A man got sentenced to 100 years in prison this week. Seven other people got 30, 50, and 70 years apiece. Their crime, in the government’s own words, was being “antifa”—a word that has no legal definition, no membership roster, no headquarters, and no leadership, because it isn’t an organization. It’s a stance rooted in antifascism. And the government just proved you can sentence people to a century in a federal prison for holding one.
Read MoreAt the very heart of the struggle for civil rights in the United States stands a Black transgender drag queen and self-identified transvestite. Marsha spent her life battling deep poverty and mental illness, ultimately living out her final years with HIV. Yet, she was a fierce political force. Alongside Sylvia Rivera, a key figure on her own right, she co-founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a groundbreaking organization that provided food, clothing, and shelter to homeless queer youth and drag queens.
Read MoreIn 2016, I entered my doctoral program at Fordham and decided to intentionally intersect my times as a tourist to connect with Eastern Cuba. Habaneros informed me that the East was the Blackest and most Caribbean part of the island. My interaction with Rastafarian community members in Havana, Cuba, also deepened my interest in the East. Additionally, my family and friends have fluid cross-cultural upbringings as Cubans of Jamaican descent and Jamaicans of Cuban descent in the United States.
I took a 16-hour bus ride across the island to Santiago de Cuba and then two motorcycles, a local bus, and a “dollar-van” Ford military-style truck to Guantánamo City. This was my first visit to the British West Indian Welfare Centre. It was 2017.
Read MorePublic outrage over celebrity silence often reveals something deeper than disappointment. It reveals a collective desire for moral clarity in a culture built to avoid it.
Recent tensions involving Drake’s criticism of DJ Khaled’s silence on Palestine sparked predictable accusations of hypocrisy. Critics questioned how Drake—a Jewish Black artist who has also avoided sustained public condemnation of Zionism or explicit advocacy for Palestinian liberation—could publicly challenge another artist’s silence while remaining politically ambiguous himself.
Read Morehe press badge sat on my desk for weeks until the ink started fading from the laminate. It was never used for Rosalía’s closed door show at Lisbon’s Primavera Sound festival, a performance staged for ten thousand people but closed to independent eyes. The images that reached the public came pre-approved, pre-lit, and pre-curated.
By midafternoon steel barricades circled the venue like polite cattle fencing, security checked credentials at every entrance, and names like mine were not on the list. Inside, the stage stayed dark while no photojournalists fidgeted with lenses and no critics scribbled notes. Nothing was left to chance as reality was scripted before it even happened. Only hired shooters waited for the director’s cue, moving with the easy confidence of people who know exactly what story they are paid to tell, and the only voices covering the night belonged to those who had paid for the stage. The rest of us were fed the finished product and told it was “truth.”
Read MoreIn moments of instability, political power rarely stands on its own. It reaches for something older, deeper, and harder to challenge: divine authority. When legitimacy begins to erode, governments do not simply tighten policy, but moralize it. They wrap enforcement in scripture. They frame control as righteousness.
Read MoreI’ve been walking to the same Foodtown for 16 years, but yesterday was the first time I counted: 7 blocks, 21 minutes.
The walk, as always, was punctuated with tree-lined streets, beautiful front gardens, the brownstones in Brooklyn you hope to live in one day, and restaurants of all kinds that could satisfy the pickiest of eaters. Signs pledging “Black Lives Matter,” “I Voted For Her,” and “Freeze the Rent” hung outside unconsciously expensive apartment windows. The neighborhood that had been my neighborhood made me feel more like a tourist and less like a native these days.
Read MoreThis question has been sitting in the back of the mind of every Black woman paying attention for a long time now, and in recent weeks it has gotten louder and more urgent and more impossible to ignore. Why do men hate women so much—and why, in 2026, are they still killing us for it?
Last Sunday, Shamar Elkins shot his wife Shaneiqua Pugh in Shreveport, Louisiana, and then turned the gun on seven of his own children—ages three to eleven—and another child in the home, leaving eight children dead and two women wounded. Days before that, former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot his estranged wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in their home and then turned the gun on himself, leaving their two children to find them. And somewhere between those two tragedies, influencer Ashlee Jenae was found dead in a hotel room in Zanzibar—her birthday trip with her partner ending not in a proposal but in her death, her family notified not by him but by the hotel. Four months into 2026, story after story after story: Black women killed by husbands, partners, the fathers of their children—acts of violence so senseless they begin to blur together, and yet each one is devastatingly, irreversibly distinct.
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