A neighbourhood in Brooklyn that has been Black since the 1800s has gone from 75% Black to 40% in twenty years.
Not because people moved. Because their houses were taken with paperwork.
American Gods (2017) looked like it was going to be television’s next great fantasy series. Season 1 was visually daring, unapologetically weird, and unlike anything else on TV. Then Bryan Fuller and Michael Green left before Season 2.
Black gay bars are closing while everybody profits off Black queer culture. Ballroom gets copied, our slang gets recycled, our aesthetics get monetized, & suddenly non-Black people are the face of “Black gay” events.
How do u consume the culture but erase the people who built it?
“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”
A short list of everyone who got reparations:
- slave owners who went bankrupt after the Civil War
- Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
- Japanese survivors of US internment camps
- Native Americans through the Indian Claims Commission and multiple other legislation
- Miners for radiation exposure
- Sterilization victims
- U.S. farmers during Trump 1.0
There is no reason Black people shouldnt be compensated for centuries of slavery and decades of segregation. We’re not even out of Jim Crow.
In 2020s film & TV, there is a complete erasure of dark skinned black women. It makes so uncomfortable that these supposed writers are so disillusioned about who black women are, they decide to pretend we don't exist at all. Meanwhile, black women create the discussion and discourse around the fucking shows. We have to stop watching.
I just want to point out....
The amount of money the United States has spent on war in the last 67 days, is roughly the same cost that Bernie Sanders proposed for universal college. So the real question is never can we afford it, it's what we choose to prioritize.
“The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates