media, race, and pop culture explained
Today mark 50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. While his name glosses the lips of Americans every time the struggle for racial equity comes up, his legacy and his work atrophy even as we speed towards a majority-minority population. It has been a lifetime since King bespoke his famous dream–my lifetime in […]
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Kids love superheroes. Though recent decades have found superheroes skewing older with the explosion of comic cons and an indistry hungry for hot characters in barely-there costumes kicking ass and laying waste, let’s not forget that superheroes are also the bread and butter of childhood dreams. We already know that Black Panther is for black people, a […]
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1 Its cold and traffic is terrible as the Uber inches ahead toward the light. I look out the left-hand side window and see row houses, thin, stacked up against each other, some remodeled, others older and decaying, their history in plain sight. Row houses in Georgetown were created to house the slaves and free […]
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Marvel’s much anticipated Black Panther is set to open February 16, but if you haven’t gotten your ticket yet you may find yourself out of luck. Movie tickets went on sale this week and soon after began to sell out. Even Black Panther star Lupita N’yongo found herself ticketless for opening night. @THR says @theblackpanther is @MarvelStudios best-selling […]
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On the West Coast of Africa sits a gleaming white castle where over 300,000 Africans were tortured, raped and broken before being shipped to the Americas to work until they died. I anticipated I would be moved when I visited there, and even so was unprepared for the pulsating energy of this place, the feeling of a […]
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For white men, acts of extreme violence are ubiquitous, they are normalized, and they are celebrated. This makes sense in a country where we read perpetrating genocide as brave. This ideology trickles down to individuals, loading them like weapons and unleashing them in a world full of potential victims.
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I see a line of armed militia invade an American street; khaki clad men with pith helmets and pepper spray; I see Klan members and skins heads–young men, a new generation marching with torches–with torches; a car runs into a crowd. I watch. I watch it again. I watch it over and over and over–new […]
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