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Join NOW!Early in August, unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. While protests broke out in the weeks following Brown’s death, Wilson remained free, awaiting a grand jury indictment. Grand juries decide whether or not a crime has been committed, not […]
...moreLaurie Penny, journalist and author of Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, talks to Flavorwire about feminism, Ferguson, and the harassment of female journalists online: The fact that there’s an enormous backlash against women’s liberation online doesn’t mean that the Internet is a bad place for women — quite the opposite, in fact. It’s precisely […]
...moreIn the new Penguin Book of Witches, Katherine Howe assembles documents from three centuries of witch hunts—including arrest warrants, trial transcripts, and even apologies from a judge and jury in Salem. Per Genevieve Valentine at NPR, the historical record opens up to reveal that, far from being a spooky anomaly or simple mirror of McCarthyism, […]
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…if you want more, the music can meet you where you are. It can instruct on the meaning of music itself, on its history, on its cross-cultural possibilities.
...moreJust in case the events unfolding in Ferguson aren’t enough of a reminder of the effects of overly aggressive police, The K Chronicles is compiling a series of police brutality strips.
...moreOn August 18, hip-hop and comic book nerds alike convened to celebrate the release of Volume 2 of Ed Piskor’s The Hip-Hop Family Tree, a history of the genre in graphic novel-form. In the Daily Beast, Daniel Genis explains how the competing personae and one-upsmanship among rappers translate so easily to a medium that often […]
...moreIn an interview with The New Yorker, Graywolf poet Claudia Rankine discusses Ferguson, James Baldwin, and the experience of invisibility: “[T]he sort of execution-style shooting takes [Michael Brown’s shooting] to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around.” To […]
...moreAs civil servants in heavily militarized gear keep the Ferguson community under surveillance and the rest of us glued to the Internet for increasingly shocking reports of brutality and awe, we need another good story this week. Enter the Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement Series. The series is dedicated to giving new life to […]
...moreSocial media, journalism, Ferguson, and challenging power. The Internet cannot have nice things. We’re all horses. So, where’s our Black Beauty? The nature of creativity. You guys, you guys, Buzzfeed isn’t the devil. Honestly. Is that robot a better writer than you?
...moreRembert Browne flew to Ferguson last week. Out of interest in the town’s newfound notoriety, the crowds contesting it, and the general ennui surrounding Contemporary Black Youth, the usual-sports writer compiled the meat of his thoughts in an essay for Grantland: The history of being black in America is the history of nonviolence versus “fight […]
...moreThe news of Michael Brown’s death cannot be ignored. When one of our young people dies from shots fired by a police officer, there will be sadness and confusion. There will inevitably be questions, and questions left unanswered will lead to anger. This is a week, perhaps, when we need fiction and art to help […]
...moreOn Saturday, August 9, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. The boy was on his way home from a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, where about two-thirds of the residents are black. With so few of the facts confirmed, many of the […]
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