139 Search results for "white imagination"

The white writer’s misimagination of Black characters in science fiction
by Inigo Laguda This essay contains spoilers for Another Life (2019) and Annihilation (2018) For a writer, I read astonishingly little. I chalk my aversion up to over-inundating myself with books as a boy and filling all my curious voids with grand words and fantastical tales. It’s almost like I nauseatingly engorged myself on literature […]
From John Henry to James Evans: Black men married to hard labor in the white American imagination
by Donnie MoreIand I find myself humming the theme of Good Times, quite a bit. It’s calming, in the way only Black Baptist Church Choirs can be calming. In fact, I find all of it pretty calming—Good Times, that is—because it’s so unequivocally Black, that it feels a part of my cultural genome. Now, I […]
‘Because White Men Can’t Police Their Imagination, Black Men Are Dying’
Claudia Rankine’s preeminent book on race in America, ‘Citizen’, has been given a chilling update. What used to be blank spaces now hold the names of black men killed by the police.
Why Black pain will never disarm white supremacy
A nursing book was recalled in 2017 because of the racist way that it discussed pain; how it is felt, how it is interpreted, and how it should be understood by physicians, and therefore, how it should ultimately be treated. This entry, entitled “Cultural Differences in Response to Pain,” included sections on “Arabs/Muslims,” “Asians,” “Blacks,” […]
How the imagination of the ‘Lovecraft Country’ writer’s room failed us
by Kamilah Bush This essay discusses sexual assault and r/pe. The first episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country is possibly one of the most perfect television pilots of all time, in my opinion. The opening shot, drops us in the middle of a typical enough looking war scene—it is a familiar cinematic landscape with images we […]
Police-Free schools are necessary, as is abolishing the white supremacist state they are rooted in
by Mustafa Ali-Smith As protests continue on both the national and global scale, widespread call-to-actions ramp up. Dismantling, defunding, and divesting from policing and providing police-free schools are becoming a part of everyday conversations. Early educational institutions have even begun to respond to these call-to-actions by ending their relationship with local police departments and promising […]
The endless appropriation of MLK and white supremacy’s need to rewrite historical narratives
Barely a month has passed since I wrote about appropriation and the vampiric nature of whiteness, specifically as it pertains to Black art and aesthetic. My focus was white artists and their simultaneous disavowal and infiltration of rap and hip-hop, and my purpose was to illustrate the pattern of how white society appropriates Black art […]
Shedding the need for white validation and embracing the nuances of Black knowledge
by Inigo Laguda Living Black in the internet age comes with “tipping points” – times where we witness unforgettable instances of prejudicial violence or communal disrespect against those who look like us. For some of us, that tipping point was the murder of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and/or Korryn Gaines. Some of us won’t have […]
Mental health treatment is a Black tradition, white people just took credit for it
by Imade Nibokun Black people invented mental health treatment before the “pray it away” stigma and the white supremacy that produced it. While Black folks continue to address the stigmas attached to mental illness, we must also acknowledge that Black mental health practitioners existed first. The first known physician in history is an Egyptian architect […]
Quality, art, the culture of sameness, and white men’s egos
“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together.” —”The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”, Dialectic of Enlightenment Stephen King recently tweeted, “I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to […]
Black women face greater scrutiny than white women for being polyamorous
The societal impact of straying from what is considered a norm is greater for Black people than it is for our white counterparts. by Sarah Thomas Of the many places to learn about my sexuality, That 70’s Show was as good as any. There were tons of make-out scenes and implied sex during its […]
What does “home” mean for Black folks when white violence can so easily invade our dwellings?
by Donnie Moreland One of the most haunting images to come out of the Reconstruction Era, for me, is that of the 1872 Harper Weekly engraving entitled “Visit of the Ku Klux.” It’s a crude image, taken up mostly by the figures of a Black family—a mother, her daughter and an elderly man over a fireplace […]