The Black Youth Project

By: Jari Bradley Legend has it that, as a child, I hated dresses. I was just entering kindergarten and someone thought it would be fitting to adorn me in red ruffles for the first day of school. On my way past the stairs to my kindergarten classroom, a middle-aged Latina woman with curly black hair who taught fifth grade looked at me and made mention of how cute I looked. I was told that I looked…

by: Amari Murray The first time I noticed the change, it was in the mirror. Not my reflection – hers. We were getting ready to go out, Beyonce’s “Diva” spilling from a speaker on the dresser while the bass vibrated softly through the bedroom walls. Clothes covered nearly every inch of the bed: a black mesh top she already rejected, two pairs of jeans, one gold heel hiding beneath a denim jacket,…

The message came in the middle of something ordinary. A notification. A man I had never met, a name I did not recognize, but a kind of voice I had learned to brace for. You know this ritual if you have lived it: the small risk of opening a message from a stranger who has reduced you to your status before he has said a single word to you as a person. This one was not about curiosity. It was a…

By: Amber Butts For many Black disabled and chronically ill people, the doctor’s appointment is only the most visible part of their experience. Before that comes the tracking, the notes, the second-guessing, the effort to describe what is happening in a way that will be taken seriously. By the time we get in the hospital room or clinic, we are expected to be concise, calm, and believable in a…

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 a lack of comfort and a lack of safety. In those moments, I…

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 venom as the “F-word” in many Western contexts. The older generations preferred…

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 the daily priority. For others, it meant growing up solidly middle-class,…

By: Alana Brown-Davis I’ve been a daughter of the South all of my life. I was born in Alabama and raised in southwest Mississippi. Being Black and Southern meant that I grew up as Christian. Our family typically attended Methodist gatherings but in an effort to get into heaven, we went wherever. The COGIC church down the road welcomed us with open arms, as did the Baptist one in town. All of them…

By Ugonna-Ora Owoh When Leo, a 28-year-old bisexual man living in Lagos, Nigeria attended a rave for the first time in October 2022, he was in disbelief. “It was my first time seeing so many queer persons in one place,” he explains. “They felt free, nobody was worried about who was watching them or attacking them, they were just dancing with their partners.” He has since become one of the active…

By Prosper Dave Ogechukwu   The first time I heard of Pride Month was from a friend who had relocated to the UK in 2019.  He’d sent me a series of photographs of himself dressed in different outfits and asked which one I preferred.  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.   “It’s Pride Month, baybee,” he replied.  He explained that it was a month dedicated to celebrating LGBTQ+ identity and community,…

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 something imposed on me. It functioned as an inheritance, a set of obligations passed to me that dictated what boyhood would be.…

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 a hookup in that moment. Maybe you’ve heard the mantra “No means no.” Maybe you…

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 and me as the innocent victim. But abolition has taught me that easy stories are built on hierarchies…

by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield I am not sure when we began to construct “the artist” and “the critic” as two distinct entities, but I am concerned about who gets pushed out of being seen as a credible critic when the two are separated.  In her lecture “The Individual Artist,” collected in The Source of Self-Regard (2019), Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison makes note of the phenomenon…

by Daniel Johnson Thurgood Marshall is arguably the most important figure in modern judicial and legal history. Founder of the Legal Defense Fund as well as its first president and Director-Counsel, the first Black judge to sit on the Second Circuit of Appeals, the first Black Solicitor General, and finally, the first Black Supreme Court Justice, his shadow looms large over not just the Supreme…

By Taylor Allyn On the apps, it is always the same choreography. I open the grid and feel my body enter a market, lit by the cold light of my phone. Faces slide past: white, light, maybe one or two Black men scattered like decoration across a page that was never designed for us. The messages I get live at the extremes, either hyper-visibility or silence, either a category someone waited to check…

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 long enough to feel my weight land fully. Closer to the ground the air changes—wet wood, earth opened up,…