2020 has been a year plagued by a lack of clarity and direction, with great loss exacerbated by deep systemic inequalities. The troubling conditions, in America, have been buttressed with recent audio confirming that the executive office knew about the ruinous potential of COVID-19, and willfully misled the public. So far, the death toll from the virus has crossed 200,000. Deep fissures in the country’s fabric have been exposed, revealing the urgence of policy around healthcare, immigration, housing, and policing. Amongst all of the noise, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro has been at the vanguard, facilitating these conversations on the national stage.
Despite not being a front-runner during primary season, Castro has made waves for framing the immigration conversation around policies such as Section 1325 and 287(g), which criminalizes illegal entry and enforces compulsory collaboration with local law enforcement. Castro focuses on repositioning the narrative of the “American Dream” as one that should be reformed and enabled rather than obstructed, considering the amount of national investment in the flawed precept that we are a country built on the backs of immigrants.
This originally published on July 16th 2020 in The Cut.
For years, Sil Lai Abrams has maintained that she was sexually assaulted by one of the music industry’s elite in 1994 when she was a young model during a visit to New York. The writer and domestic-violence activist first wrote about it in her 2007 book No More Drama, but didn’t she name hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons directly until two years ago in a piece for the Hollywood Reporter. Abrams and Simmons’s yearslong friendship — which included a fleeting intimate relationship and Abrams’s brief stint as an executive assistant at Def Jam — came careening to a halt after the alleged rape.Abrams says that thetrauma of such a harrowing event triggered a suicide attempt that she almost didn’t survive. But people are finally listening.
Originally published for Vulture on September 18th, 2020.
2020 commenced with a great loss in New York’s robust contemporary hip-hop scene: the murder of Canarsie’s prodigal son and prince of Brooklyn drill, Pop Smoke, at just 20 years old. His sudden passing left an indelible vacancy in the city. The loss of one of the booming voices of the New York rap community — whose meteoric career was cut short by a violent end — cratered the community and felt like an overwhelming defeat for one of rap’s newest waves in the city.
However, even a cursory look at the current musical landscape in New York would reveal that there is no dearth of emerging talent across the five boroughs — and not all of it is concentrated in drill. Several niches have developed over the past few years, each with their own distinctive sound. Young talented artists are branching out and blazing trails within the new school, as much of the rest of the country dismissively boxes them in as simply trying to duplicate the sounds of the South. From the small empires being built out of Highbridge to the mantles being passed down in Canarsie, artists are beginning to redefine the soundscapes of New York City — and they are as robust as ever.
The ’90s ushered in both the rise of the South, which demanded acknowledgment of its contributions to hip-hop, and the emergence of the video vixen. It was only natural, then, that the Roc-A-Fella duo of Dame Dash and Jay-Z would extend an olive branch to UGK, one of the fastest-rising duos from Texas at the time, to collaborate on the biggest single of Jay-Z’s fourth album, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter. The song almost didn’t happen, however: Reluctant to collaborate with Jay, Pimp C didn’t submit his verse until the 11th hour, even delaying participating in his now-infamous music-video scene with Gloria Velez. (He ultimately had to film in Miami in lieu of Trinidad’s Carnival, the backdrop for the rest of the crew.) —Shamira Ibrahim
From Despondent To Defiant, Dua Saleh’s ‘body cast’ Stomps On Everyday Injustice
May 30, 2020
Dua Saleh — Black, nonbinary, Sudanese and Minnesotan — is driven by the generative work within their communities. They released “body cast” at the close of May, stating that they “intended to save it for a project in the future, but I can’t wait that long with what is happening in my city of Minneapolis.” Over sparse production, they pack in dense couplets, wailing, “Lately I’ve had plaster on my mind / County ain’t on s*** they got bodies on the line / Lately I’ve been analyzing time / Y’all been dodging cameras like they bullets over crime.” In the course of two and half minutes, they veer from despondent to defiant, sinking into angst only to rise back up in rage. The final moments include audio from a viral video of Angela Whitehead asserting her right to refuse the police entry into her property — a vignette that is breathtaking for its utter recalcitrance and almost mythic in its seeming implausibility.
Originally published for Complex on. August 28th, 2020
A little over five years have passed since Bree Newsome commanded the nation’s newsfeeds with the insurgent act of stripping the South Carolina State House of its Confederate adornments. Despite a shift in administration, a viral pandemic and media cycles that have wildly accelerated in the wake of record unemployment and quarantine, as Newsome herself does not hesitate to point out, the more things have changed, the more they stay the same. “The system itself is the problem,” she explains. “I don’t think that the existing system can bring solutions because it’s not broken.”
In the time since her arrest, Newsome has remain unbowed, committing to coalition work in her current residence of North Carolina—such as the Housing Justice Coalition in Charlotte and its state-level campaigns such as #NeedAHome2StayAtHome. She continues to use her social and digital platforms to try to effect grassroots disruption. Simultaneously, monuments around the country—Stonewall Jackson in Richmond, Virginia, and Christopher Columbus in Boston, for example—are toppling at a much higher rate than when Newsome initially made headlines. For some, this was a harbinger of an uprising that has yet to fully materialize, while the ever-looming conversation around the November 2020 election casts its shadow over daily protests and steadily increasing unemployment numbers.
Originally published for Teen Vogue on August 18, 2020.
On March 6, Megan Thee Stallion released Suga, her third extended play project packed with nine bass-heavy tracks about rough sex, making money, and self-love. Anchored by the standout tracks “Savage” and “Captain Hook,” Megan delivered a tongue-in-cheek ode to unrepentant sexual pleasure while switching between rhyme schemes fast enough to give you whiplash.
What would follow was a year filled with women rapping about sexual agency and ensuring that they remain on the foreground of the conversation around hip-hop culture. City Girls, Saweetie, Flo Milli, Doja Cat, and Mulatto all released new music within a four-month span in 2020 as well. Megan’s two major hit songs: “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé and “WAP” with Cardi B broke records. When taking account of 2020’s music distinctiveness, it should be heralded as a year when female rappers took laps around their contemporaries, one hit song after another.
Make no mistake: The power construct in music is still heavily informed by the cishet male gatekeepers of the hip-hop industry. As a genre that historically has served as a magnifying glass for the surrounding environment, patriarchy — and misogynoir in turn — has always received a platform.
But artists like Megan and Cardi B are leveraging their varied skills with a forceful reconstruction of the lascivious Jezebel stereotype that has long been affixed to Black women — removing the shame and immorality from sexual desire and highlighting the transactional power that has always existed. There is a wide range of women’s skill and talent to choose from who are centering their own pleasure and autonomy in a genre that has used the strip club as a litmus test for marketing viability of new songs for the better part of the current millennium.
Doja Cat quickly rose from her novelty single “Moo” off her debut album Amala into a bonafide international star, with singles such as “Juicy,” “Rules,” and “CyberSex,” exploring body positivity, sexual pleasure, and female agency — landing her a coveted feature from Nicki Minaj on the remix Billboard charting single “Say So” in May. Rapper Saweetie, for her part, has navigated the sweet spot of harnessing early 2000s nostalgia while still centering her agency in the song, flipping Petey Pablo’s classic crunk hit “Freek-A-Leek,” “My Type,” and more recently “Tap In.”
Simultaneously, Alabama rapper Flo Milli has quickly risen to relevance, being welcomed into the new vanguard of rappers — with co-signs from The City Girls and Missy Elliott — with her irreverent new project, aptly titled Ho, Why is You Here. Leaning into a brash, bratty timbre with lines that thrust you right into her unrepentant aesthetic, the 20-year-old’s music is as enjoyable as it is clever. “In the Party” and “Beef Flomix” respectively, and have become such cult hits that they can have been found as backing tracks in “fancams” within stan culture; her standout single “Weak” transposes the homonymous SWV track, repurposing it into a dismissive anthem about the failings of men. Her album follows suit accordingly, as each track grows more insolent and cocksure than the last.
The women’s posse is making a comeback too: the Thot Box (Remix) is a collective of up and coming women emcees (Chinese Kitty, Dream Doll, Young MA, Dreezy, and Mulatto) flexing their muscles in response to misogynoir. Cardi B, for her part, has alluded to working on a Ladies’ Night inspired song for her upcoming album.
But how does this moment in rap fit into the greater canon of women’s place in hip-hop history?
The conversation around female artists having agency and sermonizing the power of their sexuality is nothing new. At just 20 years old, a young Kimberly Jones stood alongside her childhood friends Notorious B.I.G. and other label mates in Junior M.A.F.I.A. In a taut 4’11 package, the video for the single “Get Money” off of the group’s debut album, Conspiracy, panned over to a brown-skinned Lil’ Kim, reclining in a salon chair donning a fur, gold chain, and a strapless red dress, while she delivers line after line of erotic haymakers, flexing her sexual power and agency under a mind-blowing flow. Not long after, Lil’ Kim’s career shot into the next gear, with her own debut album, Hardcore, serving as a cultural anchor and template for a new era of women in rap.
As Kim said in the Netflix series Hip-Hop Evolution, “I was supposed to be the girl that was cute and made the guys look good, but I liked being vulgar and explicit sometimes because it made me feel free.”
This disruption was not without significant backlash — as the infamous quote goes, “well-behaved women rarely make history.” Coming out of the era dominated by of MC Lyte and Queen Latifah and the graphic language reserved for the Biggies and the Jay-Zs of the world, many viewed Kim’s content as oversexed, lewd, and anti-feminist, as opposed to a complement to the content that the other women were producing, similarly to how the Rapsodys and Nonames of the contemporary era are positioned.
Fast forward to present day and the raunchiness that shocked the charts with Lil’ Kim’s Hardcore, Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na, Missy and Trina’s “One Minute Man,” or Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” is still just as subversive — but far less uncommon. A whole new class of young women are rising to the occasion of inverting the norms of male objectification for their benefit in their music. As scholar and authority of hip-hop feminism, Joan Morgan writes in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, “most women possess an almost intuitive understanding of the role sex, money, and power play in our intimate relationships — and we accommodate accordingly.”
In the 90s, Lil’ Kim redefined the “alpha” role in hip hop music — and in contemporary times, we see an ascendance of that same perspective, to an overwhelmingly positive reception by the artists’ receptive fanbases, which is a welcome change of circumstances from decades ago. That re-centering of erotic power through women going bar for bar with each other or standing on their own, far from eradicates the industry-standard hip-hop misogyny that still runs rampant, but it allows for having a choice in your relationship with intimacy in hip-hop and power dynamics that is far more expansive than just the cishet male’s perspective.
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.
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.”
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.’ “
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.”
“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:
For those who are still out in the streets (while your algorithm may have you convinced otherwise, protests are still very much happening): check out resources such as Mask On Zone and resources from Decolonize this Place to continue to engage in organizing and disrupting efforts as safely as possible.
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).
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. ♥️
