001.
A Year of the Movement for Black Lives
The movement for Black lives is in the news every other day—protesting on college campuses, demonstrating against police violence, and demanding answers to problems of racial justice from the county’s highest offices. But how do you keep fighting when the deaths and injustices seem to be stacking up higher and higher every day? How do you keep your head above water when the struggle against oppression threatens to drown you?
In this zine, a collection of 13 young Black Americans—artists, activists, musicians, writers, and scholars—share their own experiences with American anti-Blackness, their thoughts on the movement, and how they’ve coped along the way. Together they form an emotional and empowering snapshot of Black life in the midst of changing tides.
002.
The Master's Tools
With the Black Lives Matter movement revving up across the country, student activists are taking their place in the struggle to reshape the Black experience in the United States. In the next issue of Wade in the Water, we ask: what is the ideal experience for African-American students at American universities? More than racial sensitivity training and an eliminating racist microagressions in the classroom and elsewhere on campus, what today’s protestors are demanding, and what many pearls-clutching journalists fear, is a complete reimagining of how a college education should serve students. So, what would it mean to reconcile a system built to maintain the privilege of the victors with the needs and knowledge of the oppressed groups? And how can we meet these needs while still giving these same students the knowledge they need to operate in a world driven by the canon they are trying to dismantle?
A mix of Black activists and educators from across the country and across academic disciplines offer up their own experiences, hopes, and ideas on answering this conundrum in Wade in the Water Issue 2. You can read here.