by Tracy Chahwan

by Ezra Claytan Daniels

This comic originally appeared in LAAB Magazine #2: Eat/ Shit, published by Beehive Books, 2021.

by Paul Pope

This comic originally appeared in LAAB Magazine #2: Eat/ Shit, published by Beehive Books, 2021.

by Gyimah L. Gariba

This comic originally appeared in LAAB Magazine #4: This Was Your Life!, published by Beehive Books, 2019.

by Ronald Wimberly

by James Romberger

Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

-Aimé Césaire

I never knew Jean-Michel Basquiat, although we were of the same time and place and had friends in common, but I recognized his abilities the moment I saw his work. I can still recall how his painting resonated from the wall in a closely hung group show at CHARAS in the early eighties. It rivaled the intensity of the Alice Neel portrait across from it. Although his paintings have singular appeal in terms of their brilliant coloring alone and their…

by Ronald Wimberly

My earliest memories of the word “Nigger” — or “nigga” — are of it fluttering about cookouts or family functions. Some old uncle would say it, cigarette dancing metronomically on his lip. Back then, if “nigger” had an odor, it’d be Heineken and Salem menthols; its sound, my childhood, of candor. It was a magic word. If “nigger” could be heard, or spoken without pain, we were in a safe place. And nigger wasn’t always a term of endearment. For instance, when prefixed with “dis-”, “nigga” often signaled frustration or even mild disgust. …

by Elizabeth Young

Monster metaphors matter. They show what a culture demonizes and they provide a vocabulary for those who are marked as monstrous to resist. I have been tracking a particularly revealing and protean monster metaphor for some years. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein offers no overt discussions of racial identity for the creature who is assembled from disparate corpses and reanimated and who then rebels violently against his maker. But the figure of a Black Frankenstein monster appears with surprising frequency in U.S. culture from the nineteenth century onward, across many media, in direct and indirect references, and in…