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. […]
The fight for diversity in publishing is happening on social media. On April 24, 2014 Aisha Saeed one of the founders of We Need Diverse Books tweeted: No diverse authors at #BookCon None. Nada. Zilch. #nowords http://t.co/iGza0WYXHL … #weneeddiversebooks @BookRiot — Aisha Saeed (Amal Unbound Out May 8!) (@aishacs) April 24, 2014 The groundwork for […]
When the Black Panther movie was announced it sparked renewed interest in Afrofuturism. What is it? What are its characteristics? Is the Black Panther even a good example of Afrofuturism? Like all of the great debates of our time, the debate about Afrofuturism happened on social media: on the Elysian plane of reason and measured rhetoric that […]
What is a utopia? What do you imagine? Do you imagine moving sidewalks and flying cars, teleportation machines, world peace? Utopia, defined by Sir Thomas Moore in his book Utopia (1516), is an imaginary place, an ideal state, a visionary system. In 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby imagined a utopia, an idea of an Africa untouched […]
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the American Dream: “I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block association, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.” […]
