Art

powerful #beingblackandmuslim photo series challenges the erasure of black muslims in pop culture

April 24, 2017
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Bobby Rogers is a visual artist and designer from Minnesota whose work deals with Black identity and culture across a range of mediums. His latest project, #BeingBlackandMuslim, is a portrait series investigating existence at the intersection of Blackness and Islam. Each of Rogers’ subjects in the series is accompanied by a quote about their Black Muslim experience, a timely exploration of what it means for the largest group of Muslims in America to be forced to deal with anti-Black violence from non-Black Muslims, Islamophobia from everyone else, and the general erasure from narratives around both Blackness and Islam at the same time.

As a Black Muslim himself, Rogers explains on his website: “Simply existing at the axis of #BeingBlackandMuslim can be exhausting. You’re always not enough. Always having to validate your existence. With my #BeingBlackandMuslim series I want to put a face to the voices of some of the most resilient human-beings in the world.” Check out the powerful photos below!:

PHOTOGRAPHY: BOBBY ROGERS
Photo assistant: DesaraƩ Cox, Asma Bulale, Jared Tuttle
Text credit: Bobby Rogers, Mohamud Awil Mohamed, Vanessa Taylor, and various tweets
Check out more from Bobby Rogers at his website

*Hari Ziyad is a New York based storyteller and writer for AFROPUNK. They are also the editor-in-chief of RaceBaitR, deputy editor of Black Youth Project, and assistant editor of Vinyl Poetry & Prose. You can follow them on Twitter @hariziyad.

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