In the television show, Once Upon a Time, the Pied Piper is really Peter Pan who is really Rumplestiltskin’s father who is really the crocodile whose ticking belly might be only ticking in Captain Hook’s mind, who may not be the villain he is made out to be. The story goes that Captain Hook wasn’t […]
My mother said we ought to watch it together, Surviving R. Kelly. We’d talked about his case around my grandmother’s kitchen table, and we all agreed that it was disgusting, terrible, sad. We sang “Step in the Name of Love” in parody of ourselves, or at least the selves who had danced to it at […]
I packed next to my cardigans and tampons, my three Tyler Perry DVDs, counted among the essentials for my impending freshman year of college. They fit neatly at the bottom of my suitcase, flush against the bottom, the hard plastic a contrast to the soft fabric cushioned against it. I’d found them in a 5$ […]
I cannot find my high school id card, but let me describe it to you. I was 13 and my hair had been relaxed for precisely 11 months. It hung straight down to my shoulder blades, prone to waltzing in the wind. I am smiling, and I cannot remember why because I had just gotten […]
In a vacuum, the film Green Book is as innocuous as they come. It’s a “buddy movie.” You know the one. Opposites attract when immovable forces bring them together. Your heart will be warmed. It’s supposed to. A sense of amity will suffuse you. You might cry. That’s okay, it happens to the best. […]
To celebrate Black History “What About White History Month” Month in the year 2019 of our Lady Beyoncé, Esquire magazine drafted a flaccid profile of the white American male and his harrowing transition from having all of the social, economic and political power to only having most of it. It’s February, the shortest month of […]
According to Ancestry.com, I am composed thus: Benin/Togo, 40% My grandmother went to Ghana and a woman touched her face and traced a path across her forehead and down her nose and back three hundred years. You’re from Mauritania, she said. I googled “people of Mauritania,” looking for my face, my mother’s face, some […]
Last year, I reviewed Angie Thomas’s debut novel The Hate U Give. Marketed as the Black Lives Matter book, the film rights sold before the copies hit the shelves. With few exceptions, The Hate U Give has remained atop the Young Adult New York Times Bestseller list since its publication. It tells the story of Starr Carter […]
Picture this. A green field of happy black people swaying on the melody of being for a time, carefree. On a Sunday in August, I stood in a field in Commodore Park, Brooklyn with 70,000 people, mostly black—all kinds of black—and sang in one accord with The Electric Lady herself, “Highly melanated. ArchAndroid orchestrated. Yeah, […]
On September 24, 2017, writer and activist Justina Ireland wrote a review of the YA novel, American Heart by Laura Moriarity. Her review, entitled “American Heart, Huck Finn and the Trap of White Supremacy” is critical of Moriarity’s choice, as a white author, to write a narrative about the American-Muslim experience with a white protagonist. […]
