46 years ago, a moving picture testified to sexual assault against a woman. It moved all around the world, in fact. Only, the world called it “art.” Not much has changed since. This most visible example of a public rape frames sexual assault’s most misunderstood and excused forms: coerced consent, false pretenses and pressure as permission. And people can still buy and sell this sexual assault on film to this day. Why? Continue reading
A 16-year old woman of color received what female slaves may have if they refused their master’s sexual advances: death sentences at worst, and more tortured lives at best. Continue reading
No matter what I have learned from her brother Bill Genovese’s heart-wrenching push for the truth, I still can not extinguish the feeling of seeing myself in Kitty Genovese: young, happy, independent, innocent, moving toward the future, and fated to be a woman living alone in American big cities. Continue reading
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The women I want the world to start remembering forever are pictured here. Please click on their photos for more information about their lives and stories, as well as ongoing activism in their memories for this remainder of Black History Month. #SayHerName Continue reading
One way to move this tragedy and the deceased in it past public ephemera and into history is to forever connect the loss of their lives to a national symbolic act against domestic terrorism: the legally-mandated abolition of our Confederate flag, and civil prosecution of anyone who waves it. Continue reading
Racial profiling does not discriminate by gender…it’s time to tell our black girls the police may not be working for them. Continue reading
Read my story “What Billie and Phyllis Sang About”, about an abandoned black woman left to survive alone in Harlem, in the new issue of Atticus Review. My favorite Billie Holiday and Phyllis Hyman music is on the story’s companion soundtrack Here. #BillieandPhyllis Continue reading
Originally posted on negression:
I still from documentary film on Joyce Vincent: “Dreams of a Life” There is a defining 21st Century Western World story about a Black female Londonder who passed away in her government-subsidized bedsit/SRO flat in 2003,…
The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, housed in Chicago’s Carter G. Woodson Library, is an invaluable display of the flowering of Black history and culture within a Northern, urban environment galvanized by the energy of hundreds of thousands of post-war Black migrants from the South. Continue reading
