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We're Queer, 'We're Here,' and We're Fighting Back
Media for good trouble.
Liberation lives here.
Southern politics
An open letter to Spelman College: Denounce Cop City Now
While the HBCU boasts a commitment to Black gender-oppressed people, alumni say that destroying a critical ecosystem to invest millions in police terror is the highest degree of antiblackness.
Five Black Southerners you should know this Women's History Month
This year, the National Women's History Month theme is "celebrating women who tell our stories." But who gets to tell our stories?
How 'the shadow of state abandonment' fostered then foiled Young Thug's YSL
There's a deep connection between policing and "urban renewal" in Atlanta. Through the state's various strongholds, including the police, transforming urban space always ends up taking some communities off the map entirely. YSL (and Young Thug) might be the next big casualties.
Cop City, Gentrification, and Young Thug: Atlanta's uneven war over greenspace in 'The City of the Forest'
The police's war on working-class Black life and culture in Atlanta works in tandem with the city's encroachment on un- and under-developed neighborhoods—and the green ecosystems standing in the way of gentrification.
Illustrated: The South isn't so anti-abortion after all. Kentucky proved it at the polls.
Activists across Kentucky organized voters against an amendment that would have prevented a right to abortion or abortion funds in the state constitution. In illustration, meet three folks who were part of the movement to defeat Amendment 2.
Blue County, Purple State
While the county might remain an uphill battle for Republicans, North Carolina as a whole is a political toss-up.
Arts & Soul
grief & other loves: National Poetry Month workshop series
Poetry can be a practice of grief: messy, personal, reaching, revelatory. This National Poetry Month, Scalawag is taking 'grief and other loves' on the road.
Grief and Love, Outside the Changes
Six-time Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist and host of the podcast "Great Grief" Nnenna Freelon discusses love, death, and growing through the changes on her first album in about a decade.
Why your new diet is antiblack
The author of 'Belly of the Beast' weighs in on racism, fatphobia, and diet culture.
In the soil, in the sound: Houston's Jamal Cyrus gets to the root of Southern Black aesthetics
Houston-based visual artist Jamal Cyrus' first career-survey exhibition 'The End of My Beginning' comes to the Mississippi Museum of Art, showcasing his decadeslong exploration into the aesthetics of Black radical expression.
Bookmobiles to the rescue
In 26 states, students' access to books in school is under attack. Texas leads the nation with 16 districts enacting 713 individual bans.
'beyond a better hell' / talking to ghosts: a mixtap/e/ssay
History is a groove according to hip-hop scholar A.D. Carson. But when the soundtrack of Black grief continues to be remixed and sampled without meaningful change, Black folks are forced to compare this current hell to the last one.
'The imaginary line in the sand': Texas artist's installation challenges U.S.-Mexico border
Karla García's binational art installation, 'La Línea Imaginaria,' makes personal memory the center of focus in the southwest desert landscape—rather than the imperialism of the U.S. border.
Race & Place
These Muslim men are disrupting cycles of homelessness after prison
When Baquee Sabur, who is Muslim, knocked on a shelter door looking for a safe place to sleep, he said they tried to turn him away because of his faith. Now he runs his own transitional housing for Muslims in Texas.
Everything (Queer) Everywhere All At Once
Despite its villainization in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's box-office hit, queerness thwarts the story's central themes of limitations under capitalism and xenophobia.
Abolishing the Black Superhero Complex: From Black Panther to MLK
'Black Panther' celebrates a monarchy, an all-Black female military, and a superhero who colludes with government agencies and extends carceral punishment for wrongdoings.
Contradictions and Convictions: Megan Thee Stallion and why abolition can't wait
After jokes like 'abolition can wait' resounded in the wake of the Tory Lanez conviction, a course correction: 'I don't care to condemn folks who celebrate Tory's conviction, I do care about abolition…
There is no healing in an antiblack world
'We know what it means to be profiled, criminalized, incarcerated, and murdered by police. That trauma doesn't die with us.'
Successors and failures: Adulting after death
A Black Millennial homeowner navigates complex feelings after inheriting the family home, grieving the mighty loss of the woman who left it to her.
