Black Youth Project

Black Youth Project Black Youth Project is a digital archive and publishing site focused on the thoughts & actions of young Black folks. We are for us, by us. Without apology.

What Is Critique and Who Gets To Do It? by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield.Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield asks a question the art w...
05/26/2026

What Is Critique and Who Gets To Do It? by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield.

Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield asks a question the art world keeps dodging: when we separate the critic from the creator, who gets pushed out?

Drawing on Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Mariame Kaba, Stringfield makes the case that critique isn’t cruelty — it’s care. The insistence that we deserve better, and the belief that something better is actually possible.

She traces critique through three movements: naming what is, correcting what’s broken, and daring to build what doesn’t exist yet. That last part is where Afrofuturism lives. Where abolition lives. Where every circle of people who refused to accept the world as fixed lives.

Truthtelling isn’t comfortable. For Black women especially, it can be costly. But to look at something for all its beauty and still want more isn’t ingratitude. It’s vision.

🔗 Read the full essay at BlackYouthProject.com

Thurgood Marshall Still Asks Us To Protect The Less Powerful by Daniel Johnson.Daniel Johnson traces the enduring legacy...
05/19/2026

Thurgood Marshall Still Asks Us To Protect The Less Powerful by Daniel Johnson.

Daniel Johnson traces the enduring legacy of Thurgood Marshall, lawyer, Solicitor General, and the conscience of the Supreme Court, and asks what his jurisprudence demands of us now.

Moving between landmark courtroom victories and decades of dissent, the piece examines how Marshall understood the Constitution not as a fixed document, but as a living one, capable of growth and accountable to the people it had long failed.

With the Voting Rights Act now dismantled and civil rights protections eroding in real time, Johnson returns to Marshall’s body of work as both a map and a mirror. Marshall never measured the law by what it was. He measured it by what it owed.

At its core, the piece leaves us with the question Marshall never stopped asking: do we have the courage to protect ourselves, or will we keep sacrificing each other until no one is left?

🔗 Read the full story at Black Youth Project.

Pride Month stories deserve depth, nuance, joy, and truth. ✍🏾🌈Black Youth Project is now accepting pitches from Black wr...
05/19/2026

Pride Month stories deserve depth, nuance, joy, and truth. ✍🏾🌈

Black Youth Project is now accepting pitches from Black writers for Pride Month essays and reportage exploring q***r life, identity, politics, dating, community, and global perspectives on q***rness.

If you’ve been waiting for a sign to pitch your story — this is it.

Submit your pitches to [email protected] Learn more + explore BYP’s style and voice at blackyouthproject.com

Pitches accepted through the end of the month — don’t wait too long! 

Desire Has a Racial Hierarchy by Taylor Allyn.Taylor Allyn examines how race, HIV stigma, and q***r desire shape intimac...
05/12/2026

Desire Has a Racial Hierarchy by Taylor Allyn.

Taylor Allyn examines how race, HIV stigma, and q***r desire shape intimacy for Black q***r men navigating dating apps, relationships, and systems of exclusion.

Moving through personal memory and lived experience, the piece unpacks how so-called “preferences” are often informed by racial hierarchy, colorism, and the politics of desirability. It reflects on the emotional toll of being hyper-visible as fantasy while simultaneously excluded from love, safety, and recognition.

At the same time, the essay explores the ways Black q***r communities continue building spaces of care, honesty, and belonging beyond those systems. Through friendship, intimacy, and mutual recognition, Allyn reminds us that survival also lives in the act of seeing each other fully.

Read the full story at BlackYouthProject.com.

✨ Series Alert: Abolishing Patriarchal Violence ✨Join us for a transformative conversation as we continue our Abolish Pa...
05/11/2026

✨ Series Alert: Abolishing Patriarchal Violence ✨

Join us for a transformative conversation as we continue our Abolish Patriarchal Violence Series with two researchers and organizers from the movement.

We are diving deep into the intersections of abolition and identity with and . We’ll be discussing the Abolition Study!

🗓️ THE DETAILS
• WHEN: May 15, 2026
• TIME: 3:00PM ET
• WHERE: Right here on IG Live

Set your reminders, tag a friend who needs to be in the room, and we’ll see you there!

How We Keep Each Other Alive by Amber Butts.Amber Butts reflects on survival not as abstraction, but as practice rooted ...
05/11/2026

How We Keep Each Other Alive by Amber Butts.

Amber Butts reflects on survival not as abstraction, but as practice rooted in memory, land, community, and the quiet rituals people build to protect one another when institutions fail.
Moving between personal memory and collective history, the piece explores preparation, displacement, wildfire, and global violence, revealing survival as deeply communal. Neighbors pass buckets between burning homes. Names are exchanged hand to hand. Doors stay open longer than usual.

The work connects local and global realities including Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Philadelphia, and Tulsa, showing how marginalized communities continue to rely on care, vigilance, and mutual aid to sustain one another.

At its core, the essay reminds us that community is infrastructure, and survival has always depended on people willing to hold each other through uncertainty.

🔗 Read the full story at Black Youth Project.

Black Culture Is Not a Costume: K-Pop, Cultural Appropriation, and Racial Capitalism by Charles Tremblay.Charles Trembla...
05/05/2026

Black Culture Is Not a Costume: K-Pop, Cultural Appropriation, and Racial Capitalism by Charles Tremblay.

Charles Tremblay examines how Black culture is globally consumed, particularly within K-pop, while the people who create it remain unprotected and marginalized.

The piece unpacks how Black aesthetics—from language to hairstyles—are adopted and celebrated without context or accountability, revealing a deeper system of racial capitalism where Black culture is commodified for profit. It traces this dynamic through histories of minstrelsy, digital Blackface, and the regulation of Black bodies, especially Black women and girls, whose identities are policed even as their cultural expressions are imitated and praised elsewhere.

At the same time, it challenges the idea of cultural “exchange,” arguing instead that what we are witnessing is an unequal system where visibility does not equal protection. The work calls for a deeper reckoning with how Black culture is engaged globally, insisting on recognition, accountability, and the protection of those who shape it.

🔗 Read the full story at Black Youth Project.

✨ New Series Alert: Abolishing Patriarchal Violence ✨What does it mean to make a home within your own body? Join us for ...
04/21/2026

✨ New Series Alert: Abolishing Patriarchal Violence ✨

What does it mean to make a home within your own body? Join us for a transformative conversation as we kick off our Abolish Patriarchal Violence Series with two incredible voices from the movement.

We are diving deep into the intersections of abolition, identity, and joy with Dr. Kai Marshall Green and Je Naé Taylor. We’ll be discussing the “Abolition Study” and celebrating Dr. Green’s powerful new book:

📖 “A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love”

This is more than a book talk—it’s a space to envision a world free from patriarchal violence and grounded in Black Trans love. You don’t want to miss this.

🗓️ THE DETAILS
• WHEN: April 24, 2026
• TIME: 7:00PM ET
• WHERE: Right here on IG Live

Set your reminders, tag a friend who needs to be in the room, and we’ll see you there! ✊🏾🏳️‍⚧️

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Holding the Line by Daniel Johnson. Daniel Johnson reflects on how Ketanji Brown Jackso...
04/20/2026

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Holding the Line by Daniel Johnson.

Daniel Johnson reflects on how Ketanji Brown Jackson is using her position on the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge an increasingly conservative judicial landscape.

The piece centers her dissents as a form of public intervention, speaking not only to the Court but to the country, particularly in cases that shape the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, immigrants, and marginalized groups. Through her writing, the law becomes a site of tension, where constitutional interpretation collides with lived realities.

At the same time, it highlights how Jackson’s voice functions as a form of resistance, grounded in a commitment to civil rights, accountability, and the belief that the law must serve those most vulnerable to its power.

🔗 Read the full story at Black Youth Project.

The Architecture of Removal: Black Immigrants, Disappearance, and the Politics of Survival in the United States by Amber...
04/05/2026

The Architecture of Removal: Black Immigrants, Disappearance, and the Politics of Survival in the United States by Amber Butts.

Amber Butts reflects on how U.S. immigration systems disproportionately target Black immigrants, revealing the deep entanglement between immigration enforcement and racialized policing.

The piece draws attention to the quiet violence of erasure, the reality of harsher detention and abuse, and the disruption of families and communities. Through these conditions, everyday life becomes shaped by fear, surveillance, and uncertainty.

At the same time, it highlights the ways communities respond—through care, vigilance, and mutual aid—as essential practices of survival.

🔗 Read the full story at BLACKYOUTHPROJECT.COM.

What Gets Carried: On Silence, Power, and Survival by Amber Butts.In this reflection, Amber Butts explores how Black and...
03/24/2026

What Gets Carried: On Silence, Power, and Survival by Amber Butts.

In this reflection, Amber Butts explores how Black and Brown women are often asked to carry harm in silence to protect movements and power. What is framed as “the work” becomes a way to defer truth and accountability.

Through Dolores Huerta’s story, the piece highlights how survivors endure harm for the sake of collective progress, while systems remain unchanged.

The essay asks what it means to build movements where truth can be spoken—and held.

🔗 Read the full story at BLACKYOUTHPROJECT.COM.

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