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Culture

Untitled Poem – Akouavi Abok

by Akouavi Abok 03/10/2025

written by Akouavi Abok

My nose

My eyes

My lips

I look…

Covered in imperfections

But only I can find the perfection

Created in God’s image

I find a way to judge

Created to fit God’s perception

I search for an answer

Only to arrive at a misconception

Who am I

A tapestry woven with threads

Of joy, sorrow, and everything in between

In the mirror I gaze

A stranger in my own skin

My hands

My legs

My body

Lost in a bewildering maze

Within this struggle of lies

A glimmer so faint

For I have committed a sin

For I have used my hands to paint

An image unlike me

03/10/2025 0 comments

Arts & Entertainment Black History Culture Political Education

Friend or Foe: Blaxploitation

by Nadine Melanesia Black 03/10/2025

written by Nadine Melanesia Black

Before the 70s, it was rare for an Afrikan person to go to the theater and see a widely distributed movie that had a cast of all Afrikan people that did not center a white protagonist. The exploitation of Afrikan bodies in cinema allowed for Afrikan people to move up within Hollywood and receive representation, but also led to the damaging distribution of harmful Afrikan stereotypes. This genre was labeled “blaxploitation”, with the NAACP officially coining the term alongside the formation of the Coalition Against Blaxploitation. The NAACP, backed by other critics, flagged these movies for perpetuating harmful stereotypes about the Afrikan community in amerikkka.

Although originally produced by Afrikan people, featuring Afrikan people, for Afrikan people, the greed within Hollywood took advantage of what they saw as a profitable genre to exploit, leading to white influence seeping into the production of afrikan films: blaxploitation. Despite the exploitation from white Hollywood, Afrikan stories were somewhat finally able to be told to a larger audience through these films, including Afrikan social issues that were previously censored from mainstream media which was monumental for the 70s.

As a sacrifice for working in these roles, Afrikans had to depict stereotypes in these movies, which was then fed to the rest of Afrikan amerikkka, who undoubtedly were drawn to these movies as they were the only representation at the time. This perpetuated an endless cycle of creating these movies to please the audiences, and the audiences only being able to turn to these films for representation.

Despite being impactful in terms of pushing Afrikan actors into the spotlight and giving actors roles that extended beyond subservience to their white counterparts, it did so by exploiting Afrikan stereotypes using Afrikan labor. Blaxploitation assisted in using harmful stereotypes for entertainment, essentially forcing Afrikan actors into another role of servitude. This time, the role of servitude is one that is disguised and repackaged to be sent off to Afrikan moviegoers.

Acknowledging its controversial impact in amerikkkan culture, we must also accept that this allowed for cinema to reach a new audience. The featuring of Afrikan actors as the lead characters in movies such as Super Fly and Blacula, influenced more Afrikan people to turn to the cinema for entertainment. The question we must ask is if this “inclusion” was harmful or helpful to shaping our futures, imaginations, and capacity for struggle.

The controversy surrounding blaxploitation reveals a deeper issue within Hollywood, a fundamental contradiction that allows for a severe lack of representation and an inability to be free within a “creative space.” Hollywood was never meant for everyone. When blaxploitation began to become more popularized, it came at a time when Afrikan actors could hardly find work in the industry. Afrikans were able to be featured in movies in roles that weren’t second to their white costars and could be featured in a film with only other Afrikan people.

Blaxploitation generated inspiration among the Afrikan creative community, specifically in terms of its cinematic style, with future generations leaving behind most of the heavy harmful stereotypes and adopting a focusing on Afrikan life.

To move forward from the harmful representation of Blaxploitation, we must divest from the external validation of white Hollywood. We must create room within our own communities that allows for Afrikan producers, directors, and actors to pursue work that is meaningful and tells real and raw stories, helping to influence future generations of Afrikans. Hollywood is not responsible for saving us as the mainstream entertainment industry and media function to legitimize the state and the status quo: oppression, degradation and violence against Afrikan people. Understanding this, we are provided with new opportunities to recenter ourselves and redefine what creativity, success and storytelling should look like within our own communities.

03/10/2025 0 comments

Arts & Entertainment Culture Political Education

DOOM and Dilla: White Consumerism, Commodification, and Interpersonal Social Currency On Contemporary Pioneering Hip-Hop Artists

by Orisha Lamon 03/10/2025

written by Orisha Lamon

MF DOOM and J Dilla are some of the most influential artists and producers of all time. Praised for their innovative approaches to music through lyrical storytelling and profound mixing, they are a main point of reference for contemporary artists. Both artists still have posthumous releases that come in the form of features, remixes, and revisited recordings. The current state of musical consumption especially from Afrikan artists performing for marketability and white capital has left subversive genres at risk of being co-opted and fetishized. Which may happen at a far more parasocial level given the personalization and “underground” nature that provides a space for white exceptionalism and the development of primarily non-Afrikan cult followings. Sadiya Hartman in Formations of Terror, creates a context of Afrikan suffering through something of a spectacle: consumable, commodified, intended for white capitalization. Hartman’s focus is on John Rankin’s letters on American slavery, however, examined and translated through contemporary shows of performance for a white audience, this cannot go unnoticed as acting as a “vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment”. The reaction to popular Afrikan musical artists’ centering their music around ambiguously liberal and racially progressive strides toward Afrikan cultural aesthetics is generally regarded as an almost vitriol performance, when in its essence is inherently consumed and marketed via frames of voyeurism, primitivization, and fetishization. There is entitlement over these artists and their performance that is curated intentionally toward white capitalization. This may tread grounds of reductionist discourse toward Afrikan performance as spectacle. However, white entitlement and forms of racial exceptionalism can arguably be examined as a modality of furthering the contemporary pathologization of Afrikan conditions and white and colonial acquisition.

Why are MF DOOM and J Dilla in question? These two artists are notoriously known for their cult followings, composed of white males and hip-hop heads who look toward DOOM’s lyricism and villainous characterizations and Dilla’s heavily regarded genuineness as a hip-hop production pioneer. In this context we need to ask: What differentiates the fans of these “underground” artists from their industry counterparts and why do fans often focalize this point as a means of having an understanding of something alternative, subversive, underappreciated, and misrepresented? Perhaps looking toward how despite the subcultures of subcultures, whiteness as a mode of commodification, in its current context, informs how folks associate certain audiences to certain demographics and asserts the ever-growing cooptation and commercialization of Afrikan art and labor that is created out of the stories of Afrikan personalization and artistic experimentation ranging from childhood to accounts of the experience of a dehumanized being. Looking at the way both these artists passed at the hands of systemic debt and medical inadequacy furthers the distinct disconnect with behaviors of white consumption toward Black suffering and the material and physical detachment of a community of spectators who leverage their proximity and almost anthropological expertise in this production and artistry and in turn disregard how the performance is informed by structural and captive systems they actively participate in and uphold.

**white consumption is broadly defined in this context: anyone can be a white consumer socialized within the structural confines of racialized whiteness such as class and systemic infrastructure and power relations which allow this racialism and proximity to such community detachment and fetishization to occur

03/10/2025 0 comments

Arts & Entertainment Black History Culture Opinion Political Education

Uprooting Language

by Xavier Adams 03/10/2025

written by Xavier Adams

*This article provides a detailed guideline in deconstructing language; this is to be used both as an offering to ongoing discussions and as an interpretive tool to reshape how we interact with language*

What is language? As the facilitator at the “social center of gravity,” language functions as an intersubjective process of articulating one’s relationship to the world, thereby producing a unique, autonomous identity–a requisite for resistance.

II.

One remarkable aspect of algorithmic technology is its aptitude to shatter tradition: the amazing pace at which images are uprooted from its soil and spread to a global audience creates a haze of multiplicities that drown out the origin. The doors to the past are closed; shut out, one must start anew.

III.

A walk through modern history illustrates the continuous commodification of afrikan bodies. From the enslavement of afrikan bodies through sharecropping and up to mass incarceration, the physical commodification of the afrikan body is a tale inseparable from the modern era. What about the often overlooked image: commodification facilitated not through physical bodies, but through representations?

IV.

As far as the jurisdiction of digital spaces stretches, the image reigns supreme as the chief manifestation of commodification, whether it be through fashion, music, or, most importantly, language. It is the image of afrikan language, that articulation of a unique existential experience, that becomes commodified in digital spaces. Here, one enters a practice of fetishization–a process of obsessive consumption of images that, while exploiting the represented bodies, simultaneously frames the viewer’s experiences–a natural consequence of commodifying images. The simple act of consuming such images situates the viewer–who may be Afrikan as well as non-Afrikan–as an agent of fetishization.

One does not need to spend much time on social media to get acquainted with the “ironization” of AAVE: between phrases such as “type shit” and “woke,” it is not uncommon to find another deploying such phrases for a purely humorous effect. This “ironization” is effectively an alien encounter: with the pace of algorithmic technologies bent on uprooting, to encounter AAVE in digital spaces is to “translate” it to one’s own language, to attribute it a fresh meaning, divorcing race from language, shattering the tradition of language–that unique articulation of one’s relationship with the world, that autonomous identity melts away (generalized as “Gen-Z slang”), along with the potential of resistance.

VI.

With the doors to the past now sealed, without that autonomous identity offered by language, and without appealing to an origin, how are we to start anew? What new language can be articulated to regain an autonomous identity necessary for resistance? These are the discussions we must enter in our struggle toward reimagining a liberated world.

03/10/2025 0 comments

Black History Commentary Culture News

God is Change

by Bahji Steele 03/10/2025

written by Bahji Steele

Since the LA fires started, me and I’m sure many other readers of Octavia Butler’s Parable series felt a sense of déjà vu. The neighborhood of Altadena has a rich black history that began after the civil rights movement. Before civil rights, this neighborhood was full of white ranchers and business owners. When Black/Afrikan and brown families began to move in, many white families moved out during the period, a phenomenon commonly known as “white flight”. White families did not welcome diversity in their neighborhood and their departure left opportunities for the diverse Altadena community we see today to bloom and grow. Octavia Butler grew up in Altadena. Her mother worked as a maid in wealthier white homes south of Pasadena proper. Butler received her associate’s degree from Pasadena City College and studied writing, anthropology, geology, and much more at UCLA. This was the same route of schooling my grandmother took when she came to California for college to become a nurse which led my family to settle in Altadena. Butler attended John Muir High School the same as my mother and her brothers and ironically my college roommate, an Altadena native, and his mother and generations of black families like ours. This beautiful neighborhood in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains has always been home to my family. One thing that I always particularly loved about Altadena was seeing a thriving Black/Afrikan community in LA with an abundance of green space, something most black communities in LA aren’t so fortunate to have. Altadena was always a beautiful neighborhood with its overhangs of oak trees, beautiful, lush mountains, an abundance of hiking trails and waterfalls. Altadena was the only place I wanted to dream of settling in when I grew up.

“We had fire today” reads a February 1st, 2025 diary entry in Butler’s Parable of the Sower. In the story, Lauren, a girl from the LA area living in 2024, is forced to live inside a community gated by large walls to protect herself from desperately poor starving people and a band of criminals high on a drug called pyro causing them to have arson addictions. Looking back at this story now is haunting as we enter only a few days into 2025 and the Eaton Fires have leveled the majority of the Altadena homes. The childhood home of Butler, where her grave, minimally burned in the fires.

Earthseed is the community that Lauren dreamed of, the sanctuary not only physically safe from the harshness of the outside world and the fires but a spiritual space for people. Altadena was my Earthseed, as my grandpa was escaping gang violence in Watts and my grandmother an abusive orphanage in Boston, they both came to settle in Altadena for refuge, similar to the many Altadena residents that found their way escaping the Jim Crow South. This neighborhood was a sanctuary for us and it lives on. These fires have come as a result of long-standing climate injustice and extractive practices of capitalist consumption that do not engage with the Earth in regenerative ways. However, I believe the soul of the community members of Altadena will not so easily be turned to ash.

Etched in the gravestone of Butler reads the famous quote from Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” In the pulse of Altadena, Los Angeles, and beyond, the world now breathes the change she foresaw—a change that echoes through the shifting climate, the very manifestation of Butler’s prophecy. Written in 1993, her vision stands, astonishing in its clarity. Renowned for grounding the realms of Afrikan/Black science fiction and Afrofuturism, after the tremors of early 2025, one cannot help but ask: Is this fiction—or the future? She is the living word, embodying NOMMO, and with each story, she wields the griot’s power—the power of the word, the power to shape reality.

03/10/2025 0 comments

Black History Culture

Sankofa

by Nicole Crawford 03/06/2024

written by Nicole Crawford

Sankofa.

The cycle of continuation that is the unifying thread between the past and the future, always
affecting one another. It is important to be unafraid of looking back as we move forward. Coming from the Akan people of Ghana, the wisdom of Sankofa has persevered through the trade of our enslaved ancestors to these lands and has been preserved through generations.

Today, Sankofa reminds us to harness our strength to look into the past to gain wisdom and understanding of our present. With this knowledge, we develop the strength to navigate our futures, changing what appears to be fixed and creating opportunities for healing, growth, and betterment in our communities.

Action is still necessary, given the current and past state of the many systems of violence that have prevented us from experiencing equity within this nation; however, the principle of Sankofa reminds us that revolutionary change is both an internal and external metamorphosis.

To know who we are is to know who and where we have come from. To study our ancestors is to liberate
ourselves from the chains of oppression that have discouraged us from daring to become more than
what these systems of oppression have told us we could be.

Sankofa is the remembrance that allows us to honor our breath, our lives, our hearts, our roots, and future
generations. This is how we experience the fullness of what it means to exist in harmony with one another
and the earth that sustains us.

03/06/2024 0 comments

Arts & Entertainment Black History Culture Opinion

FETISHIZATION & INTERRACIAL DATING : DATING AS AN AFRIKAN WOMAN AT UCLA

by Nyomi Henderson 03/06/2024

written by Nyomi Henderson

Dating as an Afrikan woman is comparable to competing in the Olympics; both are strenuous. Forbes recently classified fetishization as “the act of making someone an object of sexual desire based on some aspect of their identity.” Understanding the role of fetishization in our dating experiences, I want to emphasize that the humanity of Afrikan women deserves to be valued with the same regard and reverence as everyone else’s.

The combination of boredom and loneliness lures us to seek pleasures of external validation where we easily become dependent on the number of matches we get, entertain pointless conversations, and subject ourselves to fetishism.

Online dating apps like Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, and Grindr are more than familiar to students on campus. Suggestive messages like:

“Tbh girl you got some big (insert cherry emoji) I like that”

AND

“You got a voluptuous (insert peach emoji) and I’d like you to suffocate me with it”

from Bumble Member #4 have become a norm and even an expectation within the hypersexualized culture of dating apps.

It was comments like these—comments about our bodies, how dark we are, and if that is really “our hair”—that led me to understand that there was a layer on the dating fields we were experiencing as Afrikan women that our white peers didn’t.

Indy100, an online news site, recently wrote an article on a study by William J. Chopik. It quickly became even more apparent that “participants were 2.3 to 3.3 times less likely to swipe right on a Black person than a white person.” With swiping left meaning they were completely uninterested, it just wasn’t their “preference.”

While these statistics are jarring, it would be wrong to jump into the current issues of finding companionship as an Afrikan woman on dating apps without discussing some of the history and social factors that play a role in these conditions.

During slavery, there was a lack of autonomy over our relationships. We didn’t own love and we most definitely didn’t own ourselves. Love was a hard thing to pursue while balancing the multitudes of instability created by dehumanizing tactics and oppressive systems. From the selling of our children to not having the right to say no, in addition to the institution of marriage being nothing but a fleeting dream, we were often left to cut our losses.

And while we developed traditions of resistance like jumping the broom, we were still limited in our emotional freedoms, and that didn’t stop post emancipation traumas from occurring.

In “MAMIE BRADLEY’S UNBEARABLE BURDEN”, Koritha Mitchell summarized it: “Black coupling was non-existent and… white households were in danger, mobs “ku-kluxed” black homes, often raping successful black men’s wives.” White terrorists destroyed Black domestic and intimate success while insisting it never existed. Throughout history, both the relationships and the people experiencing Afrikan love have been rejected, neglected, and forgotten.

So when we ponder why Afrikan women, who are members of a highly stigmatized population and are considered the most unattractive race to date within the hierarchy of dating apps, we find our answers here.

White features have always been the main standard of purity and beauty. So, it made “sense” economically and politically for Black men to start dating outside of the community. They would soon start the search for someone they could show off to society, someone who allowed them to benefit from the external gaze and validation of others.

By others, I mean the very same white men who dehumanize them.

Afrikan women never had that privilege, nor did they benefit when it came to interracial dating. After the Jim Crow era came media tropes like the Mammy caricature where Afrikan women were portrayed as unattractive,

boring, and “motherly.”

This was a huge difference to Afrikan men who were fetishized as strong, manly, and “beasts” in bed. While both forms of fetishization are harmful, one has allowed for more social mobility than the other, even if misguided. Outside of the media’s influence on how Afrikan women are perceived by the rest of society, we still struggle to find love.

At UCLA specifically, the heterosexual male-to-female ratio is disproportionate, with the Afrikan male-to Afrikan female ratio being even more disparaging. It even led one to wonder if modern-day interracial dating has become the only choice left for cisgendered heterosexual Afrikan women seeking relationships on campus.

Second-year psychology major Ryen Clark shared her experience dating interracially. She says that after her interracial relationship (while still open to interracial dating), she felt more inclined to date within her race. It was exhausting for her, having to constantly explain her culture and deal with a multitude of microaggressions from her partner.

Audrey Ohwobete, a freshman at UCLA says, “It’s nice to talk to people and get to know everyone, but in college, people aren’t looking for relationships. Just vibing, no titles.” Third-year communications major Ayiana Scott follows that same concept by saying, “Dating within hookup culture is neither hard nor easy. If you like it, good for you, everyone should at least give it a try.”

From the Afrikan women interviewed, it seemed that there was a mixed review of what dating is like on campus. Many of us are like Ryen and Audrey. With Afrikan women being the most loyal to dating within their race, interracial dating has always been a hot topic within our community.

This doesn’t excuse the category of people who hide behind terms like “preference” and “attraction” to continue having misogynistic and eurocentric views on the type of women they choose to validate.

But I do believe it’s time we broaden our horizons beyond the Afrikan community at UCLA. It’s not worth being alone because we fear how we will be perceived. There needs to be a change in the way Afrikan women are approached and treated not just by Afrikan men, but by ALL men.

Dating in this society IS racialized. While we can’t control systematic conditions, we can control what we allow. We create safe spaces already by calling out and challenging inappropriate behavior from our peers.

This looks like no longer embracing the colorists, sexists, and racists in and outside of our community, friendship circles, and families. Taking time to delve further into the history and roots behind the divisions in our community is important when we are all searching for some form of the same thing: love.

The goal of this article is to first bring awareness to the dating climate of UCLA while also humanizing Afrikan women and validating the experiences and struggles we face dating within a predominantly white institution. To everyone reading, you are more than just your body, more than your looks, and you are definitely more than your dating experiences.

Sometimes we think that the things we go through are unique to us, but these experiences are universal to everyone. So block that man who commented on whether or not that “nyash” is homegrown and seek the love and pleasures in life that should be given to you as a human being.

Afrikan women aren’t a commodity.

Afrikan women most definitely deserve love.

03/06/2024 0 comments

Black History Culture Lifestyle Opinion

“Onwards and Upwards”

by Xavier Adams 03/06/2024

written by Xavier Adams

It is no secret that peering into the past affords us a more illustrative picture of the present and allows us to grapple with pressing issues of change, liberation, and one that I find particularly interesting, progress.

My enthusiasm may then come as no surprise once I was granted access to NOMMO’s historical archives which date back to half a century ago. The burning question in the foreground of my mind was: How does the past compare to the future?

As I dug through the archives, the headlines read: “The Perpetual Rape of Africa: The Scramble Continues” “Gates Wants it All: Battering Ram Not Enough” “The Coming Racial Struggle and the Crisis of Capitalism” “Radio Stations Refuse Airplay of Anti-Apartheid Single” “African Self-Determinism Through the Arts”

Not to mention a flier that read, “We are Promoting the Complete Unification of All Africans. We Understand this to be the Prerequisite to Liberation.”

Although these articles were published decades ago they are, in a sense, uncanny – all too familiar despite the celebrated notion of progress.

Here we witness calls to end colonial rule throughout Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East; editorials concerned with the increasingly repressive police apparatus; unrelenting social and economic racial disparities under capitalist regimes; popular media, grounded in a white standpoint, refusing to shed any spotlight on the subjugation of the subaltern; the need for independent Pan-Afrikan voices to reveal the gravity of their own oppression; and calls for nation-building through the unification of the Afrikan diaspora.

Decades have passed and yet these issues reverberate perfectly in today’s world. Neo-colonialism is well alive (a struggle that especially resonates in Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan, whose people routinely suffer from atrocious acts of injustice). Mass incarceration and police violence as instruments of oppression are well alive. The social and economic inequalities wrought by capitalism are well alive. The widespread neglect of the marginalized experience is well alive. The need for independent Pan

Afrikan voices is well alive. The fragmentation of the Afrikan diaspora is well alive.

The notion of progress within the Pan-Afrikan community is a slippery one: it is widely assumed that we have significantly – though gradually – progressed toward freedom, effectively severing ourselves from 20th-century ills. Yet, it must be asked: how much progress have we enjoyed?

To my disappointment, this all too attractive idea of significant progress is, for the most part, a

mistake. The present is marked not by linear and gradual progress but by its absence.

The ills of the 20th century are the ills of today.

03/06/2024 0 comments

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