I stood in the grass under the shadow of the gangling stone gray tower. The sun blinded my eyes as I stared up to the sky, waiting for the thick rope of kinky hair to unravel and thump against the side of the tower, my ladder.
“Ranaé,” I called, my…
Recently, I visited my cousin Jimmy in Atlanta, and within my first day out at a local shopping center, I became quickly aware of the curvy shape of many of Atlanta’s women. Every so often, I would walk past a woman with a perfect, Coke-shaped body, complete with thick thighs…
Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Nicolaus Copernicus. Four very different men, with one thing in common. They were contrarians.
Contrarians are known for going against the grain. They are society’s forces of change, constantly challenging tradition for unconventional thinking. They are admired for swimming against the current, for…
Why Barack Obama was the Worst Thing to Happen to Black Radicalism, and the Increasing Dangers of Black Neoliberalism
For as long as I can remember, Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House has been described as revolutionary. The day of the inauguration, Black people all over America cried, laughed…
I was born in 1998, right on the cusp of Gen Z. I’m old enough to remember the exciting scramble of dial up, or the deep tenor of the “You’ve got mail!” AOL notification. Things like Motorola Razrs and Tamagotchis and MP3 players, or when the Nintendo Wii came out…
Anti-Blackness and racism are not the same
In ninth grade, my best friend at my primarily White, all-girls Catholic high school was a bubbly Latina with an unmatched, sarcastic tit-for-tat, a raucous laugh, and a flexible tongue that switched from her recognizable New York lilt into Spanish at will. In my 14-year-old Afro-Guyanese eyes, we were very…
