On any given day, there are nearly 424,000 children in foster care in the United States. This is me at age 4. I’d enter the foster care system for the first time a year later.

In 2019, over 672,000 children spent time in U.S. foster care. Black, LBGTQIA+ and youths with mental illnesses are disproportionately placed in foster care. Black youths are twice as likely to be placed in foster care as White youths. These youths often come from families living below the poverty line; poverty and all of the issues related to it increase the likelihood of substance use and homelessness.

I can’t help but feel like this is some sort of “BIPOC complex” mixed with an inflated ego. The idea that just because you aren’t a White man means you’d be the best choice to be involved with the storytelling for other people who aren’t White, even if they aren’t from your community is absurd. It also solidifies that you don’t have to be White to participate in White Supremacy culture. I’m sure he won’t be saying no to projects soon but I really wish he would.

Avi is an actor and voice-over artist. They come from a theatre background, having performed in a number of stage productions and is also the narrator of several audiobooks including the New York Times Best Seller Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. Lastly, you can hear them as the voice behind Raine Whispers on Disney Channel's animated series The Owl House.

I’m going through one of the hardest times in my life and I really wish I had my dad. I’ve been no contact with my parents for almost 5 years now and I need y’all to know that grief is still the same even if the person is still living.

It would be foolish if I didn’t also mention generational trauma stemming from White supremacy as a factor to these cultural exchanges and customs. I still don’t have a firm list of affirmations even after all these years but I am more knowledgable about their crucial affect on my mental health. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a firm list but I do know I’ll always go back to “I call you ‘sun’ because you shine like one”.

I'm not hired to give history lessons. I've done some presentations about bias and Black mental health disparities and I have directed people to a book. I specialize in what patients need right now in the moment. How do we help them in the immediacy? And if you need history to help you help them, that's fine, but I'm gonna direct you to a book.

I now know “alternative music” is a genre created to place music White people have appropriated from others. These tactics continue and White people continue to genre hop without hesitation and with little resistance, see Post Malone.

Obella is a DEI specialist, licensed Psychology Associate, and creative artist who loves to talk about identity, cultivate growth environments, and strategize on how to turn compassion into action. As The Radical Empath, Obella aims to use his years of experience and his lens as a Black, queer, second-generation East African man to decolonize toxic belief systems and reframe them to empower folks to be the most authentic versions of themselves, and create an accepting community of healing.

It’s literally titled How to deal with remote work microaggressions but goes on and on about “allyship”. It basically just lists all the microaggressions they can think of for various communities and drops BIPOC as many times as possible. Who are y’all talking to? Lola Bakare (She/Her) shared similar feelings after receiving an email entitled “Want to Be an Ally to Black Women? from Lean In. Lola shared that “another great way to be an ally is to acknowledge your Black subscribers exist.” Both examples credit the writing to the brand and not a specific writer or group of writers. If your target audience is cis White people, you should say that.

Often people are not able to get past question one. I also make sure to let them know that I have no interest in being hospitalized. A therapist dedicated to providing adequate care and ensuring those in search of care are able to receive the care they need would be able to provide honest answers. Not all therapists are good therapists. It’s better to know that before building a harmful relationship with a bad one.

Exploiting, misdirecting, and lying in order to present your business as Black owned is wrong. Black people and other people who are not White are not props. As a brand, if you are using certain faces to promote your brand while White faces are actually at the helm, stop. I won’t even waste my time on the individuals who do this.

When Janelle shared that they were nonbinary, I remember one post saying that “it’s never okay to assume someone’s identity before they share it but Janelle has always been nonbinary to me.” This validated so much for me. Janelle also shared this information for the first time with Black women on a Black show, this was a great example of Blackness of Queerness coexisting without one being prioritized over the other.

Spanking, corporal punishment or physical punishment is a form of abuse. It is a method that for centuries was used to proclaim power over others. The fear of being physically abused is the only tool being wielded. Fear and abuse as tools for power, control or leadership are ultimately ineffective and dishonest. Their use alongside words like love, trust, and respect are contradictory. Several studies have shown that these acts cause a long lasting effect of those being abused.

With psychology and mental health being such White dominated fields, it’s easy to imagine why these behaviors were not annotated as stimming but rather purposeful disruptions. This disconnect is harmful and has led to so much more harm. Black people be stimming. This needs to be acknowledged so we can receive correct diagnosis and get the care that we need.

Since the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd (He/Him) on May 25th, lots of anti-Black slogans have emerged. From "All Lives Matter" to "Blue Lives Matter" the nonsense has been unending but my favorite sarcasm and the one I've seen most in Texas is "We Back The Blue".

A trans flag and a nonbinary flag meet at the middle. In front of them are people sitting at a table asking questions.

Separating nonbinary people from transness feels like confirmation of cis people’s beliefs that even in transness the gender binary must still be upheld. I wrote on my own understanding of this in Trans Enough. I understand to be trans is to not align with the gender assigned to you at birth, which I do not therefore I am trans. When I see “Nonbinary AND Transgender” it feels like saying “well there’s these people and they're not trans but they’re not cis either”.

I do know that a lot of people do this to ensure nonbinary people know they are being included but in a roundabout way it feels the opposite.