Yara Shahidi Is a New Kind of Young Hollywood Mogul

This story originally published on August 12, 2020 in WSJ. Mag

Ask Yara Shahidi how she self-identifies and she will reply that she is not an activist but “a creative and socially engaged human.” The 20-year-old polymath has been in the entertainment industry since first appearing in TV commercials at the age of 6, and she made her big-screen debut alongside Eddie Murphy in the 2009 comedy Imagine That. Since then, starring roles on Kenya Barris’s series black-ish and grown-ish—playing cool older sister Zoey Johnson—have placed her among the vanguard of young Hollywood. Shahidi has also been a brand ambassador for Chanel and Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and was featured in several ad campaigns for Coach. For her young fans, she’s served as a voice on social justice in the arts and more. Her personal social media channels put her politics into practice: One day, she’s leading a back-and-forth with her fans about the works of James Baldwin via Instagram, and the next, creating a TikTok urging teens to register to vote. She’s also currently enrolled as a full-time student at Harvard University.

Now the actress, alongside her mother, Keri Shahidi, aims to take her reformist energy behind the camera. The two Shahidis are the co-presidents of the newly formed 7th Sun Productions, part of a overall deal with ABC Studios, announced last month. Her mother is an actress herself, and her father, Afshin Shahidi, is a cinematographer who was formerly Prince’s personal photographer. Shahidi views this new endeavor as one for her whole family, and she says that “the goal at the end of the day is to make powerful media but to also push the door wide open.”

The day of WSJ.’s conversation with Shahidi happens to be the one-year anniversary of her idol Toni Morrison’s death. “Toni Morrison set the foundation for these conversations,” she says, referring to the Nobel Prize winner’s efforts to prioritize Black life and stories. “Pushing back on the sentiments of Blackness having to be universalized in a way that isn’t expected of a Pride and Prejudice,” says Shahidi. “Those worlds did not have us in mind when they were being created.” Indebted gratitude, as Shahidi calls it, is a guiding principle of hers as she looks to Morrison and Baldwin for guidance on how to stay authentic to her artistic passions.

For the past few years, Shahidi headed a youth vote initiative called Eighteen x 18 and worked alongside progressive news site NowThis. They hosted an in-person summit for youth activists in 2018 with over 120 young activists in attendance. For the 2020 election, she and the initiative, now going by WeVoteNext, are working to provide accurate candidate information to first-time voters.

Here, in her own words, Shahidi explains the formation of 7th Sun Productions, imagining new worlds in media and her voting initiatives. 

Versace dress, price upon request, select Versace stores, Shahidi’s own bracelets. Styling by Jason Bolden, Hair by Keri Shahidi, Makeup Direction by Emily Cheng. 
PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHED BY TEXAS ISAIAH

It took months to find a name for 7th Sun. We wanted to make sure that the first touchpoint with us was very clear as to what we represented. Funny enough, I was in conversation with [philosopher and public intellectual] Dr. Cornel West, and he was talking about W.E.B. Du Bois. Having read The Souls of Black Folk, I noted that Du Bois says that the Black person is the seventh son, s-o-n. We’d wanted to find a way to use that but also subvert it, to degender it, which was how we arrived at seventh sun, s-u-n. 

I’ve always viewed our family as being all-around creative. It was never a conversation of Well, I really want to do this and them saying no. It was Dream bigger and dream more. Production has been a field that our family has been passionate about for years. As an actor, I find it’s exciting because for once, the stories we get to tell are in no way confined by roles that I can play. It’s not about servicing me as an actor—to be like, Let’s create the dream role for me. As a storyteller, I have more freedom than ever because our company is either telling stories that are authentic to us, or we have the ability to partner with people and tell stories pertaining to other communities. That’s been the most exciting part about it; it really expands creative potential. 

At 20, I’m working on honoring all of my desires, honoring what I’m passionate about. The lesson that my mother taught me at a really young age is the fact that my voice belongs in these spaces. At the same time, I feel like I’ve been unintentionally trained to be an amenable person. Being amenable has oftentimes been weaponized against [Black artists], because we operate in the binary of either you’re amenable or you’re aggressive. As we create things that haven’t been seen before, we’re also saying, OK, let’s redefine the concept of risk when you’re bringing in a young writer of color or a young writer of any [race, sexuality, gender, etc.]. 

The art of storytelling is something that I still admire in every form, whether it’s Barry Jenkins or Issa Rae—and the fact that we’ve seen Issa go from YouTube to her own show to her own label to owning her own coffee shop speaks to the depth of vision. The first season of [Rae’s HBO show] Insecure came with a soundtrack featuring a ton of incredible Black artists. I remember watching Donald Glover in season one of [Atlanta, his show on FX]. It was the episode that was like a fake C-Span episode, with fake commercials. It was so genre-bending. What it affirmed to me is that we have the opportunity to train our audience. That episode was just a reminder that Black artists get to lead the way as creatives and trust that we are in a world of smart consumers, and that they’re either gonna get it or they’re gonna move on to a show that they do resonate with. 

Many creators inspire me, especially young ones, like [20-year-old] Phillip Youmans, who did [the 2019 critically acclaimed drama] Burning Cane. I feel like we’re really seeing the uptick in incredibly young filmmakers because Hollywood is becoming more accessible in terms of the ability to produce and distribute content. But we know that the digital space, especially for Black and brown creators, is extremely divisive. When you put content out into the world [on social media], based on those terms and agreements that we all clickthrough, the content isn’t ours. It ends up being co-opted, and it ends up being taken and not credited. 

Alberta Ferretti polo, $695, shirt,$495, and pants, $525, saks.com, Christian Louboutin heels, $895, christianlouboutin.com, Shahidi’s own bracelets. Styling by Jason Bolden, Hair by Keri Shahidi, Makeup Direction by Emily Cheng. 
PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHED BY TEXAS ISAIAH

The way that I’m trying to use my platform has been: How can I be a conduit for voter education as a young person who’s similarly developing my opinion in the world? One thing that most of my generation knows is that policy is personal. In the past couple of months, we’ve seen it more clearly than ever. 

In times when it’s hard to figure out what my purpose is, I often turn back and think about how many of our great leaders had to watch their peers die. They knew the stakes of the work they were doing, and they were doing it for a future that wasn’t guaranteed. They were doing it for a future that they couldn’t imagine. Congressman John Lewis being 17 when he started civil action,19 when he became a civil-rights leader, in his 20s when he was speaking at the March on Washington—he knew that he was risking his life. It’s remiss to say that we don’t reap the benefits of their progress every day. Their work had to be driven in a deep sense of hope. The most radical leaders are the most hopeful, because that radicalism stems from a deep belief that some sort of change, extreme change, is possible. 

I constantly am trying to figure out—what is my role, how can I be of service to the best of my abilities? It’s something that I’m tweaking and refining daily. It’s a thrilling time to be in media right now. We’re actively talking about the fact that it has to be restructured to prioritize new voices. And with that comes the opportunity to—in the kindest way possible—burn down the traditional infrastructure that has kept us out for so long and present something completely new. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Netflix’s ‘Strong Black Lead’ Marketing Team Shows the Power (and Business Benefit) of Amplifying Black Voices

This originally published on August 6th 2020 in The Hollywood Reporter.

On June 28, 3.7 million people watched as the BET Awards went virtual amid not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also uprisings for racial justice happening daily across the country. The show (largely) successfully closed in around a tagline — “Our culture can’t be canceled” — and struck a harmonious balance between the gravitas of the Movement for Black Lives and the need for celebratory entertainment.

Two years prior, in that very awards ceremony, Netflix’s Strong Black Lead marketing team premiered its “A Great Day in Hollywood” commercial, tying the current wave of reinvigorated interest in Black stories to an iconic 1958 photograph by Art Kane, which captured jazz greats from Thelonious Monk to Dizzy Gillespie, in Harlem during the genre’s golden era. With 47 Black actors, writers, showrunners and producers across 20 shows, the spot aimed to bring a message into sharp focus: “This is not a moment, this is a movement.” It wasn’t merely a response to hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite, but rather a harbinger of what was to come as SBL worked to establish a cultural resonance, combining marketing and editorial in a concerted effort to shift the ethos and culture within the Netflix brand.

“You know it was special when you started going out to talent, and everybody was like, ‘I’ll drop everything, just tell me when,’ ” says Maya Watson, Netflix’s director of editorial and publishing. Reflecting on “A Great Day,” she says it was almost like they sensed today’s zeitgeist coming, “It was like a little whisper that I feel people felt: It’s our time. It’s time to shift the narratives in Hollywood. It’s time to have more representation.”

Strong Black Lead is a sub-brand of Netflix that amplifies content specifically targeted to various slices of the Black experience. While it has its own vertical on Netflix, boasting the deepest bench of Black programming among the top streaming services, it has also become a popular brand outside the platform at the cross-section of technology, culture and community-building.

“A few Black [staffers] were like, ‘Hey, we want to start prioritizing and talking to the Black audience,’ ” says Watson, who, before moving to Netflix, worked for Oprah Winfrey and former President Barack Obama. “Our colleagues were like, ‘Cool, what do you need from us to get it done?’

Since then, the team has worked to establish SBL as an integral part of Netflix through editorial content and original programming created exclusively for the brand. With almost a half-million followers on Instagram and 163,000 and counting on Twitter, successful initiatives include the #HeyQueen shortform video series featuring such celebrated Black women as former first lady Michelle Obama and Angela Bassett reciting affirmations, the Strong Black Legends podcast and video series where stars of classic Black movies are interviewed, and #BetweenTwoFaves, which highlights conversations among icons across the Black diaspora in entertainment. (One of the most popular was a chat between Phylicia Rashad and Cicely Tyson timed to their latest film, Tyler Perry’s A Fall From Grace.)

Myles Worthington, who worked for Netflix PR before joining the SBL team as a director, says one standout has been the biweekly podcast Okay, Now Listen with Sylvia Obell and Scottie Beam. Close friends, the two Black women discuss what they’re dealing with at any given moment — from belting out gospel to speaking candidly about sex — with a firmly Black cultural frame of reference (Nora Ephron, in one episode, is referred to as “the white Terry McMillan”).

Obell says working with SBL gave her the budget to do Okay, Now Listen properly and an all-Black team supporting her on a day-to-day basis. “It’s empowering,” she said, adding that it’s a “safe space for Black women to create something dope.”

Jasmyn Lawson, a manager on the team who also produces its podcasts, says that at the beginning of SBL they weren’t sure what to post. Netflix had original series like critical darlings Dear White People and She’s Gotta Have It, but their programming needed a broader voice, so they turned to data to find out what else resonates with viewers.

“Ninety percent of the time the things that would perform well and things people were responding to were things where we were celebrating Black culture,” Lawson recalls. “We homed in on what we were great at.”

Strong Black Leads -HOLLYWOOD Portrait -Netflix - EMBED - 2020
Courtesy of Kwaku Alston/NetflixNetflix’s Strong Black Lead team and dozens of Hollywood talent re-created Art Kane’s iconic 1958 photograph “A Great Day in Harlem.”

In the broadcast TV eras of the ’90s and early aughts, entire programming blocks were built around shows with majority Black casts. UPN evenings were anchored by Girlfriends and Everybody Hates Chris. Fox’s North Star was In Living Color. But when the rubber met the road, consistent marketing dollars were not given to shows with majority Black casts and audiences. Now, with Netflix’s marketing budget growing to $2.6 billion in 2019, the opportunities are plentiful for a team like SBL and its sister verticals (NetflixIsaJoke, theMost and Con Todo) to build out their content and reach.

“Being able to aggregate content, voice, style and design toward any particular demographic, in this case people of color, is just smart online community-building,” says Richard Lachman, associate professor of digital media at Ryerson University in Toronto. “These sub-brands can be empowered to build relationships with press, creators and audiences on their own.”

Defining “Black content,” however, can be a bit nebulous. For example, does Shonda Rhimes’ programming count, even when she has majority white casts? The answer may come down to how the consumer engages with it.

While some Netflix titles like Dear White People are no-brainers, Lawson notes that what the SBL audience sometimes wants to talk about isn’t so obvious. “One of my favorite shows on Netflix is Sex Education, which isn’t a Black show. It isn’t even a U.S. show,” she says. “But there’s a character named Eric played by Ncuti [Gatwa] that the audience has loved and is obsessed with. I think it’s something really rare. He’s not just like the Black best friend. You get to explore his queer identity, his religious identity, his African [identity] as well as his Britishness in the show.”

Celebrating legacies is also a priority for the brand, especially through the Strong Black Legends podcast. The series aims to give beloved performers their flowers while they can still share in the moment, and one of those moments went viral in a very bittersweet way. Just a few months before his death, actor John Witherspoon was interviewed by host Tracy Clayton. A Netflix promotional photo of the Friday star was widely shared upon news of his passing, and was even displayed at his funeral. 

“People only really see the final output, you only see that wicker chair photo, you only hear that interview,” says Netflix community manager Dani Howe of the image. “But. in my head, I thought, ‘Wow. Jasmyn worked her ass off and a Black woman did that. A Black woman gave us that final moment.’ “

These moves have not inoculated Netflix from growing pains when it comes to addressing diversity and inclusion. In 2018, former communications chief Jonathan Friedland was fired over his repeated use of the N-word. In November 2019, comedian and Oscar-winning actress Mo’Nique sued the company, alleging race- and gender-based discrimination over the pay she was offered for a stand-up special. Most recently, British multihyphenate Michaela Coel revealed that her critically acclaimed series I May Destroy You didn’t land at Netflix, despite a $1 million offer, because of the company’s unwillingness to allow her to retain a share of the copyright.

The streamer’s public U.S. workforce demographics also show there’s still work to be done: Only 7 percent of the staff is Black (although that is almost double the reported figures from 2018).

Lachman says it’s important that offering inclusive content doesn’t distract from fixing those underlying issues. “Inclusion can’t only be marketing,” he says. “It needs to reach the level of the senior executive and the key decision-maker.” (Tendo Nagendo is vp original film and in July, Netflix hired Bozoma Saint John as chief marketing officer.)

Adds TimeJump Media CEO Larissa Lowthorp, “A market vertical, or niche focus, will backfire if the audience perceives that it’s been done solely to capitalize on current trends, consumer sentiment or tragedy. In order to be successful, and also ethical, the marketing niche must be driven by a genuine need to serve and represent a specific audience, use their core data, test viewership and [use] feedback to better the brand.”

The SBL team isn’t shying away from those tough conversations. “We’re at a time now where people are being very critical and should be very critical of the companies that are creating our content,” says Lawson. “I want our audience to respect us for listening to them, [and know] that we are giving opportunities to Black directors and Black folks behind the scenes.”

That Black content is currently trending isn’t good enough for SBL’s team. They want it to be sustainable. With Netflix’s marketing machine at its back, and direct, authentic interaction with their audience, they’re able to understand what people want.

“We have super insights sitting there in the comments,” says Worthington. “Here’s the storylines, the characters, the creators that really resonate. They can use this as a way to deeper understand the audience and they can make better choices on product content decisions.”

Investments of this sort recently paid off in a significant way. After Netflix acquired seven classic Black UPN shows, including Girlfriends and Moesha, SBL turned the news into a viral moment for the company with a tweet that nabbed 170,000 likes and prompted the approving hashtag #okaynetflix to trend.

“You can’t make a campaign like this,” Watson remarks. “It comes from a deep place of understanding the void in the marketplace. And then saying, ‘This needs to exist.’ “

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Shamira Explains It All Issue No 2: Independence Day

This originally published on July 6th 2020 as part of my Newsletter series on Substack here.

Today (July 6th) marks 45 years of Comorian independence from French rule – when three of the four islands of Grand Comore (Ngazidja), Moheli (Mwali), Anjouan (Nzwani) and Mayotte (Mahore) successfully parted ways with the notoriously domineering regime of French colonialism.

It came a full 15 years after the wave of what is known as the “Year of Africa” (1960); where 17 African nations declared independence from colonial rule – overwhelmingly from France – including the then-Republic of the Congo from Belgium (marked by Patrice Lumumba’s seminal speech), and punctuated by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s address at the United Nations General Assembly:

For years, Africa has been the foot-stool of colonialism and imperialism, exploitation and degradation. From the north to the south, from the east to the west, her sons languished in the chains of slavery and humiliation, and Africa’s exploiters and self-appointed controllers of her destiny strode across our land with incredible inhumanity without mercy, without shame, and without honour.

This year was concluded by the ratification of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in the United Nations – which, it should be noted, was abstained by the colonial powers of Belgium France, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States.

(We also got the Congolese Rhumba hit “Indépendance Cha Cha.”)

Of course, no fracture comes without its pound of flesh: many of the countries within the Francophonie in particular continued to orbit around the vestiges of the colonial empire. The CFA remained that kept many countries economically tied to France, with their reserves kept in French treasuries, simply rebranding from colonies francaise d’Afrique to communaute financiere africaine in West Africa and Cooperation financiere en Afrique centrale elsewhere. This is a financial bind that is still being unwound to this day – with a proposition pending for a new regional currency, that is still pegged to the Euro and backed by the French Treasury, running at odds with the ongoing ECOWAS efforts (led by Nigeria) to form the Eco currency.

In the case of the Comorian archipelago, after winning our vote for independence (with the key assistance of several under-acknowledged women in the organizing efforts leading up to independence) with 95% of the vote, France rejected the vote and demanded assessment island by island, in which Mayotte was accounted as voting to retain French ties, and used as a just cause for annexation – despite running afoul of the aforementioned UN policy on decolonization. Since then, twenty UN resolutions have condemned France’s annexation of Mayotte – including an attempted United Nations Security Council resolution in 1976 recognizing Comorian sovereignty over Mayotte, supported by 11 of the 15 members and vetoed by France, whose permanent seat on the Council is an outgrowth of their colonial reign. Below is a link to a summary video of the road to independence in French for those who can understand:

Since then, Mayotte has become part of the French outre-mer – yet another remnant of the formal colonial era – officially becoming an “overseas” department in 2011, joining the likes of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, and Réunion. In the time since, a visa known as the visa Balladur was put in place in 1995 (named after Édouard Balladur, the prime minister of France at the time) requiring clearance for Comorian nationals to enter the 4th island. It has caused fractures and significant loss (emotional and physical) that remain to this day, particularly with generations of Mahorais that are raised with the knowledge of being “French” and consider Comorians outsiders, and the stratification of resources that exist between the two communities. For more insight (in English), please feel free to watch this Al Jazeera special below (although I caution that even this cannot fully capture all the nuances of such a complex matter).

I chose to do the second issue of this newsletter on Comorian Independence Day for a few reasons. The first is, of course, out of pride for my homeland; the second is to impart the key takeaway that historically-supported pathways to freedom are red-herrings that can still come with many caveats, whether it be the trappings of neo-colonialism or seizure of assets. Operating within these constructs is not a route to liberation so much as it is a route to incrementalism, with punitive tactics undertaken in tandem by former overseers (for the sake of brevity, look up Bob Denard).

I think about this a lot in this current moment, as our various communities and organizing groups start to think through what the future we envision for ourselves as Black peoples would start to look like. In Angela Davis’ “Lectures on Liberation” , she said, “one of the most acute paradoxes present in the history of Western society is that while on a philosophical plane freedom has been delineated in the most lofty and sublime fashion, concrete reality has always been permeated with the most brutal forms of unfreedom, of enslavement.”

This is what we are all trying to break free from and reimagine; all forms of enslavement, from neocolonialism to the modern prison industrial complex in the Americas and everything in between. As Angela Davis said during the Dream Defenders’ Sunday School session on June 14th, “Abolition allows us to get to the root of the problem. That is how it is the radical alternative.” K Agebebiyi added, “the prison system aims to redefine who can be human. We know that we are human. Abolition requires me to ask, ‘how can the human in me, see and honor the human in you?’” Derecka Purnell eloquently stated, “it’s an invitation to think about the politics and struggle through it together.”

It’s wondrous to see how so many conversations within the diaspora overlap and speak to each other, even accidentally. In a moment when so much ado and handwringing is made about the nature of removing Confederate Statues, venerating slaveholding Founding Fathers, or genocidal explorers who never even touched American soil, I think about the dialogue around the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement – particularly the 2015 remarks given by Achille Mbembe, titled “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive” :

“To bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from erasing history, and nobody should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having “donated” his money and for having bequeathed “his” land to the University. If anything, we should be asking how did he acquire the land in the first instance…But bringing Rhodes’ statue down is one of the many legitimate ways in which we can, today in South Africa, demythologize that history and put it to rest – which is precisely the work memory properly understood is supposed to accomplish. For memory to fulfill this function long after the Truth and Reconciliation paradigm has run out of steam, the demythologizing of certain versions of history must go hand in hand with the demythologizing of whiteness. This is not because whiteness is the same as history. Human history, by definition, is history beyond whiteness. Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.”

(It should be noted, of course, that the Rhodes Scholarship has still retained its name).

Of course, this pattern of coalescent discourse is a cyclical behavior that can be seen in all sorts of diasporic thought, whether it be socio-political or purely arts-related (in each instance, it is still creative in spirit). Take, for example, this conversation between Haitian poet Rene Depestre and Martinican writer and co-founder of the Negritude movement Aimé Cesaire during the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967, transcribed in the seminal text “Discourse on Colonialism”:

A.C.: I remember very well that around that time we read the poems of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. I knew very well who McKay was because in 1929 or 1930 an anthology of American Negro poetry appeared in Paris. And McKay’s novel, Banjo – describing the life of dock workers in Marseilles – was published in 1930. This was really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity. I must say, therefore, that although I was not directly influenced by any American Negroes, at least I felt that the movement in the United States created an atmosphere that was indispensable for a very clear coming to consciousness. During the 1920’s and 1930’s I came under three main influences, roughly speaking. The first was the French literary influence, through the works of Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Claudel. The second was Africa. I knew very little about Africa, but I deepened my knowledge through ethnographic studies… and as for the third influence, it was the Negro Renaissance Movement in the United States, which did not influence me directly but still created an atmosphere which allowed me to become conscious of the solidarity of the black world.

He later continues:

I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Martinicans and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me.

I can only hope that we recognize the power of this as we continue to conceptualize and dream of the world and spaces we deserve; and lean on each other as an oppressed peoples to help get there.

This month:

That’s the thing about posthumous albums — they’re forever framed by the circumstances under which they were released, forever tied to death. They become an exercise in myth-making as much as reminders of what has been lost. To listen to Shoot for the Stars is to wonder where Pop begins and ends, to search for him among his peers and imagine that their chart-topping and history-making ascents would’ve been his destiny as well. In his absence, we’re left only with snapshots of his potential, possibilities refracted through other people’s imaginations and suspended now within the span of the album. It could never be enough, but it’ll have to do.

  • If you aren’t already subscribed to Woy Magazine’s weekly newsletter – providing you with news and commentary on Haiti and the Diaspora – you should be. The latest issue covers important information around organizing efforts and protests that have been happening in Haiti that have been facing police violence tactics akin to that in the United States, as well as mass deportation updates.
  • Black women who were formerly employed at OkayAfrica and OkayPlayer (Antoinette, Oyinkan, Hanan, Ivie, Sinat, Winnie, Olabisi and others) have been making unprecedented waves in Black media for mistreatment at the hands of their CEO and publisher Abiola Oke (who has since relinquished his position), demanding his removal and other amends be implemented at the publication moving forward. Important note: they have not alleged personally to any sexual assault/harassment (while allegations have been revealed as a result of this ongoing story) or requested their jobs back. As someone who has worked with OkayAfrica for some time and was nominated for #Okay100Women this year, hearing the accounts of the mistreatment was unnerving; but I will always stand with, believe, and support trusted Black women voices in media, and hope to see more people do so. Click here to stay up to date with the latest developments and donate to their fund if you can. #itsneverokay
  • On American Independence Day, I had a conversation with Sophia Gurulé – a Xicana public defender who represents incarcerated immigrants facing deportation – on #FreeOusman, the concept of citizenship and sovereignty, harmful immigrant narratives, the prison-to-deportation pipeline and race and class implications, DACA, ICE, and anything else that came to mind around identity, borders, and the carceral state, and how this all fits with the Movement for Black Lives and in my reporting on police brutality for Black immigrants. Feel free to check that out below (as well as my purple hair).
Alchimist 🧪 on Twitter: "Assa Traoré en couverture du magazine ...
  • Comorian-American (by way of France) rapper Napoleon Da Legend has a fantastic EP out, Charles de Gaulle, with tracks in both French and English. Give it a listen below:
  • Malcolm-Aimé Musoni launched the first installment of his Zine, Blacks Rule Vol 1, with the collaboration of a lot of Black creatives (myself included). I did want to explicitly pull out an excerpt of an essay from my friend Mack titled “Kill the Cop in Your Head,” because I think it’s especially potent and resonant for right now – but check the rest out for yourself.

I leave you with three final things: 1) the audio of Lumumba’s Independence Day speech, 2)one of my favorite montage videos of the Comorian National anthem (with French subtitles 3) a lovely playlist from the women at FourTwo Creative. Yes, you can let go and get free. ♥️

Alors, c’est tout!

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The NYPD’s Long History of Targeting Black Immigrants

This was originally published on July 1, 2020 for DocumentedNY.


When George Floyd’s life was brutally ended under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, he repeatedly pleaded for his life, uttering the phrase: “I can’t breathe,” a painful déjà vu that hearkens many New Yorkers’ memories back to the death of Eric Garner via police chokehold in Staten Island just under six years ago.

Eric Garner’s killing brought to the national forefront the brutal truth of what New Yorkers had long contended within our neighborhoods and enclaves — that Black and POC communities in New York City were at the mercy of an unchecked police state, in all of its iterations, from the punitive shadow of immigration enforcement to the coded criminalization of Black neighborhoods in the form of broken windows policing.

The tragedy of Eric Garner however, was far from the first time that an incident of this scale reached national attention;15 years earlier, Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was killed at the hands of four plainclothes police officers with 41 bullets, claiming that he met the description of a rape suspect and seemed to have a weapon on him (it was later confirmed that he was reaching for his wallet). Two years prior, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was assaulted and sexually abused by 4 police officers in the 70th precinct of the NYPD after being picked up outside of an East Flatbush nightclub. 

There are numerous other stories of Black immigrants and their families being tyrannized by the mortal force of the Boys in Blue: Burkinabé Ousmane Zongo in Chelsea in 2003, Haitian-American Patrick Dorismond in the Garment District in 2000, and Jamaican-American teen Ramarley Graham in 2012 in the Bronx. In nearly all of these narratives, the families and their communities spoke and organized against police brutality and the oppressive force of the NYPD – a shared pain that exists throughout the Black diaspora no matter when you touched America’s shores. 

22-year-old Amadou Diallo is shown in this undated photo. Diallo, an African immigrant, was returning to his home when four members of New York City’s elite police force ‘street Crime Unit” fired 41 bullets, killing Diallo. (Photo by Richard Harbus/Getty Images)

Presently, the neighborhood of Flatbush is reinvigorated in a new crusade against the police – a rush of organizing that has been inspired by the wave of protests that began in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death, as well as the ongoing tensions with the increased police presence in the subways and streets that have already caused several violent conflicts with young teens. There are long-standing disruptions as well, as Emily Batista, organizer for Equality for Flatbush points out, “in Caribbean communities in Brooklyn, the informal economy and means of making money as a result of being systematically pushed out of the formal economy is criminalized by the NYPD,” adding “we know that the NYPD targets dollar van drivers, local street vendors, and the Caribbean owned businesses with harassment and violence. That is why we organize Black and Brown people across Brooklyn.”

Black New York residents have had to accept empty promises of pathways for reform. Organizations like Equality for Flatbush, as a result, have been proactively involved in organizing efforts, expanding their anti-policing actions into dedicated protests against police brutality. “When fighting for police and prison abolition, we are fighting the oppressive systems that criminalize Black Caribbean lives,” Batista says. “The police work with ICE to capture, detain, harass and intimidate people because of their possible immigration status. Fighting against white supremacy means fighting towards the liberation of all Black and Brown people from all forms of incarceration and prosecution.”

Neighborhoods with large African and Caribbean immigrant populations were also disproportionately targeted in stop and frisk. In a 2019 report, The New York Civil Liberties Union listed the precincts in New York City where force was most likely to be used by a police officer during a stop and frisk encounter between 2014 and 2017. At the top of the list were precincts in the neighborhoods of Concourse and Highbridge; Hunts Point; East Tremont and Belmont; Eastchester, Wakefield and Williamsbridge; University Heights and Morris Heights. All have large African and Caribbean populations, according to data from the American Community Survey.

For instance, force was used in 55% of the stops at the 44th Precinct in the Bronx neighborhoods of Concourse and Highbridge. They’re encompassed by Community District 4 where 41.6% of the population is foreign-born. Of that population, 63% were born in the Caribbean and 14.5% were born in Africa.

The five community districts where force was most likely to be used during a stop by the police were all in the Bronx. All had foreign born populations above New York City’s average, and are comprised mainly of African and Caribbean immigrants.

For the communities that organizers and activists such as Equality for Flatbush serve, which often have high densities of immigrants of all statuses, this presents a unique risk. Regardless of documentation status, present immigration policies, their enforcement and administration mean that any interaction with police, even in “sanctuary cities” like New York, can alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

\Pallbearers carrying the coffin of Patrick Dorismond, the Haitian immigrant who was killed by a New York City Police officer on 16 March, 2000, struggle through the crowd in front of the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York 25 March, 2000, after a funeral march through the heart of the borough. AFP PHOTO Henny Ray ABRAMS (Photo credit should read HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Lawyer Johnnie Cochran, right, smiles at Abner Louima during a press conference July 12, 2001 in New York after the city and the it”s police union agreed to pay almost $9 million to settle Louima”s civil lawsuit. Four NYPD officers were convicted of criminal charges in 1999 for beating Louima in a police car and in a Brooklyn police station where one officer rammed a broken broomstick into his rectum in the precinct house bathroom. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

ICE has reportedly evaded sanctuary rules by using police fingerprint records to send letters to arrested immigrants — usually for low-level misdemeanor offenses such as fare hopping — and asking them to come into the agency’s Manhattan offices, which presents a concern for the levels of violent arrests that have been ongoing during the protests. In a notable recent night of protests in late May, over 300 people were arrested while documented instances of violence against civilians at the hands of police were made viral throughout social media. 

This added risk for the violent clashes that happen between protesters and police in communities like Flatbush in Brooklyn or Mott Haven in the Bronx is not insignificant. Peaceful protests in those neighborhoods were recently met with an NYPD tactic called kettling, which often provokes conflict. Black immigrants make up a disproportionate number of criminal-based deportations. According to the advocacy group Black Alliance for Just Immigration, 76 percent of Black immigrants are deported on criminal grounds, compared to 45 percent of all immigrants. Despite making up only 7.2 percent of the noncitizen population in the US, more than 20 percent of people facing deportation on criminal grounds are Black. 

The double-bind of being Black and an immigrant in working-class predominantly Black neighborhoods, such as Concourse village in the Bronx and Canarsie in Brooklyn, places you at an added risk of being churned through both the criminal and immigration court system without much of an escape route. This creates a prison-to-deportation pipeline, the likes of which has become increasingly difficult to evade, as outlined here. Despite this, immigrants continue to fight for the future they believe Blacks in America deserve. Inside detention facilities, they are organizing hunger strikes in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement; calling attention to the terrible conditions where they’re being held and highlighting how immigration court systems continue to uphold the exploitation of Black lives while they’re in detention. 

As much as ICE labels their holding spaces “civil” detention, there is very little that is materially different between their facilities and a standard prison, except for a denial of a guaranteed right to a lawyer and free reign for indefinite holds. “Abolishing police is basically essential to break the deportation machine. This is why we talk about the prison industrial complex,” New York City-based immigration lawyer Sophia Gurule said.

As the protests continue, the wide diaspora of faces continue their rebellion all in lockstep, bravely challenging a common enemy; the overarching scepter of the police brutality, the prison industrial complex, and all of the forces that justify fund, and absolve it. There is an unyielding pain that has taken hold in the streets of New York, accrued over decades of unacknowledged injustice – and regardless if your Black life was born as a direct descendant American chattel slavery, its close relative in the West Indies or across the Atlantic ocean on the African continent, the sentiment of “enough is enough” has gripped and unified these varied experiences into pushing for dismantling the oppressive boot of police forces within the five boroughs. Hopefully, this solidarity extends throughout the continued fight for Black liberation.

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POP SMOKE LIVES AGAIN IN BROOKLYN

Originally published for NYLON Magazine on June 16th, 2020

On the evening of May 30, protesters and police swarmed the streets of Flatbush, a predominantly Black American and West Indian enclave in Brooklyn. It marked one of the most fraught nights of conflict since the uprisings started taking place within the five boroughs. Hundreds of arrests and violent incidents were documented by phone between residents and the police; tear gas spilled in the streets. Late into the evening, after cops successfully kettled protesters between two streets, the atmosphere shifted. Violence escalated, and the gospel that had been blasting in the background changed into the sounds that resonated with the youth. Brooklyn drill hits “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” filled the air as cop cars burned in the background.

Months after his untimely death — a still unresolved home invasion and murder in a California residence — Pop Smoke (aka Bashar Jackson) lives again. The music of Brooklyn’s beloved drill phenom filling the streets as young people united under their feelings of distress and unrest with a world they’ve been forced to accept.

News of Pop’s death was a tragic loss that is still reverberating across New York City — especially the borough of Brooklyn. Streams of his music skyrocketed soon after his transition out of this world, and for weeks, one would be hard pressed to walk down Flatbush or Flatlands Avenue without hearing the song that broke him into the mainstream, “Welcome to the Party,” or his biggest single, “Dior.” On Flatlands Avenue and E 82nd Street, a mural was created in his honor, the first of three. It stood prominently in the background during the funeral procession, where it felt as if his entire hometown neighborhood of Canarsie spilled out into the streets to honor his life — a majestic display not seen in Kings County since the passing of legendary rapper Notorious B.I.G. As noted by culture critic Ivie Ani for The Fader, their musical trajectories echo one another: two young men of West Indian descent who became the pride of their respective Brooklyn enclaves, robbed of what had the promise of being magnificent careers.

It isn’t altogether surprising that Pop Smoke’s discography has become a posthumous soundtrack of New York in this current moment of protests against police brutality, triggered by the police-inflicted deaths of Black lives such as George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s. Pop’s life, and in turn his music, was highly affected by the trauma of police surveillance and violence and the conditions that those circumstances created, down to the Canarsie neighborhood where he grew up. (The neighborhood was recently shaken by its own viral incident: A young man named Fitzroy Gayle, the same age as Pop Smoke at his death, being violently arrested by eight police officers.)

A melancholy of Pop’s passing was that he never got to have the triumphant homecoming moment in the city that raised him, thanks to the ever-looming shadow of the NYPD. In October 2019, the “Boys in Blue” requested that he be removed from the lineup at Rolling Loud the day before the event in question “due to public safety concerns,” claiming his shows were affiliated with unnamed “recent acts of violence citywide.” Upon his return from Paris Fashion Week, Pop was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport and charged with interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle mere hours before a scheduled performance at the Barclays Center honoring deceased A$AP Mob founder and collaborator A$AP Yams. (Those charges have since been dismissed.) The Sunday before his passing, Flatbush’s Kings Theater hosted Brooklyn’s first drill concert, BK Drip, with Pop Smoke featured on the bill. Eventgoers were still regrettably greeted with the message “due to unforeseen circumstances, Pop Smoke will not perform at tonight’s show” as they entered the venue, the space saturated by a heavy police and security presence throughout the largely successful evening.

Pop Smoke’s discography has always been a form of protest — defiant, transgressive, and transformative no matter the space in which it’s consumed. Drill wasn’t necessarily made for the club, but with his frequent partner 808Melo, Pop crafted melodies that existed on multiple levels — simultaneously euphoric and ominous, depending on the mood.

Songs like “PTSD,” “Scenario,” and “Better Have Your Gun” from his first project, Meet the Woo, all now hit different, transforming into a perfect encapsulation of the frenetic, rebellious energy now coursing through the veins of every New Yorker marching through its streets. Track after track, Pop litters acknowledgments to treasured friends who are still making their way through the prison industrial complex, using his distinctive gravelly inflection to depict the extent in which police interference has become accepted as part of their day-to-day life and interactions. On “Better Have Your Gun,” Pop references Tupac’s “All Eyez On Me”— the slain California rapper’s first track after being released from prison — and East Flatbush rapper Shyne’s “Commission.” “What the f*ck is you telling me?” he warns. “I got the pedigree/In the hood, I’m fighting felonies.”

When “Dior,” a track about aspirational accomplishment, is juxtaposed with a burning cop car or a melee in Soho or a cascade of faces parading down Eastern Parkway, the coalescence of energy feels nearly elemental. Pop Smoke’s music threaded together the chaos, fury, trauma, hope, and joy in New Yorkers in a way that no one else had done in quite some time. That accomplishment alone is feat enough to unify a sea of now-burgeoning activists who are screaming to be heard in a system that continues to take Black lives for granted. Pop predicted as much on the JACKBOYS and Travis Scott collaboration “Gatti”: “You cannot say Pop and forget the smoke.”

POP SMOKE’S DISCOGRAPHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FORM OF PROTEST — DEFIANT, TRANSGRESSIVE, AND TRANSFORMATIVE NO MATTER THE SPACE IN WHICH IT’S CONSUMED.

Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut album, originally slated for June 12, has now been pushed back to July 3; Smoke’s estate shifted in lockstep with the rhythm in Brooklyn. As Steven Victor, CEO of record label Victor Victor Worldwide, explained, though they’ve “seen Pop’s music become the soundtrack of the moment, unifying the masses,” they’ve still “decided to delay the release of his album out of respect for the movement.”

Posthumous adoration inevitably invites speculation of what could have been and what was lost. In the case of Pop, a young man who repped his Panamanian heritage as much as he did his Canarsie hometown, New Yorkers waited for the homecoming track with fellow Brooklynite and Panamanian Bobby Shmurda — his own saga a reflection of the fundamentally broken injustice system. Shmurda is due to be released from prison at the end of the year, but their collaboration is now a reverie that has dissolved into the ether. Pop Smoke, however, still left behind a breadth of work, with rumors of existing collabs from his spiritual forebear 50 Cent, to the “African Giant” Burna Boy himself. A clip of him flipping a sample of Tamia’s “Into You” made the rounds not long after his death to great acclaim, yet another testament to his deceptive versatility across soundscapes. The announcement of his upcoming album allows for endless possibilities in the formation of his legacy, particularly with recent events reframing the context in which his music will now be received. What themes will his project be centered around post-mortem? What boundary will he break next? How will he continue to shake the room from beyond the grave?

When the clock struck midnight on Thursday, fans were gifted the first single off his debut. The gripping “Make It Rain” repurposes lyrics from his appearance on Lil Tjay’s “Zoo York” into a commanding hook, and is coda-ed by an exceptional verse from Bobby Shmurda’s GS9 comrade-in-arms Rowdy Rebel, delivered via a prepaid correctional facility call. “Hello, this is a prepaid call from… Bobby Babayyy!!!” If there was ever a song that tangibly reflects the framework of pain and loss that reverberates around the fringes of New York’s rap scene, it’s this one: Pop Smoke delivering his signature timbre from beyond the grave and Rowdy Rebel getting “the call behind the wall,” triumphantly rising to the challenge, awaiting his moment of redemption as the streets scream “no justice, no peace.” It’s eerily timely, and as defiant as ever. You would expect nothing less.

Two decades ago, Notorious B.I.G.’s final studio project, Life After Death, was released two weeks after his death, already fairly complete. It was a double album replete with mafioso themes and ominous double entendres set to the signature captivating storytelling that made Biggie Smalls an unparalleled talent. On closing track “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)” he raps, “Sh*t’s official, only the Feds I fear.” Even on a song full of bravado and swagger, the specter of law enforcement looms large enough to make for an uncannily prophetic epilogue. In 2020, that oeuvre remains ever-present in artists like Pop Smoke, who vocalize tension with the police state on songs that portray trauma, bluster, survival, elation, and trying to find revelry amongst it all. That, more than anything, resonates in the youth that take to the streets day after day, fighting for freedom from the oppressive scrutiny that has for so long gripped their lives.

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‘The Breakfast Club’ Calls Itself “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show” — Maybe It’s Time We Listen

This was originally published for OkayPlayer on June 16, 2020.

When Power 105.1’s lynchpin morning show The Breakfast Club ⁠— hosted by Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy, and Angela Yee ⁠— launched in December 2010, Hot 97 was still the Number 1 “urban contemporary” radio station in New York City, standing strong atop the shoulders of legends such as Angie Martinez and Funkmaster Flex. Nine months after its launch, the show had not gained much ground, teetering on the brink of dissolution.

It was a fateful morning call from jack-of-all-industries Willie “Ray J” Norwood Jr breathlessly recounting his distorted perspective of an altercation with Fabolous in Las Vegas the night before that turned their fortunes around. Quotables about “disrespecting the money team” became entrenched in urban radio lore, reaffirming a tried and true lesson that helped build some of the biggest empires in radio, including that of Charlamagne’s longtime mentor Wendy Williams — controversy and sensationalism obtain views, whether they love or hate it. 

Since having Ray J as their first breakout guest, The Breakfast Club‘s Rolodex of guests have expanded in niche and pedigree as they have cemented themselves as the number 1 morning show in urban contemporary media in the greater New York area. Their roster of guests has ranged from artists promoting their latest release to Democratic primary candidates looking to use the iHeartMedia syndicated Breakfast Club as a hip platform to speak to target demographics for voter turnout. The rubric for programming, however, has continued to adhere to a golden rule: information and accessibility may be a benefit of their now-prominent platform, but it is only secondary to entertainment at all costs ⁠— no matter the potential harms of the communities that they purportedly aim to entertain. Donning the moniker “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show,” The Breakfast Club continues to maintain cultural currency by trading in this virality and adopting the ethos of “it’s provocative, it gets the people going,” that is embodied in the show’s most polarizing host Charlamagne, infamous for pushing the most lecherous shock jock commentary on guests (particularly women) to the point he has become inextricable from the Breakfast Club brand. 

One such notable example of that ethos took place in 2016 with the planned appearance of Tomi Lahren ⁠— at the time a quickly rising upstart in conservative media ⁠— on the airwaves of Black urban radio’s preeminent morning show, barely a month after Donald Trump had been elected into office. Despite the booking being canceled by Lahren’s team due to the overwhelming backlash over her appearance on The Daily Show, Charlamagne persisted in engaging a social outing with her, retorting: “Do you want diplomacy or do you want division? I’m talking to Tomi because I care about the rhetoric that comes out of her mouth because she has influence — and the narrative she paints about movements like [Black Lives Matter] is dangerous. The same way people can hit her up on social media and tell her how wrong she is, I can meet with her and tell her the same things.” It’s a curious logic that manipulates the need to embrace the neoliberal need for compromise and continuous discourse, which will always be at odds with the irreconcilable truth of conservative media’s foundational ethos of unshakeable moral conviction. 

The argument fails to hold muster when she was heralded by Charlamagne as a template that other women in media should aspire to, writing in a since-deleted tweet: “would be dope if a young black or Hispanic ‘WOKE’ woman used social media to create a Platform to be a voice like Tomi Lahren did.” Strangely enough, such a declaration operates in the same rhetoric often associated through the conservative right media, wild conjecture with no material basis, in fact, dismissing context that allows for specific circumstances — in Lahren’s case, her backing by Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. When roundly presented with a bevy of women’s voices that already exist, he addressed it on the radio show, asking with bewilderment, “…how do we amplify their voices?”

Another such transgression involved comedian and recording artist Lil Duval. The garish 3-minute sequence detailed violence against trans women to raucous laughter and mild chiding about “political correctness,” barely a week after writer, director, producer, and trans activist Janet Mock appeared on the show. At one point, DJ Envy says, “I love when Duval is up here, he be acting a fool,” mere moments after intentionally presenting Mock’s book in Duval’s field of vision, leading to Mock being forcefully misgendered on live air. As Mock said herself in an essay response, “On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!” 

In a self-assessment of their accountability, not only were the malicious messages redistributed, but the collective also refused to accept any complicity in material harms, soliciting viewer feedback to affirm themselves, and only opening the trans community to further derogatory comments to be said on-air. Instead of truly assessing their responsibility to the Black communities they serve, the discussion diverted into whether or not they should be held to the offense over something a guest said and has refused to apologize for, ignoring media’s responsibility in framing, directing, and guiding discussions. Since then, Duval has appeared on the Breakfast Club twice more, unfettered.  

In a repetition of the animus behind Lahren’s presence, a more recent incident involved a highly-publicized interview with Rush Limbaugh amid one of the biggest nationwide fights for transformative accountability of the state-sanctioned death of Black lives lost through police brutality. In an echo of the rationale for inviting Lahren four years prior, grounds were presented on the basis of introducing Limbaugh’s platform to the gravity of the Black community’s plight. The rhetoric hit all of the predictable points: circling around the drain around white privilege; white supremacy; and explaining how individual Black accomplishments don’t dismantle systemic issues — all in the shadow of George Floyd’s memory. While Charlamagne — who would later say the discussion was a “corporate” decision from iHeartMedia  — may have insisted, “I’m not letting nobody politicize black pain,” a pre-taped segment that inevitably devolves into discourse for discourse’s sake does exactly that. The segment forced audiences to endure a tête-à-tête over the “liberal, political constructs” that Limbaugh categorically rejects. As Toni Morrison is famously quoted as saying, “racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” There was no substantive reason to engage in this exercise in masochism. However, for the Black audiences that consume the show and are overwhelmed by the delicate choreography that is just existing at the moment, being confronted by that dismissal in yet another space that is primarily sectioned off for them extends beyond unproductive and into firmly counter-revolutionary.

Most recently, the platform extended a friendly invitation to “godfather of hip-hop” Russell Simmons, currently under scrutiny for multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment as several of his survivors tell their stories in the documentary On the Record. Warmly greeted with the honorific “Uncle Russ,” he is granted an unfettered and largely unchallenged space to push his counter-narrative on the largest urban platform from his remote enclave in Bali. Safe from any extradition laws, Simmons insisted that his bevy of romantic relationships with women in Hollywood that have transitioned into extended platonic relationships – in addition to his inclusive hiring practices – inoculate him from criticism. When pressed, he parried with “I really don’t think we should be relitigating 30-year-old stories that had never been told,” a statement that is incorrect considering his accusers — Drew Dixon, Sheri Sher, and Sil Lai Abrams — have alluded to the stories in public in various capacities. He alleged that “any investigative reporter would tell you that those stories would have been printed,” dismissing the thorough work of the New York Times and Hollywood Reporter investigative teams. Perhaps most troubling about this interview was that it was allowed to be co-led by Charlamagne tha God, a man with his own documented history of admitted gendered domestic violence of his very own. As of yet, none of the women featured in the documentary have been invited to speak their own truth to power on the platform. (Ed note: Sil Lai Abrams appeared on The Breakfast Club for an interview with Angela Yee the day after this post was published.)

Photo Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The Breakfast Club’s contracts are slated to end at the close of the year, rounding out a strong 10-year run. Rumors have persisted that Charlamagne, who has gone on to publish a New York Times bestseller, have a top-rated podcast, several TV shows, and a spinoff interview platform of his own, is unlikely to return, ending the reign of the brand by default. At this moment in time, it may be for the best. The aim of Black media platforms shouldn’t be to replicate the harmful norms and standards of their mainstream counterparts. It should be to set a new one that centers Black issues and content in a meaningful and thoughtful manner. The Breakfast Club has shown that they want to lead the market but not lead the conversation, and when times are more tumultuous than ever, to accept that as an adequate approach to media is a disservice to the increasingly scarce platforms that serve our communities. 

In a 2016 profile for Vulture, Charlamagne said that there were two critical things to have a finger on to stay on top in the social-media era: “How to keep a conversation going and when to change it.” The trio has made skillful mastery of the former in the annals of their Tribeca Studio. However, on the latter, change commonly seems to come after reprisal and not from a place of thought leadership. Heavy may be the head that wears the crown, but the burden of desiring to be the preeminent space for courting heavily trafficked conversations throughout different subsections of the Black community comes with a remit to stay on the vanguard of those conversations with empathy and care. Until that becomes the established priority, they will continue to be challenged on the merits of their programming.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article referred to allegations against Charlamagne tha God. Since we do not have additional reporting to add to this case, and instead linked to a Daily Beast article published on July 26, 2018, we have removed the wording from the piece. 

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Ramy’ Meditates on the Pitfalls of Self-Righteousness

This piece was originally published for The Atlantic on June 11, 2020

In Season 1 of Ramy, audiences are introduced to Ramy Hassan—the character loosely based on the show’s creator, Ramy Youssef—and his Egyptian American family in northern Jersey. With a formidable mix of surrealism and humor, Youssef explores the complexities of being a religious Millennial man, namely through navigating the difficulties that young Muslims face coming of age post-9/11. Season 2 is anchored in Ramy’s wish to find purpose and direction in his spirituality, but his obsessive need to present a righteous version of himself only sabotages his effort at redemption.

The show is preoccupied with the idea that ritual for ritual’s sake—without deeper consideration of context or circumstances and without disposition of the ego—can often reveal one’s truest, ugliest self. Ramy has returned from a sojourn in Cairo more aimless and prurient than ever before. Back in the States, he engages in gluttony and lewdness (through the haze of a porn-filled laptop screen), and isolates himself in shame. He admits, “I feel like I have this hole inside of me, this emptiness, and I’m always trying to fill it with something.” But once he finally musters up the resolve to return to his mosque after a hiatus, his imam (played by Alok Tewari) meets him with reproach: “Read the last three surahs of the Quran every night,” he says. “It will help keep the shaitan away.” (Shaitan, in Islam, are evil spirits that tempt humans into sinful behavior; their commander, Iblis, is known in Christian texts as Lucifer.)Despondent, Ramy finds his way to the local Sufi center, led by the charismatic Sheikh Ali (Mahershala Ali). Enamored by Ali’s presence and steadiness, Ramy convinces himself that his absolution will come under the approval of the sheikh’s watchful eye.

What ensues is an empty religious performance by Ramy.Desperate to prove that he can ascend to the levels of perfection he associates with the sheikh, Ramy adheres to a rigidity that his loved ones find disconcerting, imposing stringent standards not just on himself, but also on the people around him. When Ramy attends the strip-club bachelor party his friends throw for him, he admonishes one of them, Ahmed, about the optics of the occasion. But Ahmed retorts, “Do you know how many times I’ve watched you do crazy things? Slowly waiting, praying that you’d do the right thing? I never judged you! I just prayed for you.”Ramy’s understanding of discipline is misguided, and his overcompensation and ego leave no room for the inevitability of human error, creating a built-in tension in the show.

Similar to Kanye West and his self-righteous Sunday Service performances, Ramy has understood only the trimmings of deliverance and religion, and has done so in the most self-serving ways possible. For instance, when he wants to encourage a new revert’s adoption into the Sufi center, Ramy fails to disclose that the man was a U.S. soldier in Iraq—responsible for the torture and deaths of Arab and Muslim innocents—and that he has crippling PTSD. As a result, the man is involved in a fatal incident at the Sufi center, for which Ramy is indirectly responsible. In another episode, Ramy translates his adoration of Sheikh Ali into a delusion of romantic love for his daughter. He pursues a relationship with her and then sabotages their imminent nuptials by engaging in infidelity under the guise of religiously sanctioned polygamy—a practice reserved for those who have both the resources and mutually agreed-upon consent.

Ramy’s family members also learn the cruel irony of empty performance. In contrast to Ramy’s capitulations to what he thinks is religious surveillance, his mother, Maysa (Hiam Abbass), capitulates to a literal agent of surveillance—the United States federal government—in the journey to obtain her citizenship. She studiously reviews her notes for her final exam and absorbs American vernacular. But when she incurs an infraction at her job driving for Lyft that could potentially flag her final background check, she collapses into a panic.

In an effort to determine the complainant, Maysa engages in a frenzied review of her recent passengers, ultimately assuming that a nonbinary customer named Sophia (whom she had misgendered) was the culprit. Unraveled and distraught, Maysa confronts them at a bar, and tries to appeal to their common marginalization as members of two different targeted communities. Maysa’s self-serving plea comes amid her own prejudice—in a previous conversation with her daughter about Sophia, Maysa casually asks, “Allah created him as a man, no?” But in order to protect herself,Maysa exhibits a remarkable inversion of power and imposes the same surveillance tactics on Sophia that she herself fears.

Perhaps the most tragic story within Ramy’s family is that of his uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli)—a boorish, bombastic man who revels in uncompromising bigotry and cartoonish toxic masculinity. The show ultimately reveals that his behavior belies his hidden queer identity; Naseem allows himself to indulge in his sexuality in a few furtive moments, only to then again reclaim his external presentation. He struggles with what kind of Muslim he is supposed to be and what kind of man he is expected to be, which amounts to tremendous overcorrection at the expense of himself and everyone around him.

The last three chapters of the Quran, Surah Al-Ikhlas (“Sincerity”), Surah Al-Falaq (“Dawn”), and Surah Al-Naas (“Mankind”), are commonly invoked in Islam as protection against malevolent surveillance—jinns, shaitan, or the evil eye. The ritualistic performance of these invocations reasserts fealty to God’s will. At the beginning of the season, Ramy dismisses the advice from his imam to invoke these rites, noting that he’s “trying to find God, but it’s not there.” But Sheikh Ali informs him, “If someone only gotthe rules and rituals, they might think Islam is tough and bitter … but there’s an inside, a juicy flesh, a divine intimacy, a spiritual experience. The rind without the flesh is bitter and useless.”

Ramy’s Achilles’ heel is his inability to grasp the journey of restitution via non-egotistical means, and he exercises self-imposed discipline without empathy. Just like his uncle and mother, Ramy is crippled by the perception of the absolute binary of haram and halal—what’s forbidden and what’s permitted—applying its maxims without consideration of the impact they may have on others. It’s a contextual failure that absolves a person of the responsibility of care in pursuit of moral righteousness.

Most Abrahamic religions are peppered with tales of the fallibility of human character: the person you want to be versus the person you are. In Season 2, most of Ramy’s characters are going through this journey; not just in front of God, but in front of their own communities. In trying their hardest to present themselves as the people they want to be, they consistently harm those around them—exposing the worst of who they are in dangerous bursts. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Ramy offers a look into where the road obsessed with perceptions will lead.

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On the Record Attempts to Set the Record Straight for Black Women in Hip-Hop

This was originally published on June 11, 2020 for Pitchfork.

The documentary On the Record opens by asking a question: “What is missing from #MeToo?” In the nearly three years since the hashtag went viral, the phrase has become a de facto movement, a derisive verb, and a platform for high-profile survivors in the entertainment industry and beyond. But despite originating from Tarana Burke, a Black woman, #MeToo has failed to provide a platform for the unique circumstances of Black women who dare to speak truth to power. They are frequently silenced, dismissed, or ignored, either pressured into racial solidarity or stigmatized by a hypersexual jezebel trope that justifies a higher burden of credibility. As Burke herself readily admits in the film, “A lot of Black women felt disconnected from #MeToo initially.”

On the Record attempts to reconcile with that painful truth, honing in on the experiences of Black women in the nascence of the hip-hop industry, and the impresario at the heart of it all, Def Jam’s Russell Simmons. The film centers around some of Simmons’ many survivors—mainly A&R executive Drew Dixon, as well as journalist Sil Lai Abrams and rapper Sheri Sher—and their journeys to come forward with their stories in the press. Every exposé that emerges is the result of an arduous process of reopening painful memories, ceaseless vetting and verification, and devastating fallout for the survivors. Presented side by side with the rise of Def Jam and hip-hop, On the Record shows the emotional toll of Black women’s trauma being perceived as an accepted cost of doing business. While filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s ambitious attempts to address so many critical threads of conversation about sexual assault, hip-hop, and Black women leave some nuances better served than others, the introduction of this film into the zeitgeist is an essential and welcome addition to a long-overdue conversation.

There was a brief period of time when this story almost never made it to the general public. On the Record lost distribution with Apple TV+ just two weeks before its premiere at Sundance Film Festival this past winter, after executive producer Oprah Winfrey pulled her support. It was soon revealed that while Simmons had pressured Winfrey, she had her own apprehensions about the doc and Dixon’s story. The premiere went from a triumphant moment of acknowledgement for Black survivors into a fight to avoid obscurity and erasure. Had HBO—the same network where Simmons once aired his iconic Def Comedy Jam series—not selected On the Record for their recent HBO Max rollout, the documentary could have easily collapsed into an urban legend, sustained by a whisper network of participants and early viewers.

Drew Dixon anchors the film as a former A&R executive who quickly rose in prominence during Def Jam’s early ’90s heyday. She played a fundamental role in amplifying artists and staying on the vanguard of trends at Def Jam, reshaping Method Man’s “All I Need” into a groundbreaking duet with Mary J. Blige. After her alleged 1995 rape at the hands of Simmons, she almost immediately moved over to Arista Records to work under the mentorship of legendary music exec Clive Davis, only to be sexually harassed by his replacement, L.A. Reid. She was trying to sign John Legend and Kanye West to Arista when her relationship with Reid completely deteriorated, after she continually rebuffed his advances.

As Dixon details her rise and fall in the industry, a familiar narrative comes into focus: her seat at the table came with the proviso of a heightened threshold for indecency, an expectation that she compartmentalize and minimize incidents like Simmons repeatedly exposing himself to her. It was an environment where women’s boundaries were not respected, and ultimately Dixon’s assault and harassment caused her to leave the industry altogether. Now it is difficult for her to disentangle music from trauma; she avoids engaging with some of the songs she helped make into hits. In the film, after her story becomes public in The New York Times, she nervously sits with her daughter waiting to hear what the (noticeably measured) response will be on Hot 97. “For 22 years, I took it for the team,” she says, adding, “I loved Russell, too.”

Since On the Record closely follows Dixon’s journey to come forward, Sheri Sher and Sil Lai Abrams don’t receive nearly as much screen time as they should. Sher, a member of the first all-female rap group, the Mercedes Ladies, only has around five minutes of screen time despite her crucial perspective: that of the women artists who fought for respect for their skills, only to be dismissed and treated as sex objects by the industry. Similar to Dixon, there’s an implication in the film that Sher’s alleged 1983 rape by Simmons and subsequent diminishment in the field represented a loss for the music world: Despite being hip-hop pioneers in the South Bronx, the Mercedes Ladies never released any official music or got a record deal.

For her part, journalist and activist Sil Lai Abrams offers a brief but agonizing account of the spiral that followed her 1994 sexual assault, when she was still working as a model and enmeshed in the music industry. Abrams first told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that she’d had an intermittent sexual relationship with Simmons that she clearly ended before her alleged rape, but On the Record doesn’t properly delve into the nuances of the situation, or the disorienting nature of sexual assault at the hands of a past intimate partner. Detailing a complicated survivor story is brave in and of itself, but as many Black women implicitly know, the mere allusion to a survivor’s sexual desires is often exploited, used to subtly reinforce a pervasive subconscious notion of the “cultural impossibility for Black women to be raped,” to quote seminal hip-hop feminist Dr. Joan Morgan in the film. Parsing all that out would have brought valuable new depth to the conversation.

The end of On the Record includes brief vignettes of other women’s stories, faces that fade into each other and echo fragments of the previous person’s trauma. The segment effectively highlights the magnitude of Simmons’ reach and harm in his heyday; there are women in fashion publicity, screenwriting, and modeling who detail various degrees of sexual and physical assault at his hands. In merely chronicling the scope of these allegations, the film’s focus shifts away from Black women in hip-hop. There is no easy choice to make here: A documentary that is tasked with accomplishing so much in the way of investigative, emotive, and pedagogical work, that is inherently intertwined with Simmons’ vast legacy, will have more to untangle than can easily be accomplished in just 95 minutes.

Along the way, experts and academics bring context to the overarching issue of misogynoir in hip-hop culture. Though misogyny against Black women is historically tied to the genre, its transition from a subculture to a mainstream market in the ’90s was accompanied by its aesthetic shift—a hypersexualization of Black women that hadn’t been as dominant in rap visuals previously. As the film draws connections to women who’ve dared to accuse Black men in the public eye, from Anita Hill to Desiree Washington, a robust picture emerges of how a white supremacist patriarchal construct is absorbed, echoed, and distilled for entertainment purposes, with the full expectation that Black women in the space stand in lockstep. While a bit didactic, these historical threads serve as an important reminder that the toxic expectation of race loyalty persists in highly visible spaces across movements, industries, and generations. Solidarity with Black men is the name of the game, and yet again Black women are the collateral damage.

It would be a disservice to imply that the problems detailed in On the Record are contained to the early years of hip-hop. Just last month, Chris Stylezz, the host of the Roc Nation-affiliated hip-hop party D’ussé Palooza, was confronted with dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, resulting in his termination and a new wave of discourse about the industry’s exploitative, gendered power imbalance. Charlamagne tha God, who continues to be the face of “The Breakfast Club,” arguably hip-hop’s biggest syndicated radio show, previously admitted to domestic abuse and faces credible allegations of rape against him. (He was even allowed to help lead the first high-profile interview of Simmons in months.) Despite the collective efforts to #MuteRKelly, not to mention the 22 federal criminal charges against the singer, his musical legacy still looms large in certain spaces, like on the popular Verzuz Instagram Live series. The calculus of acknowledging the pain of Black girls and women is still determined by how much it offsets the accepted threshold for collective sacrifice. As long as a legacy is critical enough to “the culture,” mechanisms are in place to protect abusers—positioning them as the victims, and the victims as living crime scenes.

Currently, Simmons resides in Bali, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. With the full support of his family, he has been engaging in an exculpatory tour of self-promotion via his unfettered social media presence, flipping #MeToo into #NotMe and posting open letters decrying the willful assassination of his character. Just yesterday morning, he used his “Breakfast Club” appearance to gaslight survivors, call out “toxic femininity,” and namedrop famous Black women who’ve had positive interactions with him, in some veiled attempt to inoculate himself from claims of assault. “I really don’t think we should be relitigating 30-year-old stories that had never been told,” Simmons said. Despite stepping down from his companies and philanthropic endeavors, his presence online as a wellness guru remains more or less unchallenged, while various friends in entertainment have stuck by his side. Is the man who sold rap to the world too big to be canceled? The answer remains to be seen, but hip-hop needs this reckoning—not just for Simmons’ survivors, but for all the Black women who’ve silenced themselves for the greater cause.

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Shamira Explains It All Issue No. 1: New York is Burning

This originally published on June 1st 2020 as part of my Newsletter series on Substack here.

Welcome to Shamira Explains It All/Shamira Explique Tout, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions – and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part French (la moitié est écrite en français, ou plus, si le thème du mois le demande). Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.

Sistas, how y’all feel? Brothas, y’all alright?

I originally wanted to launch this newsletter on my birthday – for a variety of reasons, that did not come to fruition. So I’m launching this on my mother’s birthday instead – a woman who as born in a country that had that to claw and fight for its independence from its oppressors, and continues to try to find its way. It grounds me in a sobering truth – eradicating the most visible oppressors is only the first step. But as Samuel Beckett wrote, “Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Over the past few days, cities across the United States have been rife with clashes between organizers, protesters, and their respective law enforcement forces. Some people are confrontational and others are not; all methods of protest are legitimate (including this amazing form of surveillance disruption by K-pop stans). Ultimately, the concept of a “peaceful” protest is a farce; it presumes opposing forces that do not seek to engage the community as enemy combatants. Corporations and businesses are not people, despite the fact that the Supreme Court opted to give them protections that treated them as such; but when discussing looting, keep in mind that there is record unemployment in a public health crisis with little to no social safety network to keep people afloat. As people have pointed out recently, Martin Luther King, in his advocacy for nonviolence, still expressed that “a riot is the language of the unheard:”

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

With regards to how people discuss MLK and nonviolence in general, it is frequently misconstrued and decontextualized. I encourage people to listen to this clip from Bomani Jones’ ESPN Radio Show about the impetus behind MLK Day and the clarity of his actual message – that the greatest weapon he employed wasn’t pacifism, but shame.

In Brooklyn, near-unprecedented violence is ongoing in Fort Greene and Flatbush. It should not be lost on spectators that the nexus of brutality going on in Kings Country is happening around the Barclays Center – the source of its own violence on the Black community in Brooklyn. Gentrification and displacement go hand in hand with over policing and stop and frisk. I explored that in my piece for OkayPlayer

Lastly, I will just share my quick (and growing) thread on surveillance practices and ethics with journalism and organizing. It will be an ever expanding discussion as we continue to accept loss of privacy to the state and use of that data in a retaliatory manner, but one that we have to accept is a very present threat in the first place. This is an excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote some time ago on surveillance and criminalization of Black communities:

Between the patterns of zeros and ones rests a minotaur for the digital age – amalgamating the sophistry of inherent Black criminality within a web of innovation that only serves as an anchor to longstanding pathologies. If we have any hope of a technological age that isn’t inextricably contracted to white supremacy, we would be well-suited to look at the threshold between mythology and history in order to reshape the way we think about applying harm reduction and racial equity. The surest way to get swallowed alive by a monster is to fail to realize that one is even there; and it is only by identifying that framework that we can begin to lay down the thread that will guide the perception of inherent Black criminality from the bowels of a modern digital labyrinth. 

We have a long way to go to understand just how much data we have forfeited to third parties and actors that profit from participation in the prison industrial complex. A calculation can never supersede the inherent biases that it is introduced to and the fact remains that the carceral state was designed out of a pathology to funnel brown bodies into boxes. As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, “whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.”  The superimposition of automation belies this truth, but as Saidiya Hartman spoke to “a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago”, so has the digital model continued to reinforce the punitive history behind bars: it is all it knows, and therefore all it can be.

Playlist for the Month:

This month:

  • If you are uploading pictures of protestors or people organizing – use this tool to scrub metadata and blur peoples faces and other identifying features.
  • Try to contribute to vetted bail funds if you can. Here is a Twitter Thread with links to bail funds throughout the nation. (Important Note: The NYC Chapter has said they are overwhelmed by funds, so you may want to divert funds to local organizations in need of resources instead – like Equality for Flatbush’s mutual aid fund, so that they can continue investing in their police abolition organizing as well as community support)
  • For those who want to get involved but can’t take to the streets for various reasons (like myself, because of my immigration status) , here is a link to various to be in the struggle.
  • If you are interested in additional anti-carceral reading during this quarantine, for those of you who are just starting out – I encourage you to check out Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
  • This is a great 5-minute appearance from Cornel West on CNN worth checking out (where he references the Samuel Beckett quote above). Key takeaway: “It looks as if the system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried Black faces in high places – too often our Black politicians, professional class, middle class, become too accommodated to the the capitalist economy…”
  • Here is some legal guidance for those who are arrested in New York City.

Francophone Corner:

  • Découvrez le lancement de SUNU : Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, une création de la brillante Amy Sall. SUNU Journal cherche à interroger, critiquer et célébrer le passé et le présent, tout en contribuant à une riche lignée de production intellectuelle, culturelle artistique africaine et afro-diasporique.
  • Check out the launch of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics the brainchild of the brilliant Amy Sall. SUNU Journal seeks to interrogate, critique and celebrate the past and the present, whilst contributing to a rich lineage of African and Afro-diasporic intellectual, cultural + artistic production.
  • Soutenons les médias indépendants ! Avec ce concept de « blingzine » bilingue (français/anglais), 33 Carats propose 106 pages de découvertes hip hop, lifestyle et mode par une équipe de passionnées. C’est le thème de la Déconnexion qui est exploré pour ce numéro avec des interviews d’experts sur les stratégies marketing des rappeurs français, une visite de Négus l’exposition/album de Yassin Bey par la journaliste américaine Ebony Janice.  Mais le récit collaboratif fait de bling et de hip hop « Birkins and Drake » dont Life is Good  le premier épisode est écrit par moi 🙂 En bonus ; une interview exclusive d’Erykah Badu : pas mal pour un média indépendant !Erykah Badu lance son site Badu World Market, Elle y propose des collections limitées hoodies et tee-shirts oversize en collaboration avec l’artiste canadienne Jackie Musial. A l’occasion du lancement de ce nouveau projet de la chanteuse, une interview exclusive par Sanaa Carats, fondatrice et rédactrice en chef du média, est disponible dans le numéro 3. Le rappeur français Cleim Haring en couverture.En attendant la version papier, En vente sur Issuu : 
  • Support independent media! With this bilingual (French/English) “blingzine” concept, 33 Carats offers 106 pages of hip hop, lifestyle and fashion discoveries by a team of passionate people. Interviews with experts on the marketing strategies of French rappers, a visit to Négus exhibition/album by Yassin Bey by the American journalist Ebony Janice.  But the collaborative fictional series of bling and hip hop “Birkins and Drake” of which Life is Good is the first episode is written by me 🙂 As a bonus; an exclusive interview with Erykah Badu!Erykah Badu launches her website Badu World Market, where she offers limited collections of hoodies and oversize tee-shirts in collaboration with Canadian artist Jackie Musial. On the occasion of the launch of this new project of the singer, an exclusive interview by Sanaa Carats, founder and editor-in-chief of the media, is available in this third issue. Buy it here.https://www.33carats.com/Suivre sur Instagram: 33caratswebzineTwitter: https://twitter.com/33caratswebzineFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/33carats/

Alors, c’est tout. Sign up now so you don’t miss the next issue.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAwxM-vFVzz/

In the meantime, tell your friends!

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#BlackAF Fails to Break New Ground

Originally published for The Atlantic.

What makes good art? This question has dominated entertainment criticism over the past several years—including the deliberation about fairness in evaluating award worthiness at the Emmys, Oscars, and Grammys, and a recent standoff between the director Martin Scorsese and the fandom of the Marvel cinematic universe. In the latter, Scorsese—renowned for his canon of classic films that navigate the fabric of Italian American identity in 20th-century New York—argued that the strongest on-camera stories home in on “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”

This is the challenge that the Black-ish (and Grown-ish and Mixed-ish) creator, Kenya Barris, is facing in his new Netflix series, #BlackAF. Black-ish, a network TV–friendly caricature of Barris’s own life that debuted in 2014, confronts the realities of being a newly wealthy black family in upper-class white America. The show, helmed by Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross, who play the husband-wife duo of Andre “Dre” and Rainbow “Bow” Johnson, gives a comedic peek into some of their “post-racial” anxieties. The first two seasons, in particular, try to analyze layers of race, class, and generational interactions, replete with didactic cutaways, nonverbal signifiers of accomplishment via hyperconsumption, and hand-wringing identity crises.

#BlackAF aims to reframe and expound on Barris’s personal narrative in a more self-aware, satirical context, but it ends up just repeating all the same notes from Black-ish. Without fresh source material, Barris fails to bring new complexity and depth to the ecosystem he has created. He steps into the titular role himself, with Rashida Jones playing his wife, Joya, and tries to create a hyperbolic version of his reality as the wealthy creator of a TV franchise.The difficulty lies, however, in the fact that Anderson’s original character was already a caricature, making the parallel world that Barris inhabits not nearly as much of a distinction. #BlackAF replicates Black-ish’s affinity for pedagogical missives, such as ones explaining Juneteenth, which Barris was already lauded for the first time around. And the new show doubles down on the running barbs about Barris’s distaste for his nuclear family, particularly for his emotionally expressive eldest son (Junior on Black-ish, Pops on #BlackAF).

Audiences are treated to Barris’s version of a Curb Your Enthusiasm pastiche act, wherein the only takeaway he has implemented from Larry David’s cult-favorite show is meanness. Barris seems to have plenty that he would still like to express, some of which is quite comedically articulated, but very little of what he does have to say advances the issues that he has been publicly ruminating over for the past seven years.On Black-ish, for instance,Bow is regularly marginalized by Dre’s family for being a working mom who grew up on a hippie commune. That same casual dismissal of her personhood morphs into the cruel minimization of Joya’s biracial identity on #BlackAF. Despite a strong comedic performance by Jones, Joya’s role is limited to a search for fulfillment and purpose, and contextual examinations of her race are filtered through frivolous conversations about her dancing skills and sartorial choices.

Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique—two elements that remain elusive throughout the first season of #BlackAF. If Barris is attempting to highlight the absurdity of engaging in “black excellence” performance politics, he fails on that accord. It’s not clear whether he’s critiquing the inherently flawed premise of analyzing “blackness” solely in its relationship to white supremacy, or whether he’s just capitulating to the “white gaze” of Hollywood. And without an express motive or a fixed frame of reference, it’s difficult to grasp Barris’s target audience.

Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique.
Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique.

For instance, in the aforementioned Juneteenth episode, titled “still … because of slavery,” there is awell-executed plotlineabout Barris’s inability to contextualize a mixed-media painting he has just acquired. Made by the artist Knowledge Bennett, Strength in Numbers is an immense black canvas punctuated by luminous white stippling. Barris mutters about gentrification, origin stories, and black boxes. But the episode is punctuated byan appearance from Bennett himself, who elucidates the intention behind the painting, stating, “As black people, there’s so many different things, variations of so many different colors. And it’s the sum total of all of these colors that presents blackness in its purest form—in all of its brilliance, all of its splendor.” It’s a genuine moment that would seem to pull the show into sharp focus, but it is quickly undone by Barris’s insistence that he had made the same point as Bennett. As explained by the TV critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, “#BlackAF isn’t a show about blackness, it’s a show about one person’s near-pathological need to keep up appearances.”

In the most ambitious episode, titled “yo, between you and me … this is because of slavery,” Barris tries to assess black art that gets celebrated by mainstream white audiences. He is asked to hold a panel for a “black film” that, on his initial screening, he deems painfully subpar. Barris is upset that his lower-class family members—introduced in the episode to expose his youngest children to more “blackness”—enjoy a project that he finds pedestrian, one that is also being lauded by white critics. Between Barris’s “very black” family, the amorphous white critics of Rotten Tomatoes, and the “bad” film itself, it is difficult to glean exactly what is being indicted. The segment also seems to entirely ignore the fact that black critics exist.

Later in the episode, after lamenting that he’s never won an Emmy for any of his shows, Barris consults with a high council of other creatives such as Will Packer, Ava DuVernay, Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, and Tim Story. In talking with them, Barris confronts the sentiment that he may be resting on his laurels, riding a current “black wave” with projects that appeal to “the hearts and minds of 55-year-old white women.” Instead of delving into his shows’ thematic redundancy, Barris stops just short of examining how artists may participate in the very systems that they would like to dismantle.

There is nothing wrong with Barris’s work being informed by his particular point of view and experience. In fact, these things can enrich one’s storytelling over the course of one’s creative career. Scorsese has said that “the most personal is the most creative,” words the Parasite director, Bong Joon Ho, honored when accepting the 2020 Oscar for Best Picture. Since the debut of Black-ish, however, Barris has not found new ways to examine himself and his family within the fictive universe he’s created. He seeks to break ground with more contemporary and meaningful discussions in #BlackAF, but they mostly peter out before they have a chance of landing effectively.

The late literary critic Cheryl A. Wall wrote, “Whatever the issues [writers] confront or the questions they puzzle through, they engage, directly or indirectly, the examples of writers before them who used the essay to focus attention on political controversies, to shape aesthetic debates, and to create a space for personal recollection and philosophical reflection.” A show with a title as weighty as #BlackAF should engage in incisive thinking. It’s a difficult exercise, but the payoff would be immeasurable—and that would be the satire I would gladly tune in to.

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