Category: Race & BlacknessAllRace & BlacknessBlackness & Anti-BlacknessNon-Black POC123Our elders are more than the utility they provideApril 22, 2021The problem of visibility at the intersection of aging, poverty and Blackness predates me, finding its genesis on the plantation grounds.Anti-Blackness and the Fetishization of VisibilityMarch 3, 2021Anti-blackness, predictably, got in the way of something that had the potential to be a commentary on the politics of visibility under racial capitalism.Self healing was the key to pursuing ministry in my senior yearsFebruary 18, 2021The call to ministry became clearer when some friends and I started opening our homes to people who had no place to live; people who had fallen through the cracks of the social "safety" net.Running as an act of ResistanceNovember 6, 2020I could have chosen to run east, away from the scene. Instead, I headed west, daring to face the waiting hate.We don’t need advisory committees to take the first steps toward healing from white supremacyOctober 27, 2020After temporarily removing Christopher Columbus statues from Chicago Parks, on August 12th, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the “Project to Assess Memorials and Monuments in the City’s Public Art Collection.” Members of this project will form an advisory committee with local artists, academics and public officials to promote “racial healing and historical reckoning” for the Chicago…Non-Black Muslims will never find justice without ensuring Black Lives MatterOctober 14, 2020On Saturday, June 20th, 62-year-old Ejaz Choudry, a Pakistani man living with schizophrenia, was tragically and violently killed by Peel Region Police in Mississauga, Ontario. Choudry’s family called the non-emergency police line to help the man as he suffered through a state of distress, only for him to be shot to death. Many South Asians,…Black women’s impossible dilemma: How this world ties our “safety” to the protection of our abusersOctober 7, 2020The world has an appetite for our pain, and this is what I refuse. This is why I will never again decide to protect someone who harms me.Interview with Jody Armour on Nigga TheorySeptember 3, 2020I take issue with any and all efforts to distinguish between the worthy and the wicked on the basis of conventional moral judgments.Police can’t save children from sexual abuse, but we mustAugust 26, 2020With inadequate responses to CSA and little trust in police among people of color, relying on cops to address an issue like CSA is questionable, at best.The problem with using proximity & poverty to dismiss the fallacies of “Black-on-Black crime”August 5, 2020Black men’s “senseless” acts of violence are much more sophisticated in nature than both the liberal and conservative anti-abolition culture of poverty argument would have one believe.Protecting inanimate objects and “values” over Black lives has always been essential to AmericaJuly 22, 2020None of this is new, and when we remember this we get stronger in our strategies of dismantling the systems that produce this violence.Dear Ancestors: How connecting with our dead teaches Black people how to liveJuly 10, 2020I once told a therapist, “The only reason I haven’t killed myself is because I’d anger and hurt so many people who love me.” I suspect I was mostly complaining because love was hacking away at my American sense of individualism.This #BlackMansChallenge is to extend my advocacy beyond validating the struggles of Black menJune 16, 2020For me, our revolution requires a clear, concentrated, and committed love and support for Black women, Black Trans* folks, Black gender non-conforming folks, Black queer folks, and yes, Black men.No bad apples: Actors in anti-Black systems have created too much collective harm to be judged individuallyJune 10, 2020It feels too enormous a task to mourn so many at once.Let our dead bury their murderers: Police & protests aren’t our only optionsMay 12, 2020When do we hold the State’s feet to the fire? When do we experience righteous justice?Nothing is clean enough for a pandemic when your blood is dirtyMay 6, 2020The funny thing about the order to stay “six feet” apart from one another is that folks like me can’t be too sure if the orderer is suggesting the distance we should be standing, or the distance we should be buried.There is a COVID-19 conspiracy. Scaring Black people away from healthcare & vaccination is part of itApril 17, 2020While Black people are vulnerable to targeting when medical treatments are being developed, we are also among the last to benefit. That is the conspiracy.Social distancing is just part of the problem if we don’t account for anti-BlacknessApril 8, 2020Social distancing is a privilege that the well-to-do have already been practicing for centuries to keep their resources away from marginalized people.It’s not Black people’s responsibility to end anti-Asian racismMarch 20, 2020Where was all this concern about not referencing a group of people or a place when talking about a disease, when Ebola was named after a river in the Congo?How we are conditioned not to account for the mental health needs of Black people who commit violenceMarch 11, 2020A cop with biases is dangerous to the community. If you are more passionate for them than for us all, mind your tongue.Yes, I was suicidal. But living for other people is what almost killed meFebruary 27, 2020Like most Black folks, the intentional and subliminal external messaging I received growing up were variations of me being unlovable, inadequate, and too much.Is that building racist or is it just me?: The anti-Black history of urban planningFebruary 4, 2020There are other “less” insidious markers of environmental racism that doesn’t specifically place gentrification at the center. I’ve been horrified and fascinated to track the trends of changes in communities urban development structures that impact our daily lives and our memorieCoded or not, it’s still racismJanuary 23, 2020While Black folks decipher this lexicon for our own survival, white folks either remain oblivious to the whole exchange or worse, actively deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to preserve a perception of neutrality. How “Black people are not a monolith” is used to promote respectability politicsJanuary 10, 2020I am in no way saying that Black people are a monolith. We have varying cultures, ideas, beliefs, etc. What I am saying is that we should be careful about when we feel the need to claim that and why.We protect us: Why the state will never solve the epidemic of missing and trafficked Black women & girlsJanuary 2, 2020State institutions such as the police, and child welfare services are often complicit in sexual violence enacted upon Black women and girls. What exactly is “micro” about microaggressions?December 26, 2019Between macro and micro, I would choose neither. I haven’t been able to make the microaggressions feel any less aggressive than a full slap to the face. For me, the macro only provides substance to the micro.Harvard denying Prof. García-Peña tenure reminds us elite schools are only here to exploit Black & Indigenous peopleDecember 19, 2019García-Peña’s ordeal is a necessary reminder to non-white scholars everywhere that intellectual genocide is alive and kicking.Black people are dreaming to get free- LiterallyDecember 17, 2019The complex and intricate relationship between notions of disability and indigenous concepts of spiritual marking are alive in Harriet’s story.We can’t allow Black liberation to be limited by borders designed by settlersDecember 10, 2019To me, Black liberation is synonymous with demilitarizing the murderous police state, abolishing the inhumane prison system and freeing folx from the constraints of our exploitative economic system.Using the plight of Black people to combat the oppression of non-Black POC always perpetuates anti-BlacknessNovember 21, 2019The model minority myth is then a tool of anti-Black subordination as it has been historically used to justify the plight of Black folks and pit Asian Americans and Black people against each other due to Asian Americans racial positioning.Dead Black Boy Magic: How mental health stigmas compound with anti-queerness to kill our childrenNovember 12, 2019I carry a combination of marginal identities that hold an enduring need for self-sufficiency and suffering.Embracing ugly in a world that’s tried to weaponize it against meOctober 24, 2019The impact of being uglified has real, painful, and pervasive consequences.It’s hard to celebrate how Black women always have each other’s backs when we shouldn’t be the only ones who doOctober 17, 2019There are folks in close proximity to us that will never know how and why we despair because they haven’t made space for us to be anything but strong. And it is killing us.I thought Crohn’s was why I hated my body. Instead, it showed me how liberating loving Black bodies can beOctober 9, 2019Escape is little more than retreat, but Liberation is the creation of something you don’t need to escape from.“Slave films” are how some of us defend our dead, whether you’re tired of them or notSeptember 26, 2019Suffering, or the evidence of, is something the children of Slavery cannot disengage. We must face it. We must properly defend our dead.Any conversation about disability justice must wrestle with Black traumaSeptember 12, 2019Without intending to, I subconsciously isolated Blackness from disability as if our history and our present doesn’t reflect that—as if the term “disabled†is not perpetually expanding and contracting to accommodate a plethora of other experiences. It’s not “complicated”: Black children deserve space to question, challenge & reject the world around themAugust 29, 2019When we collapse children’s autonomy in both fictive and lived realities, we undermine their ability to contemplate nuance.The motherland isn’t a correctional facility: How turning home into a place to “fix” Black children leads to disconnection from our rootsAugust 22, 2019These threats came with an inadvertent price - a polluted perception towards my own mother-country.How slavery taught me to be hyper-vigilant in a never ending chase after safetyAugust 14, 2019It is exhausting to always be this vigilant, and all too often it is still not enough.Contrasting the historic Emmy noms of “When They See Us” with the decision not to charge Eric Garner’s murdererJuly 23, 2019These two moments are linked not only by the NYPD’s long standing racism and inadequacy, but they’re also linked through their re-traumatization of our community. These two moments demonstrate that Black pain only gets widespread acknowledgement when it’s distant enough from outsiders’ daily lives to consume.Decriminalizing Black theft, and the right to steal in an anti-Black capitalist societyJuly 3, 2019“We’ve always been at the center of the theft.” – Andrew Salkey Six months into the catastrophe of my grandmother’s death, her car was broken into three times. The last time they took her notebooks and my favorite shoes. Before that, they hadn’t taken anything and I was left to figure out what to do…7 ways to reject your light-skin privilegeJune 27, 2019Educating people on their racial prejudice should not be the responsibility of an oppressed people though it generally is.Passing the torch to Black heroes in comics is part of the white supremacist lineage of reconciling servitudeMay 31, 2019I'm distasteful of the comic trope of for succeeding white men because I believe this is one of many strategies white people have adopted to cope with their mortality, and keeping us bound to them in servitudeCaster Semenya and how the biomedical industry is designed to kill Black peopleMay 16, 2019The idea that there are only two genders is an intentional capitalist and colonial project used to strengthen the political economies of hegemony and anti-Blackness.Taylor Swift isn’t copying Beyoncé. She’s mocking her.May 8, 2019Taylor Swift is not copying Beyoncé. She’s mocking Beyoncé. This difference assumes a level of intent that brings forth deliberate malice and cultural disruption.How Afro-futurism helped me reclaim the narrative around Blackness in a hopeless worldMay 2, 2019As social media made me more cognizant of the atrocities of state-sanctioned violence, my thoughts began to grow darker. My soft optimist soon crystallized into a hardened soul.It’s time to abolish elite universitiesApril 23, 2019Harvard, Princeton & Yale have all perpetuated and continue to benefit from chattel slavery. This ideology affected state and public policy in insidious ways that have carried over to the presentIf “interracial dating” isn’t influenced by white supremacy, why does it imply a white partner?April 17, 2019For many POC, “interracial” dating is more often than not about scoring a white partner, in an attempt to liken oneself toward a more legible humanityHow the fixation on “Black excellence” hinders the Black freedom movementApril 11, 2019Moreover, humans are wired for stories about individuals, not vast impersonal statistics. Consequently, the stories we see will always frame our reality more than impersonal statistics, even when we believe the truth statistics reveal.Blackness doesn’t need whiteness to exist because whiteness didn’t create it. We didApril 2, 2019We are agents and shapers of history, culture and discourse, not mere passive, thoughtless victims. We were sizing them up the same time they were sizing us up.“He didn’t have to hit her tho”: The ‘Beale Street’ slap scene & loving Black women who hurt usMarch 19, 2019How do so many Black women love violent Black men without reciprocating violence themselves, but can't get that love in return? How do we normalize care strategies for Black women who hurt us?The other side of Seasonal Affective Disorder: For the people whose social anxiety spikes when everyone’s back outsideMarch 14, 2019No matter how much therapy, I am never really ready for what the sun demands this time of year. The brunches, the day parties, the summer park nights fueled on laughter and liquor. Like this:Like Loading...
Our elders are more than the utility they provideApril 22, 2021The problem of visibility at the intersection of aging, poverty and Blackness predates me, finding its genesis on the plantation grounds.
Anti-Blackness and the Fetishization of VisibilityMarch 3, 2021Anti-blackness, predictably, got in the way of something that had the potential to be a commentary on the politics of visibility under racial capitalism.
Self healing was the key to pursuing ministry in my senior yearsFebruary 18, 2021The call to ministry became clearer when some friends and I started opening our homes to people who had no place to live; people who had fallen through the cracks of the social "safety" net.
Running as an act of ResistanceNovember 6, 2020I could have chosen to run east, away from the scene. Instead, I headed west, daring to face the waiting hate.
We don’t need advisory committees to take the first steps toward healing from white supremacyOctober 27, 2020After temporarily removing Christopher Columbus statues from Chicago Parks, on August 12th, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the “Project to Assess Memorials and Monuments in the City’s Public Art Collection.” Members of this project will form an advisory committee with local artists, academics and public officials to promote “racial healing and historical reckoning” for the Chicago…
Non-Black Muslims will never find justice without ensuring Black Lives MatterOctober 14, 2020On Saturday, June 20th, 62-year-old Ejaz Choudry, a Pakistani man living with schizophrenia, was tragically and violently killed by Peel Region Police in Mississauga, Ontario. Choudry’s family called the non-emergency police line to help the man as he suffered through a state of distress, only for him to be shot to death. Many South Asians,…
Black women’s impossible dilemma: How this world ties our “safety” to the protection of our abusersOctober 7, 2020The world has an appetite for our pain, and this is what I refuse. This is why I will never again decide to protect someone who harms me.
Interview with Jody Armour on Nigga TheorySeptember 3, 2020I take issue with any and all efforts to distinguish between the worthy and the wicked on the basis of conventional moral judgments.
Police can’t save children from sexual abuse, but we mustAugust 26, 2020With inadequate responses to CSA and little trust in police among people of color, relying on cops to address an issue like CSA is questionable, at best.
The problem with using proximity & poverty to dismiss the fallacies of “Black-on-Black crime”August 5, 2020Black men’s “senseless” acts of violence are much more sophisticated in nature than both the liberal and conservative anti-abolition culture of poverty argument would have one believe.
Protecting inanimate objects and “values” over Black lives has always been essential to AmericaJuly 22, 2020None of this is new, and when we remember this we get stronger in our strategies of dismantling the systems that produce this violence.
Dear Ancestors: How connecting with our dead teaches Black people how to liveJuly 10, 2020I once told a therapist, “The only reason I haven’t killed myself is because I’d anger and hurt so many people who love me.” I suspect I was mostly complaining because love was hacking away at my American sense of individualism.
This #BlackMansChallenge is to extend my advocacy beyond validating the struggles of Black menJune 16, 2020For me, our revolution requires a clear, concentrated, and committed love and support for Black women, Black Trans* folks, Black gender non-conforming folks, Black queer folks, and yes, Black men.
No bad apples: Actors in anti-Black systems have created too much collective harm to be judged individuallyJune 10, 2020It feels too enormous a task to mourn so many at once.
Let our dead bury their murderers: Police & protests aren’t our only optionsMay 12, 2020When do we hold the State’s feet to the fire? When do we experience righteous justice?
Nothing is clean enough for a pandemic when your blood is dirtyMay 6, 2020The funny thing about the order to stay “six feet” apart from one another is that folks like me can’t be too sure if the orderer is suggesting the distance we should be standing, or the distance we should be buried.
There is a COVID-19 conspiracy. Scaring Black people away from healthcare & vaccination is part of itApril 17, 2020While Black people are vulnerable to targeting when medical treatments are being developed, we are also among the last to benefit. That is the conspiracy.
Social distancing is just part of the problem if we don’t account for anti-BlacknessApril 8, 2020Social distancing is a privilege that the well-to-do have already been practicing for centuries to keep their resources away from marginalized people.
It’s not Black people’s responsibility to end anti-Asian racismMarch 20, 2020Where was all this concern about not referencing a group of people or a place when talking about a disease, when Ebola was named after a river in the Congo?
How we are conditioned not to account for the mental health needs of Black people who commit violenceMarch 11, 2020A cop with biases is dangerous to the community. If you are more passionate for them than for us all, mind your tongue.
Yes, I was suicidal. But living for other people is what almost killed meFebruary 27, 2020Like most Black folks, the intentional and subliminal external messaging I received growing up were variations of me being unlovable, inadequate, and too much.
Is that building racist or is it just me?: The anti-Black history of urban planningFebruary 4, 2020There are other “less” insidious markers of environmental racism that doesn’t specifically place gentrification at the center. I’ve been horrified and fascinated to track the trends of changes in communities urban development structures that impact our daily lives and our memorie
Coded or not, it’s still racismJanuary 23, 2020While Black folks decipher this lexicon for our own survival, white folks either remain oblivious to the whole exchange or worse, actively deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to preserve a perception of neutrality.
How “Black people are not a monolith” is used to promote respectability politicsJanuary 10, 2020I am in no way saying that Black people are a monolith. We have varying cultures, ideas, beliefs, etc. What I am saying is that we should be careful about when we feel the need to claim that and why.
We protect us: Why the state will never solve the epidemic of missing and trafficked Black women & girlsJanuary 2, 2020State institutions such as the police, and child welfare services are often complicit in sexual violence enacted upon Black women and girls.
What exactly is “micro” about microaggressions?December 26, 2019Between macro and micro, I would choose neither. I haven’t been able to make the microaggressions feel any less aggressive than a full slap to the face. For me, the macro only provides substance to the micro.
Harvard denying Prof. García-Peña tenure reminds us elite schools are only here to exploit Black & Indigenous peopleDecember 19, 2019García-Peña’s ordeal is a necessary reminder to non-white scholars everywhere that intellectual genocide is alive and kicking.
Black people are dreaming to get free- LiterallyDecember 17, 2019The complex and intricate relationship between notions of disability and indigenous concepts of spiritual marking are alive in Harriet’s story.
We can’t allow Black liberation to be limited by borders designed by settlersDecember 10, 2019To me, Black liberation is synonymous with demilitarizing the murderous police state, abolishing the inhumane prison system and freeing folx from the constraints of our exploitative economic system.
Using the plight of Black people to combat the oppression of non-Black POC always perpetuates anti-BlacknessNovember 21, 2019The model minority myth is then a tool of anti-Black subordination as it has been historically used to justify the plight of Black folks and pit Asian Americans and Black people against each other due to Asian Americans racial positioning.
Dead Black Boy Magic: How mental health stigmas compound with anti-queerness to kill our childrenNovember 12, 2019I carry a combination of marginal identities that hold an enduring need for self-sufficiency and suffering.
Embracing ugly in a world that’s tried to weaponize it against meOctober 24, 2019The impact of being uglified has real, painful, and pervasive consequences.
It’s hard to celebrate how Black women always have each other’s backs when we shouldn’t be the only ones who doOctober 17, 2019There are folks in close proximity to us that will never know how and why we despair because they haven’t made space for us to be anything but strong. And it is killing us.
I thought Crohn’s was why I hated my body. Instead, it showed me how liberating loving Black bodies can beOctober 9, 2019Escape is little more than retreat, but Liberation is the creation of something you don’t need to escape from.
“Slave films” are how some of us defend our dead, whether you’re tired of them or notSeptember 26, 2019Suffering, or the evidence of, is something the children of Slavery cannot disengage. We must face it. We must properly defend our dead.
Any conversation about disability justice must wrestle with Black traumaSeptember 12, 2019Without intending to, I subconsciously isolated Blackness from disability as if our history and our present doesn’t reflect that—as if the term “disabled†is not perpetually expanding and contracting to accommodate a plethora of other experiences.
It’s not “complicated”: Black children deserve space to question, challenge & reject the world around themAugust 29, 2019When we collapse children’s autonomy in both fictive and lived realities, we undermine their ability to contemplate nuance.
The motherland isn’t a correctional facility: How turning home into a place to “fix” Black children leads to disconnection from our rootsAugust 22, 2019These threats came with an inadvertent price - a polluted perception towards my own mother-country.
How slavery taught me to be hyper-vigilant in a never ending chase after safetyAugust 14, 2019It is exhausting to always be this vigilant, and all too often it is still not enough.
Contrasting the historic Emmy noms of “When They See Us” with the decision not to charge Eric Garner’s murdererJuly 23, 2019These two moments are linked not only by the NYPD’s long standing racism and inadequacy, but they’re also linked through their re-traumatization of our community. These two moments demonstrate that Black pain only gets widespread acknowledgement when it’s distant enough from outsiders’ daily lives to consume.
Decriminalizing Black theft, and the right to steal in an anti-Black capitalist societyJuly 3, 2019“We’ve always been at the center of the theft.” – Andrew Salkey Six months into the catastrophe of my grandmother’s death, her car was broken into three times. The last time they took her notebooks and my favorite shoes. Before that, they hadn’t taken anything and I was left to figure out what to do…
7 ways to reject your light-skin privilegeJune 27, 2019Educating people on their racial prejudice should not be the responsibility of an oppressed people though it generally is.
Passing the torch to Black heroes in comics is part of the white supremacist lineage of reconciling servitudeMay 31, 2019I'm distasteful of the comic trope of for succeeding white men because I believe this is one of many strategies white people have adopted to cope with their mortality, and keeping us bound to them in servitude
Caster Semenya and how the biomedical industry is designed to kill Black peopleMay 16, 2019The idea that there are only two genders is an intentional capitalist and colonial project used to strengthen the political economies of hegemony and anti-Blackness.
Taylor Swift isn’t copying Beyoncé. She’s mocking her.May 8, 2019Taylor Swift is not copying Beyoncé. She’s mocking Beyoncé. This difference assumes a level of intent that brings forth deliberate malice and cultural disruption.
How Afro-futurism helped me reclaim the narrative around Blackness in a hopeless worldMay 2, 2019As social media made me more cognizant of the atrocities of state-sanctioned violence, my thoughts began to grow darker. My soft optimist soon crystallized into a hardened soul.
It’s time to abolish elite universitiesApril 23, 2019Harvard, Princeton & Yale have all perpetuated and continue to benefit from chattel slavery. This ideology affected state and public policy in insidious ways that have carried over to the present
If “interracial dating” isn’t influenced by white supremacy, why does it imply a white partner?April 17, 2019For many POC, “interracial” dating is more often than not about scoring a white partner, in an attempt to liken oneself toward a more legible humanity
How the fixation on “Black excellence” hinders the Black freedom movementApril 11, 2019Moreover, humans are wired for stories about individuals, not vast impersonal statistics. Consequently, the stories we see will always frame our reality more than impersonal statistics, even when we believe the truth statistics reveal.
Blackness doesn’t need whiteness to exist because whiteness didn’t create it. We didApril 2, 2019We are agents and shapers of history, culture and discourse, not mere passive, thoughtless victims. We were sizing them up the same time they were sizing us up.
“He didn’t have to hit her tho”: The ‘Beale Street’ slap scene & loving Black women who hurt usMarch 19, 2019How do so many Black women love violent Black men without reciprocating violence themselves, but can't get that love in return? How do we normalize care strategies for Black women who hurt us?
The other side of Seasonal Affective Disorder: For the people whose social anxiety spikes when everyone’s back outsideMarch 14, 2019No matter how much therapy, I am never really ready for what the sun demands this time of year. The brunches, the day parties, the summer park nights fueled on laughter and liquor.
