uh oh. It’s a code red (black and green). The bat signal is out. bell hooks has started spelling her name in all CAPS. Call up your elders, pray to your ancestors; conjure up your inner fairies, spirits, and goddesses. Tyler Perry is turning your favorite play, excuse me, choreopoem into a movie.