Vanessa Taylor

It is tempting to see all this as a one-time, isolated occurrence - an individual mistake - but it is not. This type of social media-related opportunism has many manifestations and is very much rooted in Muslim celebrity culture and trauma tourism inspired by Orientalist attitudes.

While analyzing the vitriol directed at Omar, a hijab-wearing Somali refugee, it’s tempting to single out either her blackness or her Muslim identity as the cause, but the two are inseparable.

Although a hijab is a transgression within the United States, it is not the correct type of transgression to be read as queer.

Channels play the same clips over and over again. They never start from the beginning, a girl on asphalt, nor from the beginning’s beginning, knowing the girl is Shahida and it was the day before her seventeenth birthday.

There are times you have legs. Mostly, you do not. You smile with teeth grown sharp from gnawing at chains that refuse to release.

There's an obsession with defiance in Black life and an expectation that all art must be regulated into it — but, not everything is an act of rebellion. Solange's When I Get Home is not a battle cry nor is it about the voyeurs. This is Solange inviting us inside to bear witness; it is her love letter to home.

We are in a world where we’re living out science fiction fantasies of the past. Like Octavia Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Talents predicting President Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan, our biggest tech fears are being realized in real time.

Black Muslims have existed in the U.S. for centuries and folded themselves into every aspect of resistance within it. If you’re interested in learning more about these identities and experiences, I’ve put together the essential Black Muslim reading list.

The Covington Catholic mother’s naming of Black Muslims cannot be dismissed as a simple case of mistaken identity.

What does it mean, though, when you have always been regarded as less than human? When the boundaries of humanity have been drawn outside of you, robbing you of your connection to the earth, there is often nothing left to turn to but smokeless flame.

Bandersnatch reveals the trend of creating white dystopias from Black realities.

“Surviving R. Kelly” exposes even more of men’s bare minimum politics when it comes to Black women

Dunia says she’s got jinns in her fingers. That they came there ’cause she killed people, settled right up beneath her nails and she knows it ’cause she can feel them. “It’s like touching a hot coal, Sumaya,” she says, curled up beneath a blanket while we listen to Khadijah sob and retch somewhere deeper in the woods.

here between the wires
we unlocked the materials for starshine & clay
figured out how to code our way into existence.
God does not exit stage left,
behind a cool red curtain &
there are no thrones whose location we can’t find.

"People say that it’s impossible to invent colors, that what we have is what we have and what we know is what we know. That is not true. We learned. We invented. We pulled color from places it shouldn’t have existed, shades of Black that did more than span a spectrum, that became unique within themselves. And in the spots where growth failed to bloom, we found new ways to articulate what had occurred."