by Ah-Keisha McCants

I sat in my idling car at a rest stop. It was around 11:40pm. My husband, four kids and I had just had a day to remember celebrating the unveiling of a friend’s new artwork at MoMA PS1. Laughing in the streets of Brooklyn with my children’s god mommies, our fearless blackness blanketed an ever-changing backdrop. Gentrifiers’ stares be damned, we re-branded the streets that night with off-key renditions of r&b/hip hop oldies, and original satirical folk songs. We captured that moment (our children sang along, and somehow we were bigger kids than them), and shared it on Facebook. We were happy, proud, well-fed, well-cultured, silly, black and carefree.

by Michelle Charles, MSW

All too often, when we discuss in the motives of white male mass murderers in the media, we become fixated with the status of their mental health and whether or not mental illness may have played a role in their actions. In the case of atrocious shooting in Charleston, South Carolina at the historic flagship Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, we have somehow managed to fall victim to this useless conjecturing again, despite the Pro-Apartheid and neo-colonial signifying patches with which the shooter adorned his jacket. As this familiar hemming and hawing becomes United States narrative, I have become fiercely disinterested in the discussions about the mental health of the perpetrator in the context of these shootings, as they serve myriad destructive purposes. It privileges the perpetrators with the luxury of our understanding; it inaccurately paints mental illness as a precursor to destructive acts; and it neglects the mental health needs of those who were victimized or directly affected by the event.

by Carmen Jones

by Leah C.K. Lewis

The domestic terrorism unleashed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) last night in Charleston, South Carolina, “the Holy City,” starkly displays the hypocrisy of U.S. Christianity. According to the Pew Research Center, 70.6% of U.S. citizens identify as Christian. If in fact, nearly two-thirds of the people of this country who purport to be disciples of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, stood for LOVE there is no way in hell that the murder and oppression of African Americans would be anywhere near acceptable and well-tolerated.

by Dee Rene


In 2005, I was a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill when a student named Jillian Bandes wrote the following sentence in a column of the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel: “All Arabs should be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport…” (Bandes would later be fired from the newspaper for her sentiments.)