Black Women Demand Reparations & the Right to Live Free BIPOC women leaders have for centuries been stitching our community stories into the US tapestry to correct the white-washed narrative and reveal this nation’s bloody history. Black women have labored to produce and reproduce generations of possibility and freedom dreams, while countering the nonsensical myth-making […]
Category: Violence
Intersections of Justice in the Time of Corona Virus
By Cara Page and Eesha Pandit Opportunity for A New Frame This moment asks us to consider how we might pivot and adapt in a way that centers collective care, safety, and protection for each other. This is a good time to re-examine our relationship with vulnerability. Many of us are feeling vulnerable ourselves, while […]
Biological Clocks and Balldrops: A New Year’s Reflection on Black Women’s Time
I spent New Year’s Day re-reading A Wrinkle A Time, a book I first encountered in middle school. I have been invested in re-reading the book both because I’m eagerly anticipating Ava DuVernay’s forthcoming rendition of the movie, with a mixed Black girl as protagonist. But I also wanted to read it because I have […]
How to Survive the Next Four Years
Crunkista’s working survival guide…for the next four years I have never prayed so much in my life. After the election results came in, I walked around in black disbelief. I mean that literally, I now wear black anytime I am outside the house. At first it was because I was mourning the loss of a […]
Connect The Dots: For Korryn Gaines, Skye Mockabee and Joyce Quaweay
Since Friday, there have been stories of three Black women killed by acts of state-sanctioned and intimate partner violence. Those are just the three we lost this weekend, that we know about, but I’m sure there are others. On Friday in Philadelphia, Joyce Quaweay’s partner stripped her, handcuffed her, and beat her to death while […]
The Forgotten Ones (For Those Who Survive Black Death)
The past three days have felt like the end times. The sting and stench of death hanging heavily in the humidity of the third summer in a row that will be remembered for murder. Like others, I have been restless, sleepless, and hopeless—speechless. First, because of the unnecessary death of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge […]
Are You Family?
I don’t write much. In fact, I only write when I feel things deeply. These past two days, I have been in my feelings. The pain cuts so deep that I think my tears are now crying. I cried in shock when I saw the news about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I sat […]
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
“What do you think I want, respect or compliance?” This was the question I posed my class this week, after I asked them to define the terms. For compliance they yelled out things like “following orders” and “obedience.” They defined “respect” as “valuing the thoughts of others” “being loyal,” and so on. I asked […]
Serial and the Power of Storytelling
Like so many others, I spent the last few months of 2014 listening – first avidly, then with trepidation and ultimately with disdain – to the hit podcast Serial. The podcast follows a single story, week by week. The story centers on Adnan Syed, a Pakistani American high school student who was accused and convicted […]
Waiting to Exhale
(For Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and numerous others) Wait. Over the past few days, weeks, and months there have been eloquent words spoken, passionate poems and prose written, and thoughtful commentaries and reflections offered about the righteous rage, indignant indifference, fear, sadness and ambivalence that black folk and allies have felt as […]