With Anti-DEI on the Rise, It's Time to Teach Black Kids to Read Between the Bars of Black Music

With Anti-DEI on the Rise, It's Time to Teach Black Kids to Read Between the Bars of Black Music

For generations, Black music has operated as more than the soundtrack for celebration or a vessel for grief; it has functioned as an active, living archive of African American history. Spirituals coded with messages between enslaved Africans mapped literal escape routes out of plantation bondage to the intricate sonic tapestries of modern hip-hop and neo-soul, the music has carried an encrypted language.  It is a brilliant strategy of survival and self-sovereignty—a way to speak freely right in
Thiy Parks

Thiy Parks
Shh... Quiet on the Creek! The African Diaspora Has Been in the Same Group Chat for 400 Years. It's Called Black Music.

Shh... Quiet on the Creek! The African Diaspora Has Been in the Same Group Chat for 400 Years. It's Called Black Music.

Have you ever wondered what connects a crowded club in Lagos to a basement party in London; a block party in Brooklyn, and a samba circle in Salvador, Bahia? It is the syncopated heartbeat of the African diaspora. While the transatlantic slave trade systematically stripped millions of displaced Africans of their languages, families, and tangible histories, it could not deafen their internal rhythm. Over generations, Black Americans converted our shared trauma into jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, and
Thiy Parks

Thiy Parks
With Anti-DEI on the Rise, It's Time to Teach Black Kids to Read Between the Bars of Black Music

With Anti-DEI on the Rise, It's Time to Teach Black Kids to Read Between the Bars of Black Music

For generations, Black music has operated as more than the soundtrack for celebration or a vessel for grief; it has functioned as an active, living archive of African American history. Spirituals coded with messages between enslaved Africans mapped literal escape routes out of plantation bondage to the intricate sonic tapestries of modern hip-hop and neo-soul, the music has carried an encrypted language.  It is a brilliant strategy of survival and self-sovereignty—a way to speak freely right in
Thiy Parks

Thiy Parks

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Digital Collage by Jessica E. Boyd. Photo by Julian Myles / Unsplash

The Anti-Algorithm Movement Is Here—and It Looks a Lot Like Your Grandparents' House

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Thiy Parks

Thiy Parks
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Thiy Parks

Thiy Parks
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Digital Collage by Jessica E. Boyd; Images courtesy of Arianne Edmonds

Arianne Edmonds on Black Lineage, Narrative Repair, and 'We Now Belong to Ourselves'

When Arianne Edmonds speaks about lineage, her voice carries both urgency and reverence. A fifth-generation Angeleno, writer, and memory worker, she has made it her life’s work to piece together the fragments of stories often scattered, suppressed, or left to gather dust on family shelves. That work comes to life in her debut book, We Now Belong to Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2025), a blend of memoir, archival storytelling, and cultural analysis. The book takes its title from a phrase h
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