Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s Sundance darling period piece about the deadliest slave insurrection in American history, was purchased by Fox Searchlight on early Tuesday morning for $17.5 million. It was the largest deal in Sundance history, and coverage immediately suggested that The Birth of a Nation will function as some way through…
Last week I critiqued Bernie Sanders for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general. Some felt it was unfair to single out Sanders given that, on reparations, Sanders’s chief opponent Hillary Clinton holds the same position. This argument proposes that we abandon the convention of judging our…
The failure of the Academy Awards to recognize black performers and filmmakers creates a dangerously circular system that robs the next generation of daring and diverse cinema. Credit Photograph by Toby Canham / Getty Barrier Status: ‘none’ The Oscars almost never get it right. Alfred Hitchcock never won one; Elaine May has never won one….
Justice Here’s What Happened When Black People Tried Armed Occupation by Carimah Townes Jan 4, 2016 3:21 pm CREDIT: AP Images/George Widman The MOVE bombing of 1985 When a small group of radical militiamen linked to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon on Saturday, they vowed to…
Your book, Citizen: An American Lyric, has won the National Book Critics’ Circle poetry award in the US, the Forward in the UK and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. It exposes racism in the US at its most violent and at its most nuanced. Why the title? I called it Citizen because I…
Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Headquarters was occupied Saturday, Jan. 2, by a group of activists protesting the federal prosecution of two ranchers, slated to report to prison Monday on arson charges. (Reuters) As of Sunday afternoon, The Washington Post called them “occupiers.” The New York Times opted for “armed activists” and “militia men.” And the Associated…
When I was around 10 years old, my father confronted a young man who was said to be “crazy.” The young man was always too quick to want to fight. A foul in a game of 21 was an insult to his honor. A cross word was cause for a duel, and you never knew…
The family of Tamir Rice is lashing out against the criminal justice system after a grand jury declined Monday to indict the police officer who shot the 12-year-old at a park in Cleveland in November 2014. Rice’s family has argued the non-indictment in the case, in which a black child was killed by a white police…
Fromm Star Wars to Mad Max, a new, more diverse kind of storytelling went mainstream this year – and the backlash shows how much it matters. I saw Star Wars this week like everyone else, and yes, it was madly entertaining, and no, it wasn’t perfect, and if I want to see a film that’s…
Sorry, kid, but you had to die Shocking no one but disgusting everyone whose heart isn’t made of dog vomit, a grand jury has determined Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann was justified in shooting a 12-year-old black child dead in November 2014. Thus, after more than a year of investigation, Loehmann — whose daddy said…