A message from our editor for our white readers and friends. Rape culture and toxic masculinity are intricately embedded in, and dependent upon, white supremacy. Black lives matter. Ending rape culture is an abolitionist project; we must abolish the police. Donate to Movement for Black Lives https://secure.actblue.com/donate/movement-4-black-lives-1 or find a local organization or Black owned…
It cannot be said that The Bridges We Burn is subtle about our politics. Like our emotions, we wear our politics on our sleeves and strive for a praxis that bridges our ideals, theoretical foundations, and action for justice and equity. To that end, it is important for us to state that The Bridges We…
Educating white people about white privilege (or convincing them its a real cultural phenomenon) can be a truly monumental task. By design, whiteness has been made invisible; whiteness has been normalized and naturalized to be the baseline of human existence in the United States. Specifically, white men are the model of average. Women are gendered…
For how obsessed our culture is with sex, we are pretty terrible at talking about what good sex looks like, how to have it by talking with our partners about mutual and shared pleasure, how to ask for what we want, how to say what we don’t. We are especially really terrible at teaching our…
For generations, white folks have had the privilege of not usually having to think about themselves as having a race. White, like man, has been naturalized in the United States as a neutral state of being. People of color have a race that makes them different from “normal” [white] people. Similar narratives establish women as…
Comedy can be an incredible tool for furthering social justice by challenging seats of power and shining light on uncomfortable truths. Alternatively, comedy is often wielded by those with power—straight white men—to perpetuate oppression and discrimination by picking on people marginalized by society; by punching down. In Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special, “Nanette,” the Tasmanian comic squares her…
We still have far to go in our understanding and discussion of the violences of men in the United States and abroad. Domestically, there has been increasing recognition in the wake of acts of mass violence in schools that a common trait in each of the perpetrators–who are predominantly young white men–is a history of violence…
On April 20, 1999, I was barely a month into my 16th year, a sophomore in high school full of angst, unrequited love, joy, and maybe a little anger. For years one of my favorite songs was Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” the grunge anthem to teen angst and anger, but more so an ode to sadness…