LGBT People of Color More Likely to Face Poverty

By Marisa Taylor

LGBT people of color face a high risk of suffering from poverty because of discrimination and lack of strong legal protections, according to a new report released on Thursday.

An estimated 3 million American adults identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people of color, according to the report co-authored by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, a think tank, and the LGBT-focused advocacy group the Movement Advancement Project.

Black, Latino, Native American and Asian LGBT people are more likely to be poor than white LGBT people, the report said, with transgender people suffering from poverty most of all.

“Disproportionate numbers of LGBT people of color live in places that lack any explicit state-level protections for LGBT people,” Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, said in a release. “This means that LGBT people of color face a high risk of economic harm from…

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Are We Witnessing the Emergence of A Black Spring?

By Priscilla Ocen & Khaled A. Beydoun

View image | gettyimages.com

In the spring of 2010, we witnessed massive protests in the Arab World. The people of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya had enough; they had enough of the violence propagated by the state, of the political and economic marginalization that characterized their existence for generations and they had enough of the unaccountable governmental agencies that inflicted harm with seeming impunity. The protests were driven by social media, the energy of the youth and people who were willing to use their bodies to disrupt the status quo. We were transfixed as images of these protests, dubbed the “Arab Spring,” flooded the airwaves in the United States and across the world.

The description of the Arab Spring could just as easily apply to the mobilizations in the United States, in Ferguson, in New York and now in Baltimore. The similarities between these…

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Yes, the DEAD cells penetrating through the top of my scalp, holds unfortunate significance.

Ma is not a bad person you hear ?!

This however, is another post in response to one of the many comments made by her, directed towards me.

At the birth of the new year (being 2015) suddenly and with great surprise, to both me and my sister due to it being relatively new and top of the range in hair styling technology, our flat iron broke. We went into crisis mode almost immediately, trying to figure out how we would tame the unruly mess atop our heads which we had been burdened with. Thus due to this event, began my journey of hair self-discovery, for the first time ever I learnt how to manage my hair in its natural state, how to maintain it nourish it and nurture it with the love it had been so cruelly deprived of for so many years. 

Big hair don’t care !!!

Gary Haugen: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now

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‘DO NOT GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT!’: The Skin Bleaching Pandemic

When the average Joe hears about skin bleaching, or lightening as it is more commonly referred to, there are often connotations of black people particularly African Americans using it as it is a popular held belief that a lighter skin tone connotes education, social mobility and heterosexual desirability. Although this is very true to the African American community, and could easily be viewed as the root for many of the motivations for using the products, the African American market is relatively small when comparing it to the staggering one billion dollar skin whitening industry which dominates Asia. What this then implies is that skin bleaching is not only used for individuals who have darker complexions as Asia is a continent where the majority of the population is considered light skin. Thus eliminates predetermined notions that skin bleaching is only for darker skinned people and elevates the crisis from a national epidemic to a global pandemic.

#TeamDarkSkinned or #TeamLightSkinned? How about #TeamStrongIndependantBlackWomen!

OWN Network’s Light Girls documentary.

Whilst doing research for my previous blog post I came across trailer clips for a documentary that the OWN network (which is Oprah’s television network) would be premiering. The documentary is entitled Light Girls and the content that would be dealt with are the issues and problems light skinned women/girls face within the black community in America as well as the societies they live in.

Rihanna – American Oxygen

http://www.rollingout.com

RiRi gives us a poignant song about our nation. It addresses immigration, civil rights, the Eric Garner murder, corporate greed, the hope of change in the “New America”, and much more. She hit this one out of the park! Rihanna’s new effort R8 hits the streets later this year.

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