Miscellaneous
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Black People Are Individuals – Stop Lumping Us Together
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, people of different races, countries and social identities were showing their support for the black community. Whether it was genuine, or they were just jumping on the bandwagon to not look bad, awareness was spreading about the societal issues that plague the black community due to both direct and institutional racism. This was all great, but the trendy period of addressing anti-black racism exposed some other issues when it comes to how black people are perceived by non-black people. At one point, non-black people started making pretty basic social media posts to prove that they support BLM (i.e., out…
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Listen to the Silence of Your Non-Black Friends
We’ve all heard the sayings: “Everyone wants to be Black until it’s time to be Black” or “Everybody wants to be Black, but nobody wants to be Black” …or something along those lines. In times like this, we really get to experience the meaning of these phrases. A few years ago, I made the conscious decision to dissociate myself from the white/non-black people of colour in my life who I noticed were enthusiastically down with the fun parts of black culture but who I would never hear express any sort of opinion over the injustice that is regularly suffered by the black community. You know the ones… the ones who…
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I’m black first, a woman second.
Which part of my identity is the most overpowering? Should I be more loyal to my race or my womanhood? I would frequently ask myself this question as a child. I used to imagine a scenario where a line was drawn on the ground—one side representing blackness, the other womanhood—and I would have to choose a side to stay on forever. I can’t explain why I put so much stress on myself over such hypotheticals at age 8. I later dismissed this scenario on the grounds of absurdity and because I realized that it is idiotic to think that you must be more loyal to one part of your identity…
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#menaretrash
If you mindlessly scroll through your social media feeds on a regular basis, especially Twitter, you have probably read or even used the viral phrase “men are trash,” or some variation of it (e.g.,”niggas ain’t shit”) at one point or another. This seemingly trivial yet actually controversial claim is the epitome of the current phase of third-wave feminism driven by the age of social media. In using social media as the main tool of influence, feminism is now more ubiquitous than ever. A single tweet, although restricted to 140 characters, has the power to attack hyper-masculinity and challenge sexism. In case you really are not familiar with #menaretrash, here are…
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Kim Kardashian Returns to Social Media… Why Do We Care?
Story time! I have a friend who I met while living in Barcelona in 2015 and we spent four weeks being almost inseparable. She left over a month before I did to go back to her hometown in New York, but I didn’t think of getting her number because I had her on Snapchat and Instagram, which were our main forms of communication together in Barcelona anyways. However, in early 2016, she went MIA. She went from posting on her Snapchat story almost every day to not at all, and honestly, it took me until late September to notice. Her Instagram was still up even though she wasn’t posting, and I…
