Posts + Projects

​​Ron E. Armstead, drawing from his decades-long experience with the ​​Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Veterans Braintrust, has compiled the following collage of book covers for Black History Month. The theme? Essential and Recommended Readings on Black contributions to the U.S. military. The sheer volume of material is itself a powerful testament to what should no-longer be a contestable fact: Black veterans were critical forces in U.S. military history.

How often have you learned about a historic accomplishment made by a Black person in America and wondered, why am I just now hearing about this? The answer is because it’s by design. As some U.S. corporations and politicians distort American history by either misrepresenting actual events or altogether omitting the contributions of marginalized people from textbooks and public school curriculums, new apparel company Thank You Tees is returning the power to educate to the people.

Water is a vital element of human life, and is a limited resource. Today, only 3% of the available water of the earth is used for human consumption. 2 billion people don’t have access to clean water, and every 20 seconds a child dies due to complications from not having clean water. Half of the beds in hospitals are in use due to illness related to not having access to clean water. Water could be considered the blue gold of the 21st century.

This project is an extension of Feminist Killjoys, PhD, a podcast that emerged in the spirit of Sara Ahmed’s theory of killing joy as a necessary component of feminist praxis. Ahmed suggests that harkening back to early feminist “consciousness-raising” (as well as to Marxist notions of “false consciousness”) is a useful (re)turn in order to make sense of our contemporary cultural desire for happiness. Ahmed argues that the happy housewife is the foil to the construct of the “angry black woman” or, she posits, the “feminist killjoy.” That is, the feminist who ruins a good time by speaking about injustice, inequality, their dire position as women, and so on. She writes: