Originally published for VerySmartBrothas ‘ America In Black Series.
I often jokingly tell people that I grew up in a household made up of three (occasionally four, depending on what station in life my father was in at the time) distinct American dreams—one for each flag or passport represented: Comoros, Canada and the United States. My mother, my brother and I are a trinity of the resulting products of varying circumstances that led to us calling America home. Continue reading
Originally published for The Root.
The music video for 34-year-old French rapper Nick Conrad’s “Pendez les Blancs” (“Hang the Whites”) opens with a jarring visual akin to the title itself: the lifeless body of a white man on a noose, while Conrad (a black man of Cameroonian descent) stands beside him lighting a cigar.
It’s a role reversal intended to make even the most unperturbed person’s pupils dilate, with lyrics to match: In the opening lines, he speaks about entering daycares to kill white babies and then hang their parents.
Throughout the rest of the nine-minute clip, Conrad leans into a macabre inversion of anti-black violence via reenactments of culturally relevant and critically acclaimed films such as Get Out and American History X—including the latter’s iconic curb stomp scene—while wordsmithing references to actual atrocities committed against the black diaspora at the hands of white supremacists. Each line intentionally evokes a new horror, superimposed with a white face—from the whippings and lynchings described with syntax akin to that of “Strange Fruit” (“hanging from trees in cosmic emptiness/these filthy fruits provide a fascinating show”) to descriptions of torturing insubordinates to subdue rebellion to the endless wars waged for profit. Halfway through the video, a Malcolm X quote is put on the screen: “The price of freedom is death.” As a coda to his final verse, Conrad declares that he is “reversing the triangular trade” via “Black History X,” cleverly tying together themes of his song and the corresponding video by making the race reversal concept and the purpose of the cinematic allusions even more overt.
Uploaded to YouTube in September, “PLB” gained the attention of French politicians and organizations, and the backlash was swift: Far-right leader Marine Le Pen declared the video an instance of “anti-white racism” and a call to hatred and murder, demanding that the transgression be rewarded with appropriate penalties on all social media platforms. France’s interior minister, Gerard Collomb, responded in kind, stating on Twitter, “I condemn without reservation these abject remarks and ignominious attacks.” LICRA, France’s largest organization intended to fight racism and anti-Semitism, put out a statement calling the video “abject and incredibly violent” and called for legal action. YouTube promptly removed the video from its platform, claiming that it “violated hate speech guidelines.” In just a few days, Nick Conrad went from being a little-known artist with under 1,000 average hits a month to the No. 1 trending topic in France.
Pursuant to the outcry, French prosecutors investigated and determined that Conrad’s artistic license violated France’s codified press laws by causing “incitement to racial discrimination, hatred, or violence on the basis of one’s origin or membership in an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group”—in this case, Caucasians. The charge is similar to one made in 2015 against Saïdou of the well-known French group ZEP for their song “Nique la France” (“Fuck France”), in which he would be charged and later absolved of targeting hate speech toward those who were “Français de souche,” or French to the root—namely, again, Caucasians.
Proceedings began this past Wednesday with Conrad and his team facing off against complainants LICRA and the far-right leaning LAGRIF (General Alliance Against Racism and for Respect for French and Christian Identity). Reports of the trial describe Conrad enumerating in detail how the concept of the video was not only informed by multiple popular cultural and historical references (which the complainants allege are not ones that French people know well), but also the reality of his life and upbringing in France: “There is so much oppression and innuendo in society on a daily basis, even in a subliminal way; there are so many things that may elude most, but we see them.”
Conrad was questioned over his reference to Malcolm X, and the complainants implied that the deceased black liberation activist was an anti-white racist and black supremacist, unlike a more peaceful Martin Luther King. In a stunning but familiar pivot, one member of LAGRIF’s counsel team maintained, “It’s all the white man’s fault. But do we talk about the Arab slave trade and the black people who sold their brothers?”
Beyond these cartoonishly incorrect readings of history, implicit in the discussion is the assumption that racism is an equal exchange of offenses as opposed to a systemic construction. All sins are not created equal, and the collective weight of the black struggle is a debt that has accumulated over time. Under the guise of “universalism,” the French community’s continued reluctance to allow their nonwhite compatriots to confront those failings in an open space has long provided cover for oppressive tactics, to the point that France has worked to ban events and gatherings targeted for black people on the grounds of racism. It’s a farce of an exercise in a country that has yet to even track any sort of race-related census, consistently putting forth a narrative that race is not even a consideration in French identity as recently as the World Cup.
The scenes and lyrics played out in Conrad’s video are indisputably graphic, but that has hardly precluded people from understanding a performer’s artistic vision before. In Childish Gambino’s video for “This Is America,” a black man is shot in the head point blank, and a church choir is gunned down; released with similar shock value intent, it received acclaim and is currently nominated for a Grammy. Contemporaries notwithstanding, the question remains: If the scenes depicted in Conrad’s video were near-facsimiles of movies that have become cultural staples, why are we so comfortable celebrating and watching these same portrayals of violence against black people without discomfort?
Despite the perpetual efforts to distance itself from systematic wrongdoing against the black community, France has still been a site of unjustifiable black deaths: 24-year-old Adama Traore’s death in police custody in 2016 has largely gone unanswered by both the government and LICRA. Meanwhile, both institutions continue to hold court over perceived offenses of reverse racism. This dynamic evidences the power imbalance that Conrad sought to flip on its head, albeit crudely. If merely the visualization of violence against white people causes panic, however visceral, it should stand to reason that the accrued toll of centuries of brutality against black people at the hands of white supremacy is immeasurable. Whether or not Conrad is found guilty during his March 19 sentencing, there is a clear failure of France’s vocal white demographic to appreciate the magnitude of that calculus.
As Conrad’s lawyers stated, “[The song] is a violent, shocking, disturbing piece of art. But history itself is violent, shocking and disturbing.”
Originally published for Nylon Magazine.
In Islamic theology, there is the concept of the Jinn—beings born of a “smokeless” fire in another dimension, beyond human but with the same frailties; neither inherently good nor bad, with a fiendish streak that is documented not just in the Holy Quran but in Hadith, and just as capable of salvation or damnation as the rest of us. Of the five kinds of Jinn—Marid, Effrit, Ghoul, Sila, Vetala—the Sila are considered to be one of the rarest, typified by a seductive feminine energy and shapeshifting capability. Continue reading
Originally published for Broadly.
In 2018, the scales on which we weigh morality have begun to slowly shift. Many of its detractors have derisively tried to attribute the change to the rise of “call-out culture” or “cancel culture,” but the reality is that the rubric of what defines goodwill is no longer limited to intent. Power imbalances, agency, and execution are all critical factors for assessing the merit of any charitable effort, and social media has increasingly empowered the groups whose spaces are being infringed upon to continuously hold people accountable on those merits.
Originally published for Nylon Magazine.
For 12 years of my life, I awoke to the same routine. A gentle knock on my door, followed by a more urgent one, quickly followed by the hinges creaking open and my mother exclaiming in harried frustration, “Bo Shami! Reveille-toi!”
Originally published for Broadly.
“Cold Takes” is a column in which we express our passionate beliefs about insignificant events and Internet discourses at least several months too late.
From 1998 to 2006, the world got to know a trio of sister witches, known as “Charmed Ones”— Piper, Phoebe, and Prue Halliwell (and later their half-sister Paige after Prue’s untimely passing) — the most powerful forces of good of all time. An immediate hit for The WB network, millions flocked to the show —myself included— to watch three single women in their twenties engage in self-exploration and rediscovery of familial bonds while kicking ass and taking names. Continue reading
Originally published for The Root.
For Matthew Morgan and Jocelyn Cooper, it has been a long, 15-year journey to get the Afropunk Festival from the small, local hangout for passionate message-board friends in the alt-punk space congregating in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, NY, to the internationally renowned entertainment juggernaut it is today.
Borne out of a titular documentary exploring a “subculture within a subculture,” Afropunk has expanded well beyond the original source material, becoming more inclusive of the nuances of alternative black spaces as the years have progressed. But with rapid growth comes criticism—and in recent years the festival has withstood a fair amount, from pushback over the rapidly rising ticket prices for admission to dismay over the perceived erasure of the punk fanbase it was created to serve to rumblings of an increasing nonblack presence.
This growing friction between the paradox of “punk” and commercialism has been an ongoing conversation for Cooper and Morgan, which they have worked to address year after year, as they continue to cement themselves as the ambassadors of an independent black media company with a large global imprint.
“I think there’s a misconception that we are not-for-profit,” says Morgan, who co-founded the current iteration of the festival with Cooper in 2009 (prior to that, Morgan had collaborated with James Spooner, the creator of the Afropunk documentary, in what was known as the “AfroPunk Music and Film Festival”). “Although we worked in the last few years with local authorities and the mayor’s office and the local government, we are a for-profit business and we were a for-profit business even when we were free.”
“If you pick any two acts, headliners in a direct support of any of the four stages and you put those together, you cannot see two acts for the price that we have,” Morgan further clarifies. “We are still the cheapest festival in America, and we do that because it’s more important for us to have a black audience that pays for a ticket that supports their culture and enables us to have black people in marketing, editorial, sales, sponsorship. It creates a business that is for the community. That employs the community.”
Despite the relative affordability of tickets, the uptick over the years is still unmistakable, going from a previously “free” (with donations requested) event to most recently charging $60 per day, for the two-day festival. However, Afropunk Brooklyn has had a continued partnership with Chip’N in the Earn A Ticket program, which provides the opportunity for Brooklyn residents to get a free day pass in exchange for a set amount of volunteer hours. According to Cooper and Morgan, approximately 20 percent of all tickets were earned tickets this year.
With regards to the punk legacy of the festival, both Morgan and Cooper admit that they’ve veered beyond the confines of the source material envisioned by film creator James Spooner, but resist being confined to its initial definitions as their brand continues to grow.
“In 2007, 2008, I think I started to expand the definitions and not be locked into what traditional punk rock dictates because we’re already outside of those lines, so why did we have to work things that were already not for us? Why weren’t we supposed to create our own space? And that also means that, for me, the music genre is not important. It’s about the attitude, it’s about the people, it’s about the resistance, it’s about resisting in a place that is normally not associated with people of color,” Morgan says.
Morgan also draws onto his own background as to why he felt compelled to expand the musical offerings:
“I love an audience of 250, 300 people … but if I kept going down that road, I said that we would miss the people like myself. The kids that lived in the projects, like where I grew up, not what people write about but where people actually live can grow up and form community, friendship. I would miss those kids because the music would tell them that it wasn’t for them, as opposed to being an inviting place that had all types of music, therefore would bring different types of black people. So I think it’s not for me about when the decision was made about the genre of music. It was a position to bring more black people in than to exclude.”
Despite the expansion into other genres, they continue to book punk artists, and claim to book more traditional punk bands (11 this year) than any other major festivals, including artists such as the Fever 333 and Black Pantera from Brazil.
“We create alternative marketing materials solely for the punk bands so people are more aware that they exist,” Morgan says. “And the way that they’re described between the other bands is done so people go for Yuna and see the Fever 333, and that is what we do. It’s what we’ve always done. If people are new to what we’re doing, then my assumption is that they don’t know the history and they’re joining now too … which is fine. We welcome that.”
As to the social media buzz of an increasing nonblack presence in recent years, Cooper adamantly states, “This is not true. Come to the festival, you’d see,” adding that there were arguably more white attendees when the festival was still held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Morgan adds that the highest possible concentration—which, they both emphasize, is still not high—may be in the VIP section where the sponsors, band managers and special guest lists are: “The reality is that we have more agents and we have bigger bands and if anyone can tell me how we tell the bands with their white agents and their white friends and their white bandmates and their white girlfriends and parents that they can’t come to the festival … tell me how to do that without coming across like a bigot,” Morgan says.
This year’s festival was punctuated with a viral incident in which Ebony Donnely and his partner Ericka Hart claimed they were removed from the VIP section by security on Morgan’s orders for wearing a T-shirt noting that “Afropunk Sold Out For White Consumption.” In his own words, Morgan gave his own accounting of the incident, contributing it to a disappointing miscommunication:
“I walk up to three people after scanning who went backstage and I said, ‘Interesting shirt,’ or, ‘What’s that shirt?’ Unbeknownst to me, they had been taken backstage by our film crew to do an interview, which they did. And our film crew gave Ebony backstage a marker, and backstage, Ebony wrote on the shirt. I don’t know what selling out for white consumption is and I was actually interested in what that was, but I commented on the shirt and then I asked for what credentials do you have and I was told, and in my English [Morgan is from England], I was told to mind my own business and I think, in American, it was ‘why are you asking so many questions?’ The amount of conversation about the T-shirt was perhaps three seconds. We then went on to talk about the credentials. When they basically told me to mind my own business, I asked the security. They asked me what was going on, and I said—this is where the ‘my house’ thing comes up—I said, ‘Back here is my house. You can do whatever you want outside but you don’t have the right credentials to go backstage. You have to go.’
“Other people were being asked to leave backstage. It’s not a VIP as I’ve read. It’s not an area for uninvited guest. It’s a backstage working talent area. I noticed Erica. I said, ‘Erica.’ And she said, ‘You know me.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I know you,’ and that was kind of how the interaction went. It was very, very short. They were escorted out. Erica asked me, ‘Are we being kicked out the festival?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. Just not backstage,’ and they were escorted from backstage to the entrance of backstage and they went on their way.”
Morgan adds that the removal had nothing to do with the T-shirt, noting that prior to the incident, he had a lengthy and productive exchange with someone else who had a shirt stating “Make AfroPunk Free Again” without conflict. It was in this spirit of discourse that Morgan and Cooper invited Donnely and Hart to their Solution Sessions podcast, which they chose to decline.
Cooper took direct issue with the implications of the shirt itself, highlighting the impact of Afropunk in the black community in Brooklyn and abroad.
“We have supported 250 black businesses in our market,” she says, from food businesses, to homemade earring designers to organizations that have built schools in Ghana—in addition to a fully black, live-event production company. To Cooper, the greater objective of Afropunk is to create an ecosystem of a self-sustaining dollars within the black community and its diasporas, a concept that would directly counter any notion of white consumption.
“I just looked at an impact study that we helped to generate to the city of Johannesburg almost a hundred million Rand (approximately 6.6 million USD) worth of business that we brought into that city in our first year. We’re just getting started,” she says.
On the heels of this discord also lies some internal tensions made public by longtime editor-in-chief of Afropunk.com, Lou Constant-Desportes, who announced he had stepped down in a Facebook post that claimed the “philosophy and actions of some of the people who run the company are so at odds with the values that they claim to stand for.”
From Morgan and Cooper’s end, they both lamented the loss of a beloved family member from their team, indicating that bringing on Emil Wilbekin as chief content officer and Constant-Desportes’ new boss to expand their editorial vertical approximately six weeks ago may have contributed to the situation. (The Root has reached out to Constant-Desportes for comment).
Afropunk is rapidly expanding with no signs of slowing down—this year’s officially reported attendance numbers for Afropunk Brooklyn was 25,000 people a day. Next year will be the inaugural Afropunk Brazil, which will officially place the black-owned festival in four continents, with teams and offices being built in each of the other corresponding locations—Brooklyn, Atlanta, London, Paris and Johannesburg.
Concurrently, both Cooper and Morgan are eager to expand their reach into other branches of entertainment—expanding their podcasting efforts with an upcoming partnership with the HowStuffWorks network, as well as looking to undertake a few film projects. By all estimations, their dream of a fully realized digital media company is within arm’s reach—but as their network continues to expand, the dialogue of reconciling seemingly conflicting legacies of capitalistic enterprise with their punk ethos and an enmeshed association with black activism and empowerment will likely be a continuing one. On their end, they are prepared to have it—just tune into their next Solution Sessions. As Morgan puts it, “we’re able to do more when we can finance the revolution.”
Originally published for The Root.
It has been an oft-repeated refrain that the Afropunk Festival has changed from the punk-centered origins of its inception in the early 2000s—evolving well beyond the brainchild of James Spooner’s titular documentary to a festival powerhouse, with presence in three continents and five cites. Continue reading
Originally published for Buzzfeed News.
Atop Paris’s famous Champ de Mars gardens lies its even more prominent Eiffel Tower — a gargantuan lattice ironwork that millions of people from around the world flock to visit annually. Like all landmarks of cosmopolitan cities, the site is picturesque, nostalgic, and crowded — the hustle and bustle of citizens and visitors alike, colliding daily. About 15 yards from the main entrance, you’ll see a row of young men, largely of African descent, aiming to make as much money as they can from passersby, selling anything from mini Eiffel Towers to French flag pins. At the end of their day, some will pack up and take the Metro past the Périphérique to the banlieues; from the ritzy city center where they spend their day to the isolated, low-income suburb enclaves of mainly black and brown people who have been denied significant mobility or opportunity, the cité tower blocks in the shadows of the shimmering lights of the notoriously low-lying city.
Originally published for the Intelligencer at NYMag.
When New York–based activists Rise and Resist planned to use Independence Day to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies, their objective was simple: to unfurl a banner declaring “Abolish ICE” on Liberty Island. Patricia Okoumou, however, took it further, risking life, limb, and liberty in free-climbing the 100-foot-tall pedestal base of the Statue of Liberty and lying at its feet. During the three-hour standoff, she repurposed her shirt into a flag of its own, defiantly displaying the call to action to “Rise and Resist.”
