Rob Dozier

photo credit: Nolis Anderson A reboot of classic ‘70s comic book series, Marvel Team-Up , will be making its debut this year. In the first new installment of the series Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man will be joining forces with one prominent Black writer at the helm—Eve Ewing. The artist and writer is no stranger to the comic book wo rld or Marvel. Ewing is also the mind behind Marvel’s Ironheart series featuring Riri Williams, a protégé of Ironman. She has also worked on an issue of the Ms. Marvel series, which is due in February. The Chicago-native and University of Chicago professor made the announcement about Marvel Team-Up last week on Twitter. wanna know something BANANAS?!?!?! i got to work with a super all-star squad on MS. MARVEL 38, dropping february 13!!!! i’m really grateful for the trail blazed by @GWillowWilson and honored to help celebrate her with this special 5-year anniversary issue. cover by @sara_pichelli pic.twitter.com/9X02064yPc — wikipedia brown (@eveewing)...

This article was originally published on 01/15/2019 Mark Luckie came to prominence by being a leading voice for the tech industry to reckon with when it came to its lack of diversity—most notably when he left his position as a Strategic Partner Manager at Facebook last November citing the company’s “black people problem” in an open letter. His departure left the journalist-turned-tech executive with some tough decisions to make. Specifically, if he was going to return to the tech industry at all and what his next project would be. Luckily for him, he never works on one project at a time and he already had something in the works, far away from Atlanta, where he’s based: Sumeria . Sumeria is a narrative fiction podcast that follows a group of humans as they travel through space searching for a suitable home as unrest is beginning to make Earth a harder place to live for Black people. The all-Black crew left Earth for various reasons, but when they arrive on Sumeria–a colony on a...

Comic books have been battlegrounds for issues of social justice and identity— and for good reason. What qualities deem someone as worthy to be a hero speaks volumes in the real and fantasy world. That’s true of Ironheart #1 , the first installment of a series following Riri Williams, an engineering student at MIT who moonlights as a superhero, equipped with her very own armor that she designed herself. Riri first debuted in Invincible Iron Man as an amateur inventor who gets a co-sign from Tony Stark himself, but this is her first time leading a series. This past summer, Marvel announced that Eve Ewing –a writer, artist and sociology professor at the University of Chicago, best-known for her book, Electric Arches — would be writing the series. We’re first introduced to Riri as she’s flying through the sky in her suit, musing on her personal history, the death of her father, and how she will step into her newfound role as a hero. Upon her arrival to MIT’s campus, she’s greeted by...

The economic and social stability of Detroit, Michigan has long been in decline since the fall of the city’s dominant auto industry, which many residents relied on. And the city’s government has failed to keep in step with its declining population and rising levels of poverty. The situation being so dire, that in 2013, Detroit declared bankruptcy because it was an estimated $18 billion in debt. One of the ways that this has affected the city’s population — which is roughly less than 700,000 and more than 80 percent black — is its handling of water. Recently, lead was found in the water fountains in Detroit public schools, and for years residents have decried the city’s policy of water shutoffs in homes. In 2014 Tiffani Ashley Bell, a developer and computer science graduate of Howard University, learned of the water crisis and decided she had to act. She found a document on the website of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that laid out all of the past due accounts in the...

Shortly after Cynthia Gordy Giwa moved to the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn four years ago, she set out to learn about the different businesses in the area. “I was noticing, a lot of black-owned businesses in my neighborhood,” said Giwa.  “And then finding that there wasn’t a resource where I could read about them. A lot of the places were being overlooked by other local lifestyle sites.” So, she called up her friend, Glenn Alan — who has a background in marketing and photography, and has lived in Brooklyn on and off for 10 years — and he expressed a similar frustration. After some thought, they decided to create their own resource to fill that void. Not long after that conversation, they launched a site called Black-Owned Brooklyn, which highlights black business owners and culture  in an area that has a rich history of black culture and innovation. Since launching in February, Black Owned Brooklyn has amassed over 15,000 followers — far surpassing all goals Giwa and Alan set...

In the early days of the internet, tech entrepreneurs and public thinkers opined that it would save democracy. Wider access to all kinds of information and the ability to connect and share ideas with anyone anywhere had the potential to revolutionize how we interacted with the wider world. And in many ways, it did do those things, but—as Facebook’s recent privacy scandal , the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and the repeal of net neutrality rules has shown us—it’s just as capable of serving corporate or government interests, with disregard for the rights and interests of individuals. Recently, there have been grassroots efforts to move the needle closer to the original ethos of the internet. Projects like Mastodon provide framework for what a social media platform not owned and operated by a corporate giant coud look like, and the rise of blockchain technology has shown how media and other industries can operate with more transparency when more power is given to...