Culture - The Emancipator

Culture

Culture | Shay Stewart-Bouley
Go South, young (wo)man: A Black woman’s quest to manifest her own destiny
The author of ‘Black Girl in Maine’ blog reveals the struggles of being a ‘Professional Black Person’ in New England and looks South for her next chapter.

Culture | Monica Russel y Rodriguez
Lessons learned as a DEI plumber
The hope of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office is to build something better, but often staff are stuck patching constant leaks in old, flawed institutions. And it’s draining work.

Culture | Phillipe Copeland
The art of the denial
Racism denial is a political strategy and a coping tool, used by those who benefit from racism and those unwilling to confront the dire contradictions in our society. Phillipe Copeland walks us through its different forms so we can recognize and counter them.

Video | Deborah D. Douglas
What’s next for the White Lives Matter trademark?
Now that podcasters Ramses Ja and Q Ward own the White Lives Matter trademark, what do these long-time social justice supporters plan to do with the power that comes with ownership?

Culture | Audra Simpson
Indigenous identity theft must stop
Once again, a scholar vaulted to a position of power and influence through a claimed Indigenous descent has been revealed to be a White woman. The overdue embrace of Native voices is being co-opted while real Native women still suffer, facing a disproportionate number of murders and disappearances.

Culture
Banned Books Week Quiz
Banned Books Week is now underway! Put your knowledge of banned and challenged works to the test with our quiz.

CULTURE | KIMBERLY ATKINS STOHR
Books have power; it’s no surprise the powerful want to control them
The Emancipator looks at the history of book banning, from the burning of the nation’s first Black bookstore in 1800's New York City, to author Toni Morrison's books being taken off school shelves, to kick off this year's Banned Books Week.

Culture | V. Jo Hsu
The irony of the trans ‘villain’
When Boston Children's Hospital gets violent threats for providing gender-affirming care, and drag queen story hours are attacked as “sites of sexual predation,” it’s time to confront the rising tide of anti-trans propaganda seeking to divide us.

Culture | Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Public embrace of natural hair offers new twist on civil rights
Recognizing this history of control and humiliation through the material of Black hair is important for understanding new efforts to celebrate and protect wearers of Afro-textured hair in the United States.

CULTURE | Shen-yi Liao and Nat Hansen
We’re using the word ‘racist’ just fine, thanks
Are we using the word “racist” too broadly these days, applying it to too varied a range of wrongs and to too wide a group of people? Critics across the political spectrum have argued as much.

CULTURE | David Wall Rice and Julie Scelfo
There doesn’t have to be an ‘other’
Framing other people as inferior begins, innocently enough, with the essential mental process of trying to figure out one’s own identity. Beginning as infants, we encounter vast quantities of information and, to better make sense of it, start unconsciously sorting it into various categories.

Throughline | Ja’nell N. Ajani
‘Nope’ reveals Black family working to defeat the threat that hovers over daily life
In an odd way “Nope” shows there is hope for those of us who are willing can take on this “thing” that wants to erase our legacies, the institutions we’ve built, the stories that reveal who we truly are.