Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Of all the telling moments in the new Whitney Houston documentary Whitney — and there are many — the most revealing may be a small anecdote from Debra Martin Chase, the producer of The Preacher’s Wife and the 2012 remake of Sparkle. Houston, the woman everyone seemed to like and no one really seemed to…
The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling…
Donald Glover Photo: Rich Fury (Getty Images) Over the weekend, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, dropped a video for a new song called “This Is America.” You are reading this, which means there’s a better than 90 percent chance that you’ve both seen the video and had a discussion about it already. Probably several. I…
Photo: Paras Griffin (Getty Images) I spent Saturday evening in a room full of black people, celebrating the birthday of a friend and the genius possessed by two people who were not in that room: LeBron James and Donald Glover. The first part of our night was devoted to the second half of the Cleveland…
I happened to listen to “This Is America,” the new single by Childish Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, before I saw the eloquent, ultra-violent accompanying video concocted by Glover and the director Hiro Murai. One of the song’s three strands is set to a benign Afrobeat rhythm, with Glover and a backing choir echoing old, edifying…
Police monitor activity as protestors demonstrate outside a Center City Starbucks on April 15, 2018, in Philadelphia. Police arrested two black men who were waiting inside the Starbucks, which prompted an apology from the company’s CEO. Photo: Mark Makela (Getty Images) “Don’t you fucking walk away! Don’t fucking walk away from me!” the 20-something-year-old woman…
@wcnc via Twitter screenshot In today’s example of how the American justice system treats black bodies, we take a look at Ramad Chatman, a 24-year-old man who was found not guilty by a jury of his peers but will serve seven years in prison because … Come on, you know why. Read the first two…
Artist Paul Louise-Julie counts among his inspirations the words of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, the images of Star Wars and the whispers of a Senegalese elder who opened his eyes to the oral history of West Africa. Six years ago, he challenged himself to combine these influences with his skill as an…
Disclaimer: This essay includes spoilers from the film ‘Get Out’. My freshman year of college my 5’1 blonde roommate Elizabeth busted into our suite and called me a “fucking bitch” over something I said on twitter. She was drunk and aggressive. I was sober and half-sleep. I told her to go away and she advanced…
Aude Guerrucci-Pool/Getty Images There is an old African proverb that has been passed down from the ancestors through generations of black people that goes like this: “Never trust anyone who lets people put their feet on the couch.” After meeting with the Trump administration for two days and reviewing Cheddar Bob’s executive order on HBCUs,…