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A rebuilt home for Black feminist, abolitionist storytelling—created to protect community memory, sustain truth-telling, and expand our archive.

CHICAGO, IL (February 26, 2026) — Black Youth Project (BYP) announces the relaunch of its digital platform at a moment when Black media is being systematically eroded—from publications closing without warning to the displacement of Black women whose labor sustained newsrooms. These losses are not isolated. They are cumulative and devastating: community archives disappearing without a final issue or farewell. Teen Vogue folding into Vogue.com, major cuts at VIBE, and layoffs across NBC News’ race and culture teams reflect the same pattern of consolidation—and a shrinking commitment to Black voices in mainstream media.

BYP’s relaunch is a refusal—of erasure, of disposability, of the idea that Black stories can be treated as optional line items. It is also an offering: a renewed public space where Black youth, and the people who hold them up, can find reporting and cultural analysis that is grounded, rigorous, and accountable to community rather than institutions.

Founded in 2005 and currently directed by Black feminist scholar Professor Cathy J. Cohen, Black Youth Project was created to center the lives, struggles, and visions of Black youth. What began as a national research study has grown into a multi-dimensional ecosystem—spanning research, media, cultural production, and education—that makes Black youth (and now young adults) knowledge, culture, and resistance impossible to ignore. In 2025, BYP marked its 20th anniversary, a milestone that underscored both its longevity and its continued urgency in today’s mass media landscape. With the relaunch of its digital platform, BYP is rebuilding not only a site, but an infrastructure designed to protect Black stories, preserve memory, and expand access to an ever-growing archive.

The relaunched site is guided by a Black feminist and abolitionist approach to storytelling. BYP treats writing as memory and survival work—not “content.” The platform publishes essays, reporting, cultural criticism, archival investigations, and visual narratives that stay close to everyday life while resisting the shortcuts which can flatten communities into stereotypes, spectacle, or trend.

RELATED: Welcome Home To The Black Youth Project

While the digital footprint of BYP is important, it has spawned new initiatives. Through its research arm, GenForward, BYP produces nationally representative and recognized survey data on young people of color. GenForward is the only survey to be anchored in measuring the ideas, perspectives and actions of young people of color, incorporating oversamples of Black, Latinx and AAPI young adults into the basic structure of its samples. One of BYP’s other anchor initiatives, Black Life Everywhere, translates those insights into analysis, media, art, and prose—amplifying Black Gen Z and millennial voices while equipping organizers, educators, journalists, academics, and young adults with tools for resistance and liberation.

Across its projects, BYP documents how Black youth confront the ongoing failures of American democracy, including policing, health inequities, economic abandonment, and sexual politics. The work exposes what institutions refuse to admit: Black youth are not only shaped by these crises—they are shaping the responses, strategies, and visions that will define our collective future. BYP is both archive and arsenal, publishing commentary, cultural analysis, political surveys, and art that highlight the breadth and brilliance of Black life.

Over the past year, BYP rebuilt quietly, with a focus on editorial depth, collaboration, and care. This next chapter is being guided by Interim Editor-in-Chief Jenn M. Jackson — an award-winning author, scholar, and cultural leader whose work has shaped national conversations about Black life, gender, and power. Jackson is the author of Black Women Taught Us, a widely celebrated book that centers Black feminist traditions as sites of knowledge, memory, and political possibility, and has partnered with Black Youth Project and GenForward for more than a decade in advancing youth-centered research, storytelling, and political education.

The relaunch reflects strengthened editorial processes, deeper collaboration with contributors, and an expanded circle of writers, photographers, researchers, documentarians, and organizers who understand truth-telling as a responsibility, not a performance. The work remains grounded in accountability to the communities whose stories BYP carries.

At its core, the Black Youth Project is a refusal—to let Black people, especially young adults, be pathologized, ignored, or reduced to stereotypes. BYP affirms Black youth as producers of knowledge, architects of culture, and leaders shaping politics and resistance in real time. As coordinated  efforts to suppress Black writing continue, BYP intends to be a place where Black writers can think without hesitation, publish work that withstands pressure, and help build an archive that remembers this moment clearly and with care.

 

Media & Contributor Inquiries
info@blackyouthproject.com

About Black Youth Project
Black Youth Project is a Black-led platform founded in 2005 and currently directed by Professor Cathy J. Cohen. Grounded in Black feminist and abolitionist frameworks, BYP centers Black youth as knowledge producers and cultural leaders through research, media, analysis, and art—building public record, strengthening community understanding, and refusing erasure.

Author

  • Jenn M. Jackson (@jennmjacksonphd) (they/them) is a queer, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminist movements, racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, policing, and political behavior. They are the author of BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US (Penguin Random House, 2024) and POLICING BLACKNESS (expected in 2027). Jackson has written peer-reviewed articles at Public Culture, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Jackson received their doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2019 where they also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jackson teaches courses on Gender and Politics, Black Feminism, Black Politics, and the Politics of Racial Threat.