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Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic on stage: Black women and liberation
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s “Black Music Month,” and, in a parallel Juneteenth universe, Black folks would be given reparations for the looted labor of all the Black artists whose musical innovation powered the multi-billion-dollar empires of white rock icons like Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. From blues to rock, R&B, and beyond, early 20th-century working-class southern Black musicians were the backbone of the modern American music industry, yet…
How South LA BIPOC youth are shutting down ‘Don’t Say Gay’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Nationwide, escalating homophobic and transphobic right-wing attacks are threatening the mental health and wellness of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth. This spring, Women’s Leadership Project 9th and 10th graders led presentations on LGBTQI+ school climate, identity, and allyship in South L.A. classrooms and during WLP’s annual LGBTQI+ Youth of Color Institute. Utilizing GLSEN’s (Gay and Lesbian Student Education Network) school climate survey, they focused on the power of pronouns, respecting…
Black women and abortion on demand without apology
Reading Time: 4 minutes In her 1974 essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker wrote: Did you have a genius of a great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets…or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold…
Supporting Black teachers under siege
Reading Time: 4 minutes Generations after Black secularist historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson founded what was initially dubbed “Negro History Week,” the continued struggle for Black self-determination in education is an indictment of American democracy. In his new book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Harvard professor Jarvis Givens argues that “teaching and learning themselves continue to be ‘a means of escape’…and a total critique of the current…
What’s faith got to do with it? Culturally relevant humanism and Black Gen Z
Reading Time: 4 minutes I came across the concept of agnosticism at the age of 12. The existence of the Christian God is an idea I stray farther away from, both because of the way people who identify under it constantly spread hate and lies, and because examples have been presented to me about the illegitimacy of the so called “Word of God”—13 year-old Black agnostic Big revelation—the global pandemic, a wrecking ball of…
