Essay
Climate change is rapidly transforming our world in ways both visible and invisible. Greenhouse gas pollution—invisible to the human eye—is causing climate change, with widespread impacts to which we now bear witness. Rising temperatures have caused the loss of more than 28 trillion tons of Earth’s ice between 1994 and 2017, roughly the volume of »
Photo Essay
I get a trapped sick feeling as I pass Cash’s Convenience, where grass breaks through the gas pumps and the windows are dark as the creek. Already considering my escape, I drive the two-lane road that was straightened and paved before I was born, past fields on either side—fields I’ve studied, fields I’ve hunted, fields »
Interview
Psyche Williams-Forson and Tressie McMillan Cottom sat down at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on November 9, 2022, to discuss Williams-Forson’s new book, Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for publication. Tressie McMillan Cottom: I have to tell you. My family is »
Poetry
I. Grandma Sarah holds mein a reservoir of unshed tears.bring her lips to my foreheadsuck something out.set meflowing,gasping. II. Mildred Thompson heckles my father,he finds his seat, and I leapfrom his skull, full-lotus, sucklingHigh John de conqueror root,a butterfly dancingup my spine. III. My mama leans back, legs akimbo,Paulette dances obeah, Fía peersinto the beyond,Able Mable »
Essay
“The southern Black imagination reforms, revises, and reclaims spaces where Black people are present but unwelcome, underserved, or unseen.” Rapper Pastor Troy gave me my first for-real lesson in southern Black geography back in 1999. I’d been living in Albany, Georgia, for about a year when Troy forcefully and confidently declared “ain’t no mo play in »
Essay
In October 1944, our ancestors Noah and Annie Riddick purchased roughly forty acres of land in Pantego, North Carolina. That land was both a homestead for sharecropping and, more important, a refuge for a southern Black family living at the height of Jim Crow. The land provided safety and sustenance for Noah and Annie’s eight »
Essay
In April 2018, I returned to the neighborhood in northeast Washington, DC, where, over the course of six years at that point, I had conducted ethnographic fieldwork. It was not my first time returning. Every time I went to DC after relocating, I tried to visit, at least stopping into the small grocery store where »
Essay
On a hot Sunday in August 1990, LaToya stood inside an underground baptismal pool, surrounded on three sides by a canopy of North Carolina pine trees, the wooden-floored church building, and the community of parishioners that made up the churchgoers and leadership. At the rural church located just outside the one-stoplight town of Waco, North »
Essay
“Political artwork produced by the Nation of Islam routinely invited readers to develop political and spiritual desires and expectations contingent on transformed relationships to an African homeland and life in the South versus the North.” Black people living in the Post-Reconstruction South endured some of the most concerted and refined white supremacist political violence in »
Memoir
A farm on Peak’s Knob in Appalachian Virginia has shaped for generations the descendants of my great-great-grandfather Thomas Russell. Born enslaved in 1834, he purchased fifty acres only fourteen years after freedom. Over the years, members of my family grew Russell Farm to the two hundred acres presided over by James Arthur Russell, Thomas’s grandson »
Essay
“We would play tennis even after they turned off the lights on the courts,” my father told me, as he reflected on his days in the Panama Canal Zone (PCZ). Tennis became their sport; my father, his sister, and his brother perfected their craft and became so good that they and other neighborhood youth all »
Memoir
I was a tween when I first heard Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick, Push,” a song that describes the liberatory feeling soaring on skates provides. That song introduced me to the culture of Black street skating. During the summer of 2006, I took my hand-me-down pink-and-purple Barbie rollerblades and journeyed from my backyard to the neighboring cul-de-sac »