Race

Critic Myriam Gurba reflects on the passing of Sacheen Littlefeather and her attempted takedown by a notorious “pretendian” researcher.

A battered woman makes a crucial deal with Dominican Jesus: if she could escape her abuser in order to spend time with her dying mother, she would learn to make flan.

With wit, and a dash of horror, a Black caregiver in the Bay Area suburbs reflects on the surreality of elder care during a pandemic.

I’m getting ready for the function at the junction And baby you’d better come on right now Because everybody’s gonna be there We got people comin’ from everywhere – “Function At The Junction,” Shorty Long, 1966 There’s a long, long legacy of Black folks gathering around food and funk, bbq sauce and song. Before we […]

Executive Order challenges viewers to re-think the post-apocalyptic format and hero-making narratives, flipping the script on a genre that has long reinforced racism, centering Black humanity as a racist government lead by an evil Karen tries to force all Black people to repatriate to Africa as a form of reparations.

After a gang unit stopped my 14 year old cousin for driving in a stolen hoopty, they took her to Eastlake Juvenile Hall and handed her over to a new abuser: a cop.

An older homegirl, a hood mom whom Desiree considered her mentor, announced, "I'm jumping you in."

As I settle into my pregnancy, I fantasize about the human I’m going to bring into the world. I picture a girl. Beautiful. Black. Freckled like her father. Myopic like me. When she is thirteen we will sit down and have the talk. Not about periods. Or boys. Or girls. Or bodies. Or pets. Or HBCUs. Or sex. But about getting a perm.

Myriam Gurba writes about her cousin Desiree, female gangsters, cholas, Mexican bad asses with big hair, and the criminalization of survivors.

Who deserves to feel the pain of anti-Asian violence? Who deserves to take up space with their rage? As a mixed-race person, am I allowed to be here? Do I belong?

If we stop to examine our family tree, it becomes obvious that Lil Nas X is the fulfillment of Little Richard’s dreams. In a world where neoliberal gayness has taught us that the best we can hope for is Lady Gaga belting out the national anthem while deportations mount, Lil Nas X charitably tossed us a Zyrtec.

When Black Lives Matter was formed I imagine they weren't thinking about their hashtag becoming a marketing ploy, Unfortunately the hashtag has become synonymous with feel-good #woke consumerism and brand building on the backs of public lynchings of Black people by our police state. It has launched the sales of enamel pins, baseball hats, (unironically) hoodies, and now, food. Their tenacious appeal to celebrity-driven U.S. capitalism is truly impressive. As long as our grief is a product to sell to the bourgeois, who are we to disagree?

I’ve only been out of work for 11 days at this point. Yet I awake each morning to an attached PDF, an embedded link, or a “heads up” on some new job. Through the morning haze, it’s typically the first alert I see on my phone. For some asinine reason, everyone finds grounding in their […]

"A queer Black future is a future that allows me to envision a better reality for Black people everywhere…it is also a future that reckons with all the violence and retaliation that we will experience to get to that future. I also think that the future is now"

A complex and nuanced story of mother-daughter relationships developed across five generations. But while Garcia attempts to contribute to the larger conversation of race and ethnicity in Cuba, but the depictions of Black Cuban characters lean heavily on age-old stereotypes defined by theft and criminality.