“Why is the future assumed to be the continuation of growth? What if it’s degrowth?”

What is the future? Who dreams it? And whose dreams become “natural” human progression, even if the process of building that one precious utopia leaves someone lingering — beyond the wall, within the shadows, on the precipe?

When co-founding The Drinking Gourd, I aimed to create a digital and literary space for Black Muslims. I don’t claim TDG to be the first outlet to do so nor am I concerned with “firsts”. …

Fiction

We say her body was the seventh ’cause that’s what we could gather from records. Truth be told, she could’ve been the eighth. The 10th. The 20th. It both does and doesn’t matter.

When the story first broke, the media called her a “woman,” but she was freshly 18. Just a week before, she had walked across a stage with her new diploma in her hand, khimar pushed back on her head to show the red streaks in her hair. A week out of high school—does that really make you a woman?

It started with the bodies of men from prisons built outside the suburbs, far up in northern Minnesota. Most of the dead had no families. They were buried outside the walls they suffered in without a marker to find them. …

Everybody in the Twin Cities saw the video of Philando Castile dying, whether you wanted to or not. I barely remember pictures of Philando alive, but there is no way for me to forget the amount of blood that stained his white shirt; the face of his girlfriend recording; the four-year-old child in the back of the car; and outside, the frantic, shrill voice of St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez, who shot him dead.

This July will mark the third year since Philando’s murder. Three years should be enough for some sort of change, but it has meant nothing to the inflexible landscape of the Twin Cities. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul masquerade as liberal areas where everybody is safe to exist, but the mask is almost always prettier than what’s found underneath. When Philando was shot, it had been less than a year since we occupied the street in front of Minneapolis’ fourth precinct in response to Jamar Clark’s death. …

Sanction is given unto those who fight because they have been wronged; and Allah is indeed able to give them victory.

— Qur’an, 22:39

If you speak of Minnesota, you’ll be met with the usual remark, “There ain’t no Black people up there,” as if the speaker has ever visited long enough to have such certainty. As a state, it’s true that Minnesota certainly doesn’t hold the bulk of this country’s Black population. But there are enough of us up there to kill. There are also enough of us to hear the gunshots, watch the videos, and engulf the city streets. There may not be enough of us to chew up Minneapolis or St. Paul or any other place where people have come to harm. We cannot reduce concrete and police precincts built in the hubs of community centers to nothing. We cannot transform all the things that harm us into forgotten mush in our bellies, shit out in the snow. …

Salaam.

My name is Vanessa Taylor. I’m representing the Muslim Wellness Foundation’s 2017 Deeply Rooted Emerging Leaders, or DREL, inaugural class — which is a year-long fellowship centering the challenges, strengths, and well-being of Black Muslim youth.

I didn’t know how much I craved DREL until I went to the first retreat, where we covered Black Muslim psychology and more. The 2017 fellows remain connected today. We know the 2018 fellows and we’ll know the ones who come after, too. …

Black Muslims have generated fear in white America for almost 400 years. The root of that fear, and the history behind it, are worth exploring — especially today.

Recently, a video captured Native American activist and Omaha people elder Nathan Philips performing the American Indian Movement song (known as the “AIM song”) as students from Covington Catholic High School stood smirking in and around his path.

After the video went viral, a mother of one student — not the mother of the student shown facing Phillips — emailed Heavy to express dismay at the media’s initial coverage of the event:

Shame on you. Were you there? Did you hear the names the people were calling these boys? It was shameful. …

Lifetime’s documentary series Surviving R. Kelly offers one of the most comprehensive dives into Kelly’s history of brutality. Accusations against Robert Kelly—the man who plays god—range from sexual assault to domestic violence, rape, sex trafficking, and more. Some culminated in court cases, such as a 2008 child pornography case where Kelly evaded charges brought against him. The series is horrifying not only because of the sheer violence Kelly inflicted on Black girls, but because of those who allowed him to continue his career despite numerous accusations and a criminal trial.

Many of R. Kelly’s collaborators declined interviews, as executive producer dream hampton told Shadow and Act, but Chance the Rapper was one of the few who made an appearance. In an interview with Jamilah Lemieux, the rapper said making a song with R. Kelly was a “mistake,” going on to add, “We’re programmed to really be hypersensitive to Black male oppression. … But Black women are exponentially a higher oppressed and violated group of people just in comparison to the whole world. Maybe I didn’t care because I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were Black women.” …

The moment where if becomes when is difficult to locate. The change is only noticeable to you, at first, settling deep inside of your body; a certainty that should weigh you down. Maybe it does. You don’t notice. You sit around tables watching newsfeed, absorbed in live streams and updates from states away, and you are aware, slowly but distinctly, that this will kill you. The realization would change something about you, if your friends weren’t already planning their funerals before.

“If this work kills me” becomes “when this work kills me” and none of it is a joke. This is not hyperbole or paranoia to sweep away, but an integral sort of knowledge that you share with friends who are hardly more than teenagers. Someone emails you a document detailing how they want their funeral to go. Someone else says, “Don’t let those fake niggas in,” and you laugh, but you take notes, too. …