Productivity culture and its capitalist mama do not love you, will never love you and will never grant you rest—especially if you are Black. CW: This piece discusses drug use and addiction By Sabine Bradley I’m not sure that I’ll ever be excellent. In a white supremacist capitalist world, excellence is only reached, only recognized,...
Category: Race
What A Black Woman Medical Provider Sees Watching The COVID-19 Pandemic Unfold
Medical racism persists beyond historical fact to become current tradition, and inequalities can only be magnified by the circumstance of an emergency. How many more opportunities for widened healthcare disparity has COVID-19 given us? By Racquel Reid, MD As the population of the United States trudges doggedly through endless months of uncontrolled COVID-19 spread, my...
‘The Social Dilemma’ Fails To Address Racism In Tech And Surveillance Capitalism
The Social Dilemma does a deep disservice to the complexities of racism and technology by ignoring the depth of issues that arise when examining the role big tech plays in the marginalization of BIPOC. By Manaal Farooqi This year, Netflix released The Social Dilemma, a documentary exploring the numerous negative effects of social media and...
Gene Editing Cannot Be Separated From The Violent History of Eugenics and Medical Racism
For all the promises of gene editing, its study cannot be divorced from eugenics and a larger racist history that has inspired many of its endeavors. By Jude Casimir Henrietta Lacks visited John Hopkins Hospital in 1951, complaining of vaginal bleeding. A mother of five children, Lacks was diagnosed by gynecologist Howard Jones with cervical...
Slavery in Life, Slavery in Death: Reckoning with the Zombification of Blackness
Like the zombies of Haitian mythology, Breonna Taylor has been resurrected and trivialized, her death turned into an opportunity for glib commodification. By the time I learned about the existence of the New York Times’ documentary The Killing of Breonna Taylor, a few days before it was released, I was already tired. Breonna Taylor had...
Oppress Me, Please: Outright Lies, Tall Tales, and the Self-Centering of White Women
White women have not so much shoved themselves into the spotlight as strived to take over the role of the light technician and the bulb itself. On September 3, 2020, author and professor Jessica A. Krug—who had frequently gone by the name Jessica La Bombalera—published a post on the website Medium admitting that she had...
Centering White Allies In Black Liberation Destroys Our Movements
Centering white allies in our movements shifts them from being unapologetically pro-Black to becoming about what white people need to cope with their guilt. By Gloria Oladipo “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together.” This is what Terry Crews—our...
The History of Consumption and The Cannibalistic Nature of Whiteness
Europeans devouring Egyptian mummies. The Donner Party cannibalizing their Indigenous American guides. White people have consumed the Other in many ways. TW/CW: This essay discusses cannibalism, murder, lynching, suicide, and bodily mutilation Mercy Brown was not the first to die. Her mother and sister had already gone, nearly a decade before her. Still, Mercy would...
Black Children Are Most At Risk For High Blood Lead Levels
These findings on blood lead are impacted by various other systemic issues facing Black communities in the U.S., in addition to further contributing to them. Deniz “Dersim” Yeter is an undergraduate Nursing student working and studying in Kansas. Their team recently completed a study on racial disparities in blood lead levels among children under the...
Tesco (Allegedly) Stole Their Diverse Bandaids from a Black Creative and Thought We Wouldn’t Notice
Tesco’s actions are part of a pattern of disenfranchisement of Black entrepreneurs who are trying to build their business to serve communities of color. One thing you can count on people of no color to have…is the audacity. Or rather…the caucasity. And this episode of The Audacity of Caucasity stars British supermarket chain Tesco and...