Vanessa Taylor

Essence could have chosen to critically engage Kamala Harris’ campaign as a way to actually support and serve Black women.

In days that stopped making sense, nights spent curled up in the backseat of a car or facing down a line of police, I found Islam through and in my own life.

To ever hope to know Islam in America, you have to actually know Black Muslim women. To recognition of this history, four Black Muslim women share their experiences with Islam — as a source of comfort, a tool for liberation, and a means to survive in a world that seems pitted against every facet of their identities.

The de-veiling — and general maltreatment — of incarcerated or detained Black Muslim women is a symptom of wider issues relating to anti-Black Islamophobia. Black Muslim women are regarded as inherent threats due to both their Blackness and their Islam.

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.