An Interview with Darrel Kennedy and Alice Otieno of Blacks of Are.na

Meg Miller: How did you two meet?

Darrel Kennedy: Honestly, Alice, you may have a better memory of it than me. We definitely met on Are.na, no doubt. So shout out to Are.na for bringing the dynamic flow together [laughs]. I just remember coming across this dope profile where every single channel I was seeing, I was floored. We met — five years ago, probably?

Alice Otieno: Yeah, four or five. 

Darrel: This was while I was doing the Blacks of Are.na channel, so I was really trying to find bits of gold for the gold mine, to add into the channel. I was like, “you know what? I gotta reach out to this person.” She had her email accessible on her profile, and I remember sending you an email and being like, “Hey, this is who I am. Do you want to have a virtual coffee?” And then we met, and immediately we wanted to make art together.

Alice: My recollection is also similar. There were two specific channels of Darrel’s I kept going back to. One was the Blacks of Are.na channel. And the second one, even to this day when I read it, I hear it in your voice. It's the WOW. OH MY GOSH. channel [laughs].  

Darrel: [laughs]

Alice: After seeing the face behind it, I’m like, this is so something Darrel would say, and I can see you coming across the various media that you share and being like, “wow, oh my gosh.” But I remember that you dm’d me and we started having these virtual coffees every month and when I’d visit LA we’d meet in person. And then one time I was in New York after you had moved to Chicago… 

Darrel: She got me that time because she called me and told me, “I'm in New York. It's now or never.” I ended up getting a flight to Philly from Chicago and then taking the bus to New York and we spent the weekend together.

Alice: The whole time we were like, this kind of feels like an Are.na field trip.

Meg: [laughs] Are.na should do a field trip. Charter a bus…

Darrel: Go to Yosemite or something and everyone like, reflects [laughs].

Meg: You both mentioned Blacks of Are.na, the channel, which is the origin of Blacks of Are.na, the group. Darrel, you started that channel about 5 years ago, right?

Darrel: Yeah I had just gotten on Are.na. I think Blacks of Are.na was within the first five to 10 channels I made.¹ The thought I was having when I started using Are.na was, “where are the Black people?” I thought it was dope that there's no algorithm, that was a breath of fresh air. But I also felt like I was just following people because they were showing me things that looked cool, and I wanted to feel more connected than that. The thing about algorithm-forward sites is that, like, Instagram can figure out I’m Black right away, you know? They're gonna show me The Shade Room and all the other “Black” stuff. And I have to admit, I like that. So I was wondering how I could curate that in my own way.

It really started out just as a selfish resource. But within the first two years or so, I realized other people were using it almost as an index to find other members who are Black. It wasn’t a community at first, it was more like a tool. And that's one of my favorite things about where it's at now, that it’s both a community and a tool. But yeah, it really just started as a need to feel like I saw myself in this void of — and pun not intended — void of whiteness. You know, the site is literally just a white page. I wanted to see more on my feed that felt like it existed in the world that I exist in, or that I want to exist in. A space compiled of the interests of other Black intellectuals.

Meg: I like that your impulse was to basically become your own algorithm and organize that for yourself and for others. When did the shift happen, when you started making it more into the active community that it is now?

Darrel: I started meeting people like Alice, Cedric Payne, Van Newman. We were really just connecting as peers — we liked each other’s channels and wanted to be friends — but the more people I met, the more I felt like we had to get everybody in the same room.

Van was actually the first person who helped me to see that Blacks of Are.na could be a community. Van has experience in community management at Ethel's Club and Somewhere Good. They gave me the advice that we needed to be doing regular meetings and have some sort of central messaging space, since there are no dms or group messaging on Are.na. That helped me to create the blueprint of what Blacks of Are.na is today, but Van was really clear that they just wanted to be a member, they didn’t want to help run it because that’s what they were doing for their day job. Fast forward a couple of years…my friendship with Alice was really blossoming, and the community wanted to do something for Black History Month, which is how Afroconnection, our first virtual meeting, came to be. This is when Alice officially joined the team, and our real momentum as a community picked up.

Meg: So you all have virtual meet ups, you have the Discord. You also have a Cinema Club, where different members host and you highlight certain directors… 

Darrel: Cinema Club was born out of a desire to meet up regularly with intention. For the first couple of Cinema Clubs, it was just me and Alice [laughs]. I think the second one was literally like a FaceTime call. It wasn't until the birth of the Substack and the newsletter that we actually started to see some stickiness within the community and people melding together.

Meg: I really like the member highlights in the newsletter. It’s a nice way of surfacing people doing interesting things, and connecting their research/activity on Are.na to their wider life and practices, online and off. And I get to be introduced to all these new people. What have your experiences been meeting people through this group?

Darrel: The member highlights were a way for us not just to be this private club, but also be a window for people to look in. We wanted to put a spotlight on the people who want to be seen. The first one we did was with my friend Justin, aka STR33T, which is someone I've known since he was in middle school. Since we know each other so personally, we just got on a call and talked for so long. I realized I wanted the tone to be like that first phone call with Justin, I want people to hear the trust and relationship we have to open up about things beyond the professional. Interviews can feel very industry and networky, and I wanted people to just talk about their human experience, not even about their Black experience specifically, but just the uniqueness of them. The fact that they're Black is already a part of it.

Alice: One thing that comes to mind when speaking to why we started the member highlight series is just seeing how Darrel and my friendship blossomed over time — it went from “oh, this is a really cool professional creative on an app” to bonding over mutual interests, to seeing that relationship develop, and then realizing “actually this is a whole human with expansive experiences that other people need to know as well.” We wanted to do that for others, too. I think that's something that Are.na as a platform does really successfully as well, with the Channel Walkthroughs or the Montez Press Radio features — getting people to talk about their life, and seeing at which points their curiosities and their work intersect with them just living and breathing in this world, and grappling with everything that we have to.

Darrel: Alice has some of the dopest Blacks of Are.na coincidental meetings. Do you want to speak to that?

Alice: I think the first one I made was with my friend Peter Johnson in New York. He has a fashion and lifestyle brand called P96. Similarly to Darrel, we started off with email exchanges and then I would see him when I was in New York. I also met my friend Tanner, who goes by Present Hands on Are.na, last year. His primary interest is music, and he reached out because he wanted to do a podcast series. But Tanner and I kept having calls every other month or so, and now we're making music together. 

Darrel: It's like a web. You and Tanner, then Tanner and Jvon are really good friends. Jvon is a member of Blacks of Are.na, very vocal, has attended multiple Cinema Club screenings, and always brings super interesting things to the conversation. I recently realized that one of my best friends, Amira Green, who actually ended up stepping in as a graphic designer on the merch drop, also knows Jvon personally. That's been one of the most rewarding things about the member community of Blacks of Are.na, it’s almost like this central way to bring light to a lot of these different connections.

Meg: How has taking part of B.O.A. and interacting with other Black artists, writers, technologists, researchers, etc. on Are.na changed your experience of using it? 

Alice: I remember two pivotal moments in a screening and in the first Afroconnection. The first one was with Greg when he spoke about his channel Moorish Empire. The second instance was when we did a screening and watched Neptune Frost. These moments really changed my relationship to how I organize information. I use Are.na to catalog and index articles I'm reading or quotes from books that I want to remember. Given that there's so much to learn within my own cultural experience as a Black person, but also within other cultural experiences, B.O.A. has shown me that this process can be done in community with others.

You can have these spaces and conversations where you can say “I don't really understand that,” or “this history is really challenging.” Through something like a film or someone speaking about their channel, you're able to share in a more open forum as opposed to the silo of reading and having to grapple with these issues yourself. It also heightened the responsibility I have to this lifelong journey of continuing to learn about other people's history within the global Afro diaspora. Sometimes it can be heavy within our histories, but I think there's so much beauty in it. I've gained that perspective through Blacks of Are.na, being able to do this work collectively.

Meg: That feels like a good transition to the Juneteenth project you’re releasing today through the Are.na Gift Shop, “In Honor of Juneteenth (2025).” Where did the idea for this project come from?

Darrel: We were riding high off of this great Afroconnection 2025 event we had this year. Shout out Bastian Joseph Andres. We wanted to do something for Juneteenth, and we knew whatever we did we wanted to be in partnership with Are.na. It felt like a good time to reach out, with the success we had seen with our newsletter, with Afroconnection, and the recent growth of the group. We just emailed Are.na and asked if we could run an idea by you all. We decided to do merch because it was something Are.na has done before, and I did a lot of merch production during my years at Seed. When we were etching out what we wanted to create and why, we returned to the intention behind last year's gifting, which was two playlists of audio books written by Black authors “Written in Our Image” and “Written in Our Imagination.”

We thought Juneteenth was a great time to re-focus on the power of access to knowledge and how learning how to read and write was such a huge marker of liberation for formerly enslaved people of the transatlantic slave trade. Celebrating Juneteenth to us feels like acknowledging the entirety of the story and not only addressing the impact of information withheld, but also the power reclaimed when we have access to it. We identified The Reading Room, a Houston-based organization started by one of our members, Amarie Gipson, as the place we wanted to tie into in an effort to keep the mission of this campaign alive beyond the 19th.

The work that Amarie’s been doing amplifies archiving, empowerment through education, and reading, plus the space is so close to the origin story of Juneteenth — Galveston, Texas. So we were like, “Okay, let's really grow where we're rooted and build around the world that Amarie exists in.” We wanted to shed light on the Black community in Houston that was aligning with our message about access to information. We partnered on the T-shirts with Mitchell Reece, a Houston-based artist, educator, and archivist who we learned about through Amarie and The Reading Room. His paintings are on the T-shirts, and it’s become this really great gift to be able to give people to remind ourselves to intentionally leverage our access to information and our ability to read freely and write freely and continue this fight forward.

Alice: After we sent our creative brief to Mitchell, he came back with this incredible mood board featuring these different archives that he keeps: photos from magazines, family archives, and typography. His work is heavily inspired by his personal heritage and ancestral heritage. He works with painting, but he’s also worked with print and collaging. The way his painting style digitized made it feel so tactile. 

Meg: Yeah the art on the T-shirts feels so layered in a way, there’s some depth to it, which also feels related to memory, history, and archiving. It also makes me think of all of the research that grounds this project. 

Darrel: There’s a duality to the project, too, that I think contributes to the layered feeling. The names of the T-shirts, Written in Our Image and Written in our Imagination, speak to this duality: your memory and your imagination. Last year’s gifts were given these titles in an effort to distinguish fiction (imagination) from non-fiction (image) literature — but what books are truly 100% fiction or 100% fact? Similarly, the design of each shirt distinguishes information that we record (image) from information that we create (imagination). These seemingly polarizing themes have shared pathways that intricately connect one into the other. This we incidentally expressed in the artwork of both shirts. 

The Written in Our Image T-shirt symbolizes documentation and archiving.  On the front of the shirt, you see a little boy whispering in the ear of a little girl, sharing a story. This symbolizes both the importance yet delicateness of exchanging information. On the back is the actual declaration given to people in Galveston on June 19, 1865. We told Mitchell to annotate it — go crazy, write notes on the thing, treat it like your personal record. At one point, you know, he scratches out “slaves” and puts in “ancestors.” A perfect example of ways we may reshape minor (yet mighty) elements like language to adjust our lens on the past without diluting the factual elements of the history.

Then we have the Collector’s Edition, Written in our Imagination T-shirt, which features a painting by Mitchell Reece recapturing an image of Reverend Jack Yates’ daughter on a chariot covered in flowers celebrating Juneteenth in 1908 at Emancipation Park in Houston. Clippings from the actual photo are layered on top in a collage-like fashion expressing the relationship between what we create and what’s referenced as we imagine. Reverend Yates took his freedom, took the rights he was given in that declaration, and bought the land that is now Emancipation Park. But he also took it a step further and built out the most souped up, Pimp My Ride-like chariot with a bunch of beautiful white flowers for his daughters. You know, that was such a big part of slavery, losing your children, being separated from your family. Yates still has his daughters, and he’s gonna put them on a pedestal and ride them through the land he bought to celebrate his freedom. I feel like that’s just the coolest display of black imagination, legacy, and what we are able to accomplish when we leverage our privilege to prosper as a people. 

We want people to see this drop and be reminded of the power and privilege they already yield. To take a break from doomscrolling and to be more intentional about the information they consume, the time they spend, and what they do with it once reclaimed. The level of access you have in this world and the opportunities it’s afforded you may be an ancestor’s answered prayer.

The shirts Written in Our Image and Written in Our Imagination, as well as a Blacks of Are.na vinyl sticker are now available in the Are.na Gift Shop.

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You can find Blacks of Are.na on Are.na, as well as through their Substack, Instagram, Spotify, and Luma. If you want to contribute to the group, email [email protected]  — they’re looking for graphic designers, writers, community leaders, and any others with creative/operational talents that might be helpful.