Don Lemon to be arraigned. HGTV Host Drops N-Word. Black women Jobless Spike. Wilson-Raleigh March.

A 2025 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute revealed a significant increase in the unemployment rate for Black women, rising from 5.8% to 6.7%. Concurrently, their labor force participation dropped from 60.6% to 59.7%, indicating more Black women are leaving the workforce. College-educated Black women experienced the steepest losses, with employment falling over 3.5 percentage points. Researchers suggest this trend may be tied to the rollback of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.

In 2025, black women's unemployment rate, it dropped to 55.7% while unemployment rose 5.8 to 6.7%. The report also found that black women's labor force participation from 60.6 6 to 59.7% suggesting that more black women have left the workforce entirely. College educated black women saw some of the steepest losses with employment dropping more than 3.5 percentage points. A shift that researchers say may be tied to the roll back of corporate DEI programs.

The 'Love Forward Together' moral march, organized by Bishop William J. Barber II and others, is a multi-day, 50-mile nonviolent protest from Wilson to Raleigh, North Carolina. The march aims to mobilize voters for the primary elections, counter efforts to redistrict and dilute the Black and progressive vote (especially in Congressional District 1), and resist policies like ICE deployments. Participants advocate for voting rights, immigrant communities, public education, and healthcare, highlighting how gerrymandering silences entire voting blocks and makes people feel invisible.

marching 50 miles from Wilson making our way west and we've now made it into the city limits of the state capital rally... there's a big push uh to make sure people are registered, people are showing up... a movement in response to the behavior of the Trump administration, to efforts to redistrict during the off years, to efforts to to deploy ICE agents into neighborhoods... Congressional District One is what we actually marched through the first day completely... they're trying to be wiped out with the Jerry Mander maps.

Poet Black Chakra asserts that poetry serves as a vital 'coded language' for Black people, enabling them to express truths and narratives that mainstream media often ignores. He views the modern Black poet's role as a 'artivist'—an artist and activist—responsible for speaking on important issues, ensuring Black history and struggles are not forgotten, and providing uplifting messages while acknowledging past horrors. This tradition, he explains, mirrors historical practices like Capoeira, where resistance was hidden within cultural forms.

Poetry allows black people to say things that mainstream media refuses to carry? Absolutely... we put it in music or comedy, somehow it's not as in their face as someone like Malcolm X was, even though we're saying the same things that Malcolm X was saying, we just rhyme it and it it speaks to us in a code. Black people, as a people, we have always spoken different codes. The invention of the martial art form capoera was a fight style that was hidden in dance so that they could fool their slavers.

Black Chakra argues that America fears Black storytelling because 'their children listen.' This fear, historically seen with phenomena like Elvis's 'Black sound' or the rise of hip-hop, is rooted in the concern that once non-Black audiences understand the Black plight, it becomes impossible to ignore. Efforts to control or 'erase' Black history and narratives through book bans or pushing specific messages in music are attempts to maintain ignorance and prevent the empowerment that comes from understanding Black history, which is presented as integral to world history.

What do you think America is afraid of when it comes to black storytelling? Well, this interesting thing happens when we tell our stories. Their children listen... they're afraid of Tommy and Timmy and Ted and Chaz listening to what we have to say, adopting it, and adapting to it, understanding that there's a plight that we come from. Because once you see our plight, you can't ignore it.

Author George M. Johnson, whose memoir 'All Boys Aren't Blue' is one of the most challenged books in the country, explains that the book's banning is a deliberate act to avoid self-reflection on the 'horrors' caused by societal prejudices. Johnson emphasizes the importance of restoring queer Black history, as seen in his book 'Flamboyance,' to ensure that young Black queer individuals have heroes and understand their legacy, countering the systemic erasure of figures like Marsha P. Johnson from historical narratives. This work aims to put people back into conversations from which they were intentionally excluded.

when these people can't go um oh that that would be sad if that happened to somebody and they have to read a book where it's like they have to look in the mirror and look at the horrors that they may have caused on another person. Um it's easier for them to eradicate the text than to uh actually have to look at themselves in the mirror... my job now is to restore that so that people one know that they have history and legacy and that they've been here before so that we're not some an anomaly in the system.