The Black Youth Project

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,…

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 without accountability. Though these…

By Daniel Johnson Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court and an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has been consistently and sharply breaking with the conservative Supreme Court, utilizing the power afforded through her dissents to issue missives, aiming those arguments at not only the conservative Supreme Court justices, but at the country…

by Cathy Cohen To say that the term affordability has become the buzzword of this political season would be an understatement. The growing prominence of the term “affordability” is evident in the press, among politicians, and even in the public’s Google searches. The political success of focusing on affordability became evident in recent Democratic electoral wins, first in gubernatorial races in…

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…

by Vanessa Anyanso I don’t know what it’s like to be a therapist during “normal times.” I, a Nigerian American born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, moved to Minneapolis in Fall 2019 to start my doctoral program in Counseling Psychology. The world shut down for the pandemic in March 2020. In May 2020, George Floyd was murdered just miles from where I lived and Minneapolis became the…

by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD A few weeks ago, I posted on Threads about the ways that male-identified women are harmful to building community. I said this in reference to the numbers of Black women who work tirelessly defending Black men like Chris Brown, Bill Cosby, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and so many others who commit vicious and violent acts against women. Male-identifying women often align themselves…

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 of it is handed back to the person who experienced the harm. There is always…

by Michael J. Ivory, Jr. The day I told my Pentecostal preacher parents I didn’t want to attend church with them anymore, I remember feeling a profound freedom. For once, I chose my Black queer body’s peace over witnessing my existence being raked over hellfire coals. No more shallowed breath at the altar. No more tense shoulders walking down the center aisle.   Then came a second thought – this…

by Dr. Ravynn Stringfield Social media is currently flooded with messages from people encouraging others online to “get into print media” or “go analog,” while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of politically aware print media that centered marginalized voices—RIP Bitch Media—and a dearth of media that represent our experiences. However, for Black artists, writers and activists, physical…