An Examination of Aunty: Documentarian Laylah Amatullah Barrayn on the Historical Weight of the Word

Originally published for OkayAfrica as part of their annual 100Women campaign on Feb 15th, 2019.

Ask any Black person of the African Diaspora who their favorite celebrity aunty is and you’ll likely receive 10 different responses.

There’s Maxine Waters, whose tenure and temerity in Congress have endeared her to the Black community at large. In entertainment, you may get Jenifer Lewis, who has effortlessly played so many maternal figures on the big screen that she proudly titled her memoir The Mother of Black Hollywood. The music industry has given us women ranging from Mary J. Blige to Anita Baker—different eras of songstresses, but aunties all the same. And then there’s Bose Ogulu, mother of Burna Boy, whose no-nonsense persona reminds fans so much of their own aunties that she has been affectionately ordained “Mama Burna.”

The thread that binds all these women to this label is the sense of kinship, adoration, and respect endowed upon them by the Black Diaspora; the title is one that is earned, and to be carried proudly. “Aunty” is a name that surpasses its biological definition. It is a sentiment that photographer and documentarian Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and I discuss as we ponder our own transitions to such a position in our families—hers a pan-African unit several generations out of the continent—at the OkayAfrica 100 Women photoshoot. Barrayn is still buzzing from her go in front of the lens; it is not lost on the creative that the table—or the cameras—have quite literally turned. She is now the one being documented.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Barrayn says, switching out the wide brim hat she’s wearing to another one in her bag. Lately, she tells us behind-the-scenes, hats are her thing.

Barrayn’s greatest works focus on documentation, and reclaiming and preserving the so very uniquely African use of “aunty” came naturally. This composition of lived experience anchored by historical context brought Barrayn to collaborating with author and art collector Catherine McKinley on Aunty! African Women in the Frame, 1870 to the Present, a Brooklyn exhibit that unfurled the legacy of African womanhood and agency through the lens and timeline of photography on the continent. The term “aunty” as a titular framework for the collection is equal parts reverence, exploration, and reclamation of the word, drawing through-lines on how the perception of African women has shifted in tandem with the storytellers in charge.

In many African cultures, aunty is a label bestowed unto a woman as a term of respect or status rather than an indicator of any familial relationship; an inversion of its application in the colonial era, where white landowners used the term to mammify or subjugate African women as the laborers and caretakers of their European overlords. In this way, the manner in which we reclaim it present day is not dissimilar to the painful history of the word “nigga” in the United States.

“We can’t do a show called Aunty and not talk about that,” Barrayn says. “Aunty was a derogative, colonial term… It was not positive so we wanted to look at both of sides of what aunty means.”

In other words, as Barrayn says, “I like to show the whole conversation.”

The agency represented in Aunty’s photographs as new generations took hold of their images (and the words used to describe them) extends to curation as well, as Barrayn points out that a large portion of African works are mostly presented by white, male, European collectors: “It’s important for me to kind of have that pushback by two women of African descent to present the works in our own context and contextualize it in a way that wouldn’t erase some of the history and the culture of how and when and why these pictures were taken.”

With that contextualization comes a reckoning of images she collected featuring African women before the establishment of African studios: colonial photography that reinforced a mammification (or inherent servitude) of the women not just on the continent, but also abroad. “They were used as postcards, they were used as part of the colonial project and regime to document what was happening on the continent as it related to their pursuits on the land,” Barrayn says, highlighting that African women were an object of fascination. (Think Sarah Baartman, the Khoi woman taken from South Africa and paraded around Europe’s freak shows.)

“What I didn’t show in the exhibition was the back of the postcard. There were a lot of negative messages—’look where I am, look at this ugly woman on this postcard, I’m in the jungle, I’m glad this isn’t you,’—and different things like that,” Barrayn says.

This derogatory collection is juxtaposed by photos of African studios in the 50s and 60s by legendary artists such as Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe—portraits and celebrations of young women engaging in everyday life—ultimately transitioning into the work of contemporary African photographers such as Fatoumata Diabate, using the camera as a medium to push the vanguard of representations of the African woman in present-day. As the African studios began to flourish, the photos veered away from third-person gawking to fuller depictions of daily life—anything from traditional ceremonies to young adults on their way to the club, with full consent of the parties involved.

“Now, a lot of African photographers are shying away from the photojournalism and documentary work and really using a lot of creativity and their imagination and creating new ideas about their lives and the world,” Barrayn mentions excitedly. “And a lot of the work now is fictionalized and storied which is really interesting and fun. It’s an experience to engage with because you get to see what people on the continent are thinking about themselves and what could be.”

Naming this generational collection of photos came easy. Aunty, Laylah says, is what intrinsically developed as she and McKinley went through the process of selecting which of the photos amassed would make the final cut for the exhibit: “We were like, ‘Okay let’s put this aunty to the side.’ We were calling these women aunties. We had seen the photographs before, they felt very close to us, even though they were photographs, they were African women from various African countries….it was just so intuitive.”

The century-long transition Barrayn’s project showcased rendered the dynamic of the subject of the photos from purely exploitative to more collaborative, allowing for the women to choose how they want their stories to be captured for themselves, as opposed to having a narrative foisted upon them. As was deserving of proper aunties, they were now being granted with the respect, deference, and agency they had long been denied.

In a manner, these photos had been seen before by many of us first generation children; a fair number of these images were reminiscent of the photo albums tucked away in the houses of our parents and grandparents. Our albums possess snapshots akin to the artifacts being gathered by the various white collectors across the globe—priceless commodities that preserved the legacies of the women who came before us. For Barrayn, they were a critical opportunity in allowing us to become our own archivists, as opposed to letting our stories continue to fall in the hands and context of said collectors, such as Andre Magnin’s collection of Sidibe’s work.

“Family archives are very important to me in understanding who you are as a person, as an individual, your familial and cultural identity, and also really documenting the time too,” she says. “Now, some of the photography that’s from the 40s and 50s are worth a lot of money—so if you don’t value it somebody else will.”

As she relays this to me with conviction, I think about my upcoming trip this summer—back to my family’s homeland of Comoros, where I’ll spend time with my many aunts, biological and otherwise, in a woman-dominant clan. For most of my life, I have called all of them Tata—the French word for aunty—but in recent years, as the next generation has started to come of age, I have been elevated to Tata status of my very own. Inheriting that mantle comes with a duty to preserve the family legacy before those memories are lost—or, perhaps even worse, defined by someone else.

For Barrayn, she hopes that her work encourages people to create platforms that continue to show the whole conversation, similar to Aunty and her project MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora—a publication that showcases the works of 100 women of African descent, and continues the tradition of using photography as a launching point for new perspectives and under-discussed narratives .

Chronicling our heritage through photographs is a privilege, and one that shouldn’t be taken for granted as our forebearers lacked the ability to dictate narratives on their own terms. And exploring the language used against us, and how our current colloquialism has turned it into something we honor, is an important context to our overall history.

Aunty is more than a photographic exhibit to change the perceptions of how African women were seen and how they see themselves.

“A reclamation of the word, yes,” Barrayn says. “And an examination of the word.”

YesJulz Is the Latest Example of the Problem With Voluntourism

Originally published for Broadly on October 22nd, 2018.

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.

Last Tuesday, social media influencer and music manager Julieanna Goddard, the “Queen of Snapchat” also known as YesJulz, shared pictures of herself at a Ugandan orphanage and ignited an online conversation about the detrimental effects of “voluntourism.” Goddard was in the country with rapper Kanye West, for whom she had organized the trip to Uganda to record his next album— she also helped put together Ye’s Wyoming listening party in May.

After a controversial meeting with President Donald Trump, West left the country to travel to Uganda. For months, the rapper has come under scrutiny for his divisive language about race and his affinity for Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the Black community.

After arriving, Goddard immediately began sharing moments from the trip. In one photo captioned “WE GOT LOVE,” she poses with a group of children from the Masulita Children’s Home in Wakiso. The internet reaction was not universally positive, with many pointing out that the photo was an obvious example of voluntourism—a phenomenon in which overwhelmingly white groups people go to countries in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South to engage in short-term charity, regardless of having any skill or qualification relevant to a given cause.

When challenged on the matter, Goddard responded on Twitter, largely to Black women in media who called into question her efforts.

When Black women expressed concerns about the harmful optics of the “white savior complex” on display, Goddard responded defiantly, stating that “the SJWs (social justice warriors) are out in full force and are the most damaging of all.” At one point, Goddard even falsely accused OkayPlayer music editor Ivie Ani of writing a negative piece about her for The FADER— but the internet quickly pointed out that she had mistaken her for another Black woman.

Goddard also accused me of “falsely reporting” after I publicly asked what efforts were made to help the orphans picture beyond handing out Yeezys. She then informed me that I could “contact the United Nation” for answers. (The tweet has since been deleted.)

The UN confirmed that they recommended that West and his team support both Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO), as well as Reach a Hand, a nonprofit that advocates for sex and reproductive health rights and HIV/AIDs prevention of 12 to 24 year olds. West did in fact visit the UWESO, where he said wanted to “help with the infrastructure” and gave away sneakers to children.

We reached out to Goddard for a comment and her representatives said that “Julz will not be responding to any questions regarding West or any criticism involved,” but that she has a “passion for music and combining those efforts to help children who don’t have access to the arts, especially foster children, since she was a foster child herself.”

Goddard’s aim in going to Uganda may very well be filled with good intention. She undermined those very intentions with the way she went about implementing them, and in the defensiveness she showed toward Black women when called out.

West’s tour group may have made some kind of effort to support Ugandans, but the entire trip still feels marred by the weight of the seemingly self-centered nature of the visit. All of the egocentric fanfare belied any genuine designs, rendering a philanthropic effort down to a perceived vanity outing for self-satisfaction.

As Teju Cole brilliantly wrote during the heyday of the Invisible Children Crisis, “A nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied.” And, yes, this can apply to a Black man such as West.

Why?

In layman’s terms, voluntourism, in the form of things like orphanage visits, serves as a space for people such as Goddard and West to exercise the white savior complex, based in a Western white supremacist structure of individuals with privilege—be it social or economic—practicing perceived goodwill to the less fortunate. It’s a cheap salve that many Westerners think they can smear on to address a systemic wound brought about by centuries of colonialism, none of which can be undone with a volunteer visit (complete with a photo-op as a coda to document all of the “life-changing” progress). Bundled with the package is the social media acclaim you receive for your noble effort of boldly going into a less-developed nation, whether it comes in the form of Facebook likes or retweets, regardless of whether you are doing more harm than good.

But they’re not the first people to do this— it happens, all the time with celebrities traveling to places like Haiti, Nepal, and Cambodia in an attempt to help third-world countries.

“People tend to use examples from their own volunteering experiences to demonstrate that projects can actually be helpful, often relying on statements that start with ‘I believe’ to justify voluntourism,” Noelle Sullivan, an assistant professor of instruction in global health studies at Northwestern University, wrote for HuffPost. “Many reports overestimate the effect of the work, based on no independent empirical data whatsoever. The voices of those purportedly helped are almost entirely absent from volunteer testimonials and the websites of companies that arrange these trips.”

As of 2015, according to UNICEF, 11 percent of the 17 million children in Uganda are orphans. Many of these orphans lost at least one parent due to complications from HIV/AIDs, and have been fostered in approximately one-third of all households, according to the Uganda Demographic Health Survey. For the children who do not have the benefit of being taken in by family or being fostered, they have resorted to either the streets or institutionalized care, commonly referred to as orphanages, which are overwhelmingly deregulated and absent of much oversight, often resulting in harm for the children involved. As a result, institutionalized care is commonly viewed in the humanitarian industry as “an option of last resort,” absent no other form of alternative care.

The toxic nature of Westernized fetishization of third-world countries’ suffering, however, has created a market demand for young children as a commodity to draw fundraising from overseas tourists, volunteers, and donors—even when some of these children have parents around. The product is a cartel economy that in Uganda alone has proliferated to over 400 institutions, frequently at the expense of the futures of the children themselves, who are at risk of diminished intellectual, social, and behavioral abilities.

In fact, orphanage voluntourism has become so profitable that many orphanages intentionally exacerbate the conditions at their facilities, intentionally manipulating the circumstances to tug the hearts (and pursestrings) of the relentless rotation of visitors. In these cases where children are sometimes deliberately deprived of resources, the children have a probability of developing attachment disorders from the consistent cycling of volunteer caregivers.

1540232184269-GettyImages-1052282910 — Photo by Getty Images

The objectives for participating in such a mission tend to be largely self-serving. In the case of West and Goddard in Uganda, the sneakers they gave wear out. The Beats headphones they handed out don’t last forever. The photo, however, remains as a constant mood-booster for people who visit these African countries like Uganda—a reminder of when they irrevocably changed the lives of impoverished Africans, despite the fact that they remain in an exploitative system largely separated from their families and under the power of a despotic, bigoted, and under-resourced government led by Museveni (who West broke bread with on Monday, to the disapproval of opposition leader Bobi Wine).

Despite valid concerns and inquiry, however, Goddard defended her social media coverage of the trip as a reflection of magnanimity in the face of being repeatedly criticized for failing to acknowledge the optics of willfully exploiting the dynamics of being a white person in a Black space.

“There are very valid reasons why Black people (specifically, Black women) critique her visibility in Black culture,” Juliana Pache, the social media director at The FADER, tells Broadly. “She often deflects critiques of her white privilege by stating that she is half Puerto Rican, but it’s worth noting that ‘Puerto Rican’ is a nationality, not a race. In any given space across multiple continents, she is a white woman, and on some level, whether consciously or subconsciously, she can, and often does, play the victim when called out for her nonsense. ‘Jealousy’ is a cheap and convenient card to pull on people who critique her problematic visibility.”

Altruism is beyond the act of desiring to do good; true selflessness comes with a level of self-awareness about how one’s talents can best be of service to truly help people and avoid interference with progress. In the case of Goddard, simply being co-signed by West is not a justification for running roughshod in spaces without accountability. Boundaries exist, people will challenge you, and the threshold of expectations can be high.

Systematic privilege often blinds people from realizing when they’ve infringed upon spaces without proper diligence or care for the marginalized communities and cultures therein. As long as we keep seeing more “WE GOT LOVE” orphanage photo ops, I fear we are a long way away.

Afropunk’s Owners Get Real About the Festival’s Growth, Recent Controversies

Originally published for The Root on September 11th, 2018.

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.” “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.

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.”

Couple Thrown Out of Afropunk for Protest T-Shirt Questioning Festival’s Inclusivity, Eroding Punk Nature

Originally published for The Root on Sept 4, 2018.

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.

As those transitions have accumulated over time, their weight can be felt in palpable ways, such as the gradual addition of corporate sponsors, removal of programming that was made available in earlier years, notable increases in nonblack attendees and the aggressive increase of ticket prices. There are more imperceptible adjustments as well—such as the establishment of a VIP section for the more elites of black Hollywood to rub elbows and participate in the rebranded idea presented by festival co-founder Matthew Morgan that “it’s punk rock to be black in America.” Outstream Video 00:00 00:00

It was in this same VIP section that Ebony Donnely and his partner Ericka Hart were forcibly removed from the festival by security for wearing a handmade shirt that stated that “Afropunk sold out for white consumption.”

They were invited to spend time in VIP as compensation for Hart participating in a documentary collaboration with Mass Appeal. (They had already paid for general admission tickets.) During the filming, people shared their feelings about Afropunk and Hart shared her concerns about some of the changes that were happening. Once in the VIP, they were made to feel unwelcome the longer they lingered, despite being invited. Then:“Somebody [a short black feminine presenting person] comes behind me, comes to the front of me to see my shirt. She was like, ‘that’s interesting. Well, why are you here?’” Donnely said.

The situation came to a climax when Morgan himself confronted Donnely and Hart, demanded what they were doing back there and pointed at Donnely’s shirt. This all happened despite a pre-existing, friendly relationship between Morgan and Hart (they had previously shared and promoted pictures of her topless at the 2016 Afropunk on their Instagram and website, which she then wrote about). When pressured to explain why he was being so confrontational, Morgan retorted with “sweetheart, this is my house,” and promptly summoned security to escort them out of the festival.

In a statement emailed to The Root, the organizers for Afropunk said:

We are living in incredibly challenging and oppressive political times. As Black people, we face overwhelming confrontations—systemic racism, social injustice, disproportionate rates of incarceration, higher health disparities, and the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We are under attack.
The AFROPUNK platform was conceived to celebrate Black excellence and create a safe space for Black folks who are marginalized men and women, gender non-conforming, and those considered other by white heteronormative powers that be. We give our AFROPUNK community a voice, a platform and a space to express themselves and be their authentic and unapologetic selves.
Being activists is hard, uncomfortable, and sometimes complicated. There was an unfortunate incident at AFROPUNK Brooklyn with Ericka Hart and her partner/friend Ebony Donnley, and friend Lorelei Black were asked to leave a backstage area of the festival which was for talent and working staff. The couple/friends were escorted back to the VIP section where they stayed for the rest of the evening. We have great respect for Ericka and Ebony and would never kick them out of AFROPUNK.
We are sorry that Ericka and Ebony feel mistreated. That was not, nor has it ever been, our intention. We have supported Ericka and her activism for many years. We celebrate her voice, her activism, and her Black body. She is a part of our AFROPUNK community.

There’s a particular dissonance in the censorship of dissent taking place at a festival with “punk” in the name—a cultural ideology that should represent anti-authoritarianism at its core. From Donnely’s perspective, “this is a space created by the people; the people made Afropunk, punk and black people, black people from the hood, they made Afropunk.” With that ethos of community fellowship comes an implicit need to hold organizers accountable when that same community perceives that their spaces are being erased or infringed upon—a calling both Donnely and Hart felt a duty to answer in their own ways.

When asked to elaborate a little further on the merits of his T-shirt, Donnely explained it was worn out of concern for a space that once had so much value for many black queer people who listened to varied music: “The issue for me is that Afropunk is a space that invites white people into it and has not issued or addressed any of the people’s sentiments or sensitivities around white folks wearing appropriate wear and also just, being under white people’s gaze all day long. I didn’t pay to be looked at and gawked at by white people. I just didn’t pay for that … I’ve always got the sense that they’re selling something. They’re selling me.”

In the days since the fracas has gone viral, Morgan has failed to make a public statement save for a series of cryptic Instagram posts stating that “Afropunk Believes In Respectful Discourse,” “Afropunk Respects Creative Expression,” “Afropunk is For Us By Us” and promising that they will “continue to engage in hard conversations.”

Simultaneously, organizers have reached out to Donnely and Hart to appear on the Afropunk podcast—an offer which was declined. Instead, Donnely and Hart prefer a public apology, not wanting to be involved in any public relations spin for the festival.

With regards to what AfroPunk as a festival should do moving forward to be more considerate of the homegrown community it serves as they continue to expand globally, Donnely lays out a few options as to how they can create conditions for increased transparency of their operations as well as continued inclusiveness:

“You can’t be in Brooklyn in a space with such a strong political history inside of blackness, have an Afropunk Solution Session but you’re not inviting black trans women. You know what I mean? You don’t have organizations underground. You have [Women’s March board member] Linda Sarsour but not Black Women’s Blueprint in Flatbush; they’re right in Flatbush. They’re also a national organization.

“You can’t have just the complete and total allegiance to celebrity. You have to reach into and source from Brooklyn and source from the ‘counterculture’ from the subcultures of the black community from which this festival sprang. You have to also rely on them for your programming,” Donnely said.

It stands to remain whether Matthew Morgan or co-organizer Jocelyn Cooper will directly address the recent issues surrounding Afropunk, including the increased attendance from nonblack patrons.

However, for the communities who have called Commodore Barry Park home for 10 plus years, they will need to reconcile what definition of punk ultimately works for them and whether that aligns with continuing the consumption of Afropunk as a brand.

Updated: Sept. 5, 2018 3:45 p.m.: In a lengthy Facebook post, Lou Constant-Desportes announced that he has resigned his post as editor-in-chief of the online publication for Afropunk, in part, he says “because 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, that it’s puzzling to watch them and their corporate entourage continue to practice their performative ‘activism’ dipped in consumerism and ‘woke’ keywords used for marketing purposes.

“This has been on my mind for a very long time, for a while I tried to convince myself that I could continue and do it for the community, maintain my integrity in this unhealthy environment, keep giving ‘second chances’ to people who don’t even seem to understand how problematic their actions are, or be selfish and try to at least reap some of the benefits generated by my hard work. But staying silent is not doing anyone justice, not to mention that it keeps me and others in harm’s way. We deserve better.” Read the full post here

We’ve reached out to the organizers of Afropunk and will update if they respond.

Who Gets To Claim Their Identity In France?

Originally published for Buzzfeed News on July 21st, 2018.

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.

These Parisian banlieues are home to many African and Caribbean immigrants and their French-born or -raised children, including many of the soccer superstars celebrated for bringing a World Cup victory to France for the second time in the country’s history last weekend. Kylian Mbappé, who won the tournament’s Best Young Player Award, grew up with a Cameroonian father and Algerian Mother in Bondy; Paul Pogba, whose parents are Guinean, has spoken openly about his family’s experience in Roissy-en-Brie; Blaise Matuidi was raised in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a community in the city’s eastern suburbs, with Angolan and Congolese parents. The names go on: N’Golo Kanté, Presnel Kimpembe, Benjamin Mendy, and Steven Nzonzi all grew up and were discovered in similarly constructed neighborhoods centered around immigrant communities that had access to a wide network of soccer clubs.

The Daily Show host Trevor Noah. — “Africa won the World Cup.”

Identity in France is a fraught conversation. As a tool of supremacy, the country has leveraged the bestowment of “French identity” at will, using citizenship as a reward for shedding the vestiges of the colonized nations that African migrants had previously called home. It is a complex narrative that comes with reconciling some painful truths of imperialism and colonization. Moreover, the liberal overcorrection of the ahistorical “one France” serves as a thin barrier to confronting the reality of centuries of black French citizens being categorically discriminated against, at all levels of society — from being obstructed in acquiring suitable housing, employment, and education for generations to being racially profiled for identity and nationality checks. In a 2016 report from the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, or INED, a survey of more than 22,000 case studies of second-generation French citizens of African descent identified that second-generation African immigrants continue to be “highly disadvantaged” in the labor and education market.

This is all overridden, of course, if they showcase exemplary value on a stage such as this year’s World Cup — or in outlier cases like the “Spiderman” story from earlier this year, in which a young Malian migrant man literally scaled the front of a building, climbing four floors to save a toddler who was dangling from a balcony. While it is certainly true that the far right in France has used the label of “African” to ostracize black citizens and their immigrant and/or refugee families, with an emphasis on putting “native French first,” their more cosmopolitan counterparts approach the matter as a meritorious allocation that comes with an asterisk: When you are not succeeding at the highest level then you are swiftly shellacked for it and reminded of how French you are not. This was the experience of the 2010 French World Cup team during their resounding collapse in South Africa when France exited the tournament at the group stages. If you are not fortunate enough to be a transcendent talent in sport, create a national sensation of impressive feat, or establish acclaim in a crossover entertainment market like artists such as Imany, then the acceptance of your “Frenchness” as an average citizen comes with an implicit social contract. It’s shown in the form of inquiry as to where your family is “originally” from — shedding all veneer of a “common French heritage” as merely a matter of niceties and wishful thinking.

For these reasons, insisting on a narrative of colorblind citizenship flies in the face of the history of French socialization. It is a systematic demand that French culture comes complicit with assimilation, as if there is a magical threshold of assimilation possible to supersede ingrained stratifications within society. Dismissing their African heritage makes French Africans no more likely to get an apartment on the other side of the *Périphérique,* or obtain better jobs. Nor will it change the insults levied by the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) led by Marine Le Pen. Separating the most successful soccer players in the world from any narrative that ties them to immigration is impractical to their reality as well; their lives are impacted by these stories through family and friends. The communities they grew up in were filled by people who were overwhelmingly reminded of their dual realities daily; their heritage and their citizenship, an inescapable truth. Their parents may have been naturalized, but as the INED report indicated, more than half of those polled think that European-descended French citizens do not regard them as French — and that is a disconnect that persists in their daily existence in the margins of urban enclaves.

viral sensation of its own, with his Instagram feed showcasing the team singing and dancing to iconic Afrobeats and coupé-décalé, and swaying to zouk and kompa in the Russian airports between games.

When they finally achieved their hard-fought dream of winning the World Cup, Pogba brought out his mother and brothers — Mathias and Florentin, who play for the Guinean national team — and, in jubilation, performed the Shaku Shaku and Gwara Gwara dances on French national TV. In the days since, players have honored their parents in heartfelt messages, acknowledging the shared dream and immigrant heritage they derived from. The desire to remove these *very African*markers of their identity is not coming from the players themselves. Instead, it comes from a populace that has a political investment in reaping the spoils of a French win from “one France” but still fails to come to terms with an emerging spirit of self-determination brought about by a history of disenfranchisement. The players are claiming their birthright, as is their entitlement; but they are also sharing their family and legacies with pride on their own terms. Together, they are reclaiming what they have constantly been reminded of growing up and turning it into a source of fellowship with their *banlieues* and beyond.

Divorcing the players from their heritage in the public sphere is not only about sanitizing the fact that the white population of France has refused to confront their race-based discrimination — right down to failing to measure metrics that could substantively track or assess progress across race- or ethnicity-based lines — it is also about diverting the discourse around France’s sins. A superimposed graphic showing all of the French team’s roots highlights just how much France owes its success to Africa and the Caribbean — a fact that should be painfully obvious — and that these communities, despite being pushed to the margins, continue to produce the best the country has to offer.

But at its worst, it leaves those communities with immense pain and few answers, as was the case of Adama Traore, the young French man, son of Malian immigrants from the Parisian *banlieues*, who died in police custody under suspicious circumstances on his 24th birthday, two years ago. These stories are France’s stories too — the successes, the failures, and the deep postcolonial pain that has and will continue to reverberate for years and generations. What lies in the chasm between the narratives of the country is the notion that if all groups, *black, blanc, beur*, collectively embrace a singular French identity, we can somehow adopt the successes, abandon the shame, and present a unified front of liberty and growth — a concept that only serves as a panacea for the white population.

The view from the top level of the Eiffel Tower is majestic and resplendent in the ways that pictures will never quite do justice to. If you squint *just* a bit, you can start to make out the edges of the *banlieues* of Paris where thousands of French and Francophone people live — people who don’t have the kind of undeniable soccer talent necessary to attain exclusively French citizenship. In these suburbs, people cheered on their hybrid communities, which were front and center as a result of the World Cup. What has previously been relegated to the far corners of the horizon is now in full beam of the spotlight, at great discomfort to the many who want to rob the soccer team — and all those who look like them and share their roots — the chance to celebrate their dual identities on a global scale. There may indeed be one France, but it is a France made up of many faces, and those whose roots extend far beyond these borders should be able to lay claim to France without suppressing claims to a heritage elsewhere.

Paul Pogba celebrates with his family after the 2018 FIFA World Cup final between France and Croatia. — “Africa won the World Cup.”

Identity in France is a fraught conversation. As a tool of supremacy, the country has leveraged the bestowment of “French identity” at will, using citizenship as a reward for shedding the vestiges of the colonized nations that African migrants had previously called home. It is a complex narrative that comes with reconciling some painful truths of imperialism and colonization. Moreover, the liberal overcorrection of the ahistorical “one France” serves as a thin barrier to confronting the reality of centuries of black French citizens being categorically discriminated against, at all levels of society — from being obstructed in acquiring suitable housing, employment, and education for generations to being racially profiled for identity and nationality checks. In a 2016 report from the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, or INED, a survey of more than 22,000 case studies of second-generation French citizens of African descent identified that second-generation African immigrants continue to be “highly disadvantaged” in the labor and education market.

This is all overridden, of course, if they showcase exemplary value on a stage such as this year’s World Cup — or in outlier cases like the “Spiderman” story from earlier this year, in which a young Malian migrant man literally scaled the front of a building, climbing four floors to save a toddler who was dangling from a balcony. While it is certainly true that the far right in France has used the label of “African” to ostracize black citizens and their immigrant and/or refugee families, with an emphasis on putting “native French first,” their more cosmopolitan counterparts approach the matter as a meritorious allocation that comes with an asterisk: When you are not succeeding at the highest level then you are swiftly shellacked for it and reminded of how French you are not. This was the experience of the 2010 French World Cup team during their resounding collapse in South Africa when France exited the tournament at the group stages. If you are not fortunate enough to be a transcendent talent in sport, create a national sensation of impressive feat, or establish acclaim in a crossover entertainment market like artists such as Imany, then the acceptance of your “Frenchness” as an average citizen comes with an implicit social contract. It’s shown in the form of inquiry as to where your family is “originally” from — shedding all veneer of a “common French heritage” as merely a matter of niceties and wishful thinking.

For these reasons, insisting on a narrative of colorblind citizenship flies in the face of the history of French socialization. It is a systematic demand that French culture comes complicit with assimilation, as if there is a magical threshold of assimilation possible to supersede ingrained stratifications within society. Dismissing their African heritage makes French Africans no more likely to get an apartment on the other side of the *Périphérique,* or obtain better jobs. Nor will it change the insults levied by the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) led by Marine Le Pen. Separating the most successful soccer players in the world from any narrative that ties them to immigration is impractical to their reality as well; their lives are impacted by these stories through family and friends. The communities they grew up in were filled by people who were overwhelmingly reminded of their dual realities daily; their heritage and their citizenship, an inescapable truth. Their parents may have been naturalized, but as the INED report indicated, more than half of those polled think that European-descended French citizens do not regard them as French — and that is a disconnect that persists in their daily existence in the margins of urban enclaves.

viral sensation of its own, with his Instagram feed showcasing the team singing and dancing to iconic Afrobeats and coupé-décalé, and swaying to zouk and kompa in the Russian airports between games.

When they finally achieved their hard-fought dream of winning the World Cup, Pogba brought out his mother and brothers — Mathias and Florentin, who play for the Guinean national team — and, in jubilation, performed the Shaku Shaku and Gwara Gwara dances on French national TV. In the days since, players have honored their parents in heartfelt messages, acknowledging the shared dream and immigrant heritage they derived from. The desire to remove these *very African*markers of their identity is not coming from the players themselves. Instead, it comes from a populace that has a political investment in reaping the spoils of a French win from “one France” but still fails to come to terms with an emerging spirit of self-determination brought about by a history of disenfranchisement. The players are claiming their birthright, as is their entitlement; but they are also sharing their family and legacies with pride on their own terms. Together, they are reclaiming what they have constantly been reminded of growing up and turning it into a source of fellowship with their *banlieues* and beyond.

Divorcing the players from their heritage in the public sphere is not only about sanitizing the fact that the white population of France has refused to confront their race-based discrimination — right down to failing to measure metrics that could substantively track or assess progress across race- or ethnicity-based lines — it is also about diverting the discourse around France’s sins. A superimposed graphic showing all of the French team’s roots highlights just how much France owes its success to Africa and the Caribbean — a fact that should be painfully obvious — and that these communities, despite being pushed to the margins, continue to produce the best the country has to offer.

But at its worst, it leaves those communities with immense pain and few answers, as was the case of Adama Traore, the young French man, son of Malian immigrants from the Parisian *banlieues*, who died in police custody under suspicious circumstances on his 24th birthday, two years ago. These stories are France’s stories too — the successes, the failures, and the deep postcolonial pain that has and will continue to reverberate for years and generations. What lies in the chasm between the narratives of the country is the notion that if all groups, *black, blanc, beur*, collectively embrace a singular French identity, we can somehow adopt the successes, abandon the shame, and present a unified front of liberty and growth — a concept that only serves as a panacea for the white population.

The view from the top level of the Eiffel Tower is majestic and resplendent in the ways that pictures will never quite do justice to. If you squint *just* a bit, you can start to make out the edges of the *banlieues* of Paris where thousands of French and Francophone people live — people who don’t have the kind of undeniable soccer talent necessary to attain exclusively French citizenship. In these suburbs, people cheered on their hybrid communities, which were front and center as a result of the World Cup. What has previously been relegated to the far corners of the horizon is now in full beam of the spotlight, at great discomfort to the many who want to rob the soccer team — and all those who look like them and share their roots — the chance to celebrate their dual identities on a global scale. There may indeed be one France, but it is a France made up of many faces, and those whose roots extend far beyond these borders should be able to lay claim to France without suppressing claims to a heritage elsewhere.

Patricia Okoumou and the Dual Threat to Black Immigrants

Originally published for the Intelligencer at NYMag on July 13th, 2018.

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.”

Upon release from arraignment, where she was charged and pleaded not guilty to three federal misdemeanor charges — trespassing, interfering with government functions, and disorderly conduct — Okoumou spoke plainly about her opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “white supremacy is terrorism” and introducing herself as a naturalized citizen who immigrated from her native Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1994, she said the “draconian, zero-tolerance policy on immigration has to go. In a democracy we do not put children in cages … reunite the children now.” If there were any remaining questions of her intent, she proudly declared that “Michelle Obama, our beloved First Lady … said, ‘When they go low, we go high,’ and I went as high as I could.”

Okoumou laid plain the irony of celebrating the freedoms represented on Liberty Island while immigrant families are being split up and held indefinitely in detention centers, but she also did something else — put a Black woman immigrant in the center of the debate. While the visceral showdown at the U.S.-Mexico border emphasized Latin American immigration, separation policies and, more broadly, quickly eroding immigration protections have a long reach. The effects have been particularly acute for Black immigrants, who are one of the fastest growing demographics in the United States.

Since 28 percent of Sub-Saharan African immigrants have entered the nation as refugees or asylees between 2000 and 2013 — statuses that can only be applied for upon entry to the U.S. — the family-separation policy poses significant risk to Black immigrant populations. In fact, two of the primary plaintiffs chosen by the ACLU for their class-action suit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement are also of Congolese heritage: a mother and daughter who came to the U.S. seeking asylum last year. They were separated four days later and held at San Diego and Chicago detention centers, respectively, for over five months.

Adding to the problems faced by black refugees and asylees is the pending expiration of the eligibility to live and work in the United States via Temporary Protected Status for many countries. The designation is currently given to eligible residents of ten countries affected by armed conflict or natural disaster, including approximately 50,000 Haitians, who were issued the status in 2010 as a result of the earthquake that devastated the nation. While United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Francis Cissna alleges that Haiti “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation,” this is contradicted by the USCIS’s own report that states “many of the conditions” prompting the original designation still exist. The effort to keep the program alive, which successfully lobbied for an extension until July 2019, staves off the potential disruption of thousands of families of disjointed immigration status, many of whom have established roots and raised American-born children. But while the delayed deadline provides some reprieve from pending displacement, the potential impact to families and communities necessitates an urgency in remediation that has prompted lawsuits from multiple organizations, including the NAACP and ACLU.

Black immigrants face the dual threat of bias in the criminal-justice system and cruelty in the immigration and deportation system. The two systems overlap through initiatives such asthe Secure Communities Program, which deputize local police with the ability to vet and report suspects for immigration violations through a fingerprint database, and executive orders that threaten to void the visas of any immigrant who is convicted of a crime. Racial profiling, disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates, and biased apprehension tactics such as stop-and-frisk work to make black immigrants especially vulnerable to draconian immigration enforcement tactics.

As a result, more than 20 percent of all noncitizens who face deportation on criminal grounds are black, and black people are ultimately deported at a higher rate. To put it in context — in 2015, 11 percent of total convicted-criminal removals were for “Priority 2” criminals, which include immigrants convicted of three or more misdemeanor offenses. If Okoumou had not already been naturalized, the current federal proceedings for her act of civil disobedience would have transformed into a referendum on her legal residency in this country.

At the apex of the St. George’s neighborhood in Staten Island that Okoumou calls home lies a ferry terminal — it’s the only free way in which the borough is connected to the greater New York City area. The 25-minute ride boasts “postcard-perfect views” of Liberty Island, and it is indeed idyllic — on a clear blue day, the silhouette of Lady Liberty stands prominently on the foreground of an unvarnished skyline, a proud representation of romanticized American ideals. As Patricia Okoumou sat at the hem of liberty’s garment, the contrast was obvious: On a day when approximately 20,000 tourists planned on traversing the inner workings of the structure, celebrating the famous lines of The New Colossus Sonnet engraved at its base — give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free — we were reminded that in that same sonnet, Lady Liberty is called “Mother of Exiles.” As the rights of those exiles are chipped away, it is activists who ensure that we all hear dissonance between projected American ideals and their execution in policy . In one defiant step, Okoumou did just that — and reminded us that in the sea of thousands of families at the mercy of oppressive and unjust policies, both at the U.S.-Mexico border and all other ports of entry, are many black faces, whose stories cannot be ignored in the fight for a just and humane immigration system.

‘Dear White People’ Creator Justin Simien Takes On The Alt-Right & Fake News In Bold New Season [Interview]

Originally published for Okayplayer.

Shamira Ibrahim spoke with the talented Dear White People creator, Justin Simien, about the show’s new themes, technology, race and more.

The premiere of the Dear White People Netflix series in 2017 was met with a barrage of accusations of “anti-whiteness,” reverse racism and calls for its cancellation, a bewildering phenomenon that seemed reflective of the passing of the baton into a new sociopolitical era, both in the U.S. Government as well as in the never-ending misinformation wars persistently fought on social media. Season 2 of the show, premiering on May 4, tackles this transition head-on, using its characters as mirrors into the myriad of ways we both willingly and unwittingly participate in the outrage culture hamster wheel that seems to have exploded since the 2016 elections.

Over the course of 10 episodes, the lead characters confront these new challenges — internet trolls, the rise of “white nationalism,” doxxing, free speech on college campuses, and internal debates within their black community as to the next steps to take to combat the looming spectre of white supremacy in their daily interactions — while continuing to reconcile the inherent exploration that is urbane to everyone’s coming-of-age college years. At the core of it all remain young adults who are still trying to figure out what scene they belong to and how to navigate their individualism while feeling beholden to the interests of a collective college housing experience that is being encroached upon by the influx of white classmates.

Okayplayer had the pleasure of speaking with writer and director Justin Simien about the unique themes expressed in this season, and the choices made to advance the conversation on the interactions of technology and race in season 2. One thing was made clear about the ethos of this season: the tools used may be different, but the tactics that entrap the restless fervor of the discourse being had by young black people—both on campus and online—remain the same.

Okayplayer: You start the season where we left off, focusing on the after-effects of the final conflict. Did you guys know where you wanted to take the series when you finished the inaugural season?

Justin Simien: I had a few ideas about it, but really, it was the response to Season One. I felt a sense of urgency for Season Two that I didn’t feel until Trump won the day we wrapped season one — not just the negative response to our first press materials, but a desire to create a false sense of outrage among people. They really made people believe that an anti-white show was coming to Netflix, which is crazy because as many times as I say it to myself – Dear White People — I cannot figure out what is so threatening about those three words together.

My head was spinning after season one — why do these conversations get away from us so easily? The answer was always amnesia. There was always this sort of desire to erase the personal history of people in this country. It’s kind of an obsession, actually. That common phrase, ‘Just get over it,’ is very entrenched in our country’s racial dialogue, from the days right after slaves are newly released — ‘get over it, you’re free, what do you have to complain about now’ — all the way until today.

As long as there is a percentage of the population that is purposely ill-informed about race, we can’t ever really have a meaningful dialogue that doesn’t get out of control. You see that’s the way that misinformation works. You see the architects of it. You can look at it through a historical lens, and I just kind of became obsessed with all those little secret histories that this country contains that affect our everyday lives. I became fascinated by that.

OKP: The first season really focused on a more liberally informed racism in the kind of elite environments many of us exist in. In this season, it really seems to draw out the open bigotry we seem to have transitioned into. What made you take that direction?

JS: It was literally what all of us in the room were going through. People who obviously associate me with the show said some vicious things to some of my writers, but literally, any black person on Twitter who regularly talks about these issues publicly has felt the change in culture, has felt the divisiveness, has felt the way in which people are almost addicted to the outrage. It’s like we get together just to get outraged as opposed to having a meaningful conversation. It would feel odd not to talk about it and not to include it in the fabric of these characters’ lives because this is exactly the bullshit they would be dealing with if they were real and if Winchester was real.

OKP: Speaking of outrage and everything that comes with it, the show also leans into the cult of personality borne from the zeitgeist of response. It can really create a whole platform all on its own. What conversations were you all having in the writers room while fleshing those components out?

JS: It’s a whole industry. Every time one of these poor kids gets shot, you’re going to see the news cameras, you’re going to see the competing liberal versus conservative spin, you’re going to hear from the NRA… all this advertising money is being made off of the death of somebody. That money doesn’t go to the family. It doesn’t help them psychologically repair. It doesn’t help the community gather around the issue, and there are very few consequences for the perpetrators of these crimes.

There was this feeling that it was another part of this system. When we talk about racism in Dear White People, racism is defined as an institutional thing. We’re talking about disadvantages though when it feels like every time something happens, it sort of happens in the same way, that, to us, was a key that this is systemic. Our system is actually made to work in this way. I brought a couple of books into the room, one of which was The History of White People, which was just a mind-boggling read, but also, makes you realize just how arbitrarily we landed on this idea that whiteness means anything at all, let alone it being the standard of beauty. I just really wanted to explore that.

We looked into secret societies, which to me is an extension of this need to kind of always erase the past or hide our tracks. It felt like the same thing. Fake news, propaganda, trolls, it just felt like the same cast of characters since the Reformation era. That’s what I want people to understand, beyond just making you love the characters and having a lot of fun. I want you to leave the show curious, like, what other secret histories do I not know about? There’s a few. You never see it. They leave you quite upset when you start to look into it.

OKP: Another prominent theme is the continuing examination of navigating queer identity through Lionel’s character. What did you guys want to draw out in that storyline this season?

JS: I wanted to write very specifically about being a gay person who’s also black, but also grew up without a father — that’s Lionel, that’s me — and he doesn’t really know how to be in the world. A lot of characters in TV shows, once they come out, their story is sort of over. They come out and they immediately find a boyfriend, and everything’s great. I just thought that was a kind of cruel fiction for all of the rest of us who are like, ‘Well, that didn’t happen to me.’ I wanted to show Lionel’s continuing awkward walk in that life.

One of the things that strike me about being gay is how queerness is separated into these different groups in the same way that races are and in the same way that within the black community there are all these tiers of colorism and sexism. To be both is just such a mind fuck. I wanted to walk people through that, in a non-sitcom-y way, where he just goes to a party and meets the love of his life. It’s not that simple. Even as you go through the series, the love of his life may not be the love of his life.

That’s what my experience is. I remember coming out and just literally never feeling the way everybody else in the club seems to be feeling, which is, they found their mecca, they found their thing. I never felt that way. I was never treated that way. I was never hit on in L.A. clubs. It never happened. It’s sort of like, I just wanted to show what that felt like and what it continues to feel like for queer people and queer people of color.

OKP: In that storyline, popular personalities Kid Fury and Todrick Hall have guest features. How was it like working with them?

JS: They’re so lovely. The funny thing is, like, I’m such a big fan of them but they were treating me like I was a thing. They were nervous and humble and I was like, ‘Wait, but you guys are stars in my head.’ Todrick [Hall] came so prepared. Kid [Fury], God, he just broke my heart. I just loved their performances. What I think came out was a really funny scene.

They were wonderful and I just thought they killed every take and really great to work with. I also thought because Todrick has been pulled into some of these problematic, pop star debates, and gained the ire of both black and white people. I just thought, what a fun way to just say ‘Eff you’ to all of it — including him, literally the center of a conversation like that and bring some levity to it because they’re pop stars. This is not that serious.

The point of the scene is to show Lionel what gay black men look like and how intimidating that can feel. Boy, did they pull that off! You know what I think it is, I think that we are so often excluded from narratives that when we get to create our own, we become so exclusive and I just wanted to show how that feels to the outsider, like Lionel, who could probably be these guys’ friend but no one knows that right now because we’re all so intimidated of each other. We’re all so scared of each other. Even when he walks in they pause and sort of have to. I thought that would be a fun, entertaining way to look at ourselves.

OKP: In both seasons, the focal narrative was around the use of technology to spread information and how that can get distorted. In the first season, that was more so with the app and the Facebook invite; this season, it’s social media and how news can get distorted. What do you think about when you think about this show and going further? How would you like to advance the conversation and how we have used technology to more access but with certain amounts of pitfalls?

JS: I think I’d like to continue in the line of thinking that I’ve begun, which is, why is this sort of erasing of the truth such a seemingly necessary component to advance in this country? We’re essentially giving our lives over to algorithms that we’ve now been able to statistically prove are actually racist. In very real ways, the nuances of people who happen to be of color, there’s no space for that in these algorithms because nobody of color wrote the algorithms and so nobody could see what was missing from them.

For everything from faucets not being able to register black skin in a bathroom to sort of lumping certain kinds of cultural answers together and drawing inaccurate conclusions about people and that effects purchasing and advertising decisions and all kinds of things that have a lot of other things they’re sort of connected to.

I’d like to continue to explore that. We do have this thing in our country where when a new thing happens, there are all these forces that we just sort of allow to kind of sweep up whatever hedge up happens so that we can no longer talk about it or even properly remember it. That will always kind of be a theme that I think recurs, but I’m very interested in exploring, well, okay, given we are so distracted and given we are so woefully misinformed, what does a successful network of people look like? What does coming together even mean anymore? What does a meaningful dialogue mean? What is the work that it takes to move a social needle?

Is it actually possible? Are these things that happen to happen when these people are forming a group or when those people are forming a group? Or, are there things that we can actually affect? I think a lot of us are mad and we are looking at the culture around us and we are exasperated and what we want to know is, what is step one and then what is step two? I think what I want to see is characters going through those steps in some really concrete ways. I’m curious to see what that might look like.

At the same token, these are young people in a very formative experience and I was very reactive when I was at that age. You’d never catch me coming back junior year the same way I was rocking sophomore year. I’m also really interested in seeing how the event of the first two seasons sort of effect the characters in terms of their own self-expression and how they position themselves in this world.

I think someone like Sam, who’s been trying the same thing for a while now and getting disappointing results, I wonder if she’s going to be so quick to get on that same horse again or if she’s going to try something new? That’s where my first sort of thoughts go because I want to see the characters grow and change and respond over time. I never want you to feel like any season of the show is just a kind of warmed up version of the previous season. I’d rather it fail miserably but be different and look like human life, which is always changing, than sort of stay the same.

Dear White People Vol. 2 is available for binge-watching and streaming on Netflix now.

Black Loiterers, White Lingerers, and Starbucks Coffee

Originally published for the Intelligencer at NYMag on April 24th, 2018.

There is a well-known stereotype of a particular kind of coffee-shop patron — an aspiring screenwriter or freelancer, scrupulously cobbling together their pitches or book proposals, courtesy of their favorite local haunt’s free Wi-Fi, electrical outlets, and comfortable furniture, paying for their mobile home office with just a $2 cup of bottomless coffee. This patron, of course, is usually white. The trope has been both parodied and celebrated, and it’s easy to find lists ranking coffee places by how easily they can be transformed into work spaces. Since this lifehack only works by shifting costs from the patron to the coffee-shop owner, some coffee shops have responded by either eliminating Wi-Fi services or furniture — but I’ve never heard of an earnest novelist being carted away in handcuffs for spending several hours after their last order writing character sketches.

Last Thursday, however, two young black men named Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were arrested and forcibly removed by police from a Starbucks café in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia while waiting to meet a (white) colleague for coffee.

According to reports, the police were summoned by the on-site manager, who denied either one or both men entry to the bathroom. There are a few conflicting details; whether or not the manager informed them that they had to leave before calling the police has been disputed by witnesses. During a live interview for Good Morning America, Nelson and Robinson said that they arrived at 4:35 p.m. for a 4:45 p.m. meeting and informed the staff. The police were called at 4:37, just two minutes later. Regardless, the core facts remain the same: two young black men were following the common practice of waiting for the rest of the party to arrive before ordering, were deemed unwelcome by the on-site staff, and law enforcement was dispatched to dispose of these intruders to the sacrosanct environs of an international café chain.

In response to the national outrage spawned by a video documenting the interaction, Starbucks executives put out a series of statements expressing their dismay at the incident and vowing to work to prevent a recurrence of these events, explaining that their “store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated as it did.” While that may certainly be true, calling the police — especially calling them to deal with black people — is inherently an escalation, and one that sharply increases the possibility of violence. In this case, a 911 call implying that the two men had refused to leave prompted seven officers to arrest them, remove them from the shop, and detain them for eight hours without charging them with anything. The crux of the pushback has been around the racial dynamics of the encounter: Several of the nonblack patrons at the Starbucks location in question reported that they had been there for a long time, without purchasing anything and without recrimination.

There is an unspoken code of behavior in coffee shops — a certain level of perceived gentility expected for the privilege of loitering indefinitely. This is an impossible aura for black people to project — their mere presence is perceived as a threat. In a 2017 report conducted by the ACLU on stop and frisk in Philadelphia, statistics in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood where this Starbucks is located showed that 68 percent of stops by the PPD were conducted on black residents, despite having a neighborhood black population of merely 3 percent. This is a phenomenon referred to as “out-of-place policing”, which not only ties blackness to criminality, but views the presence of black people in white neighborhoods as suspicious

This is the problem Starbucks executives have publicly committed to addressing with a franchise-wide day of training on “unconscious bias”on May 29, with guidance from partners such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League. The swift decision is commendable, but the circumstances around the incident point to a weightier problem than mere “bias”.

There is a certain toothlessness in the phrase “unconscious bias,” however well-intentioned, as a description for racism. It minimizes it by transforming the systems and social conditions that oppress the marginalized into a mere accident of psychology. To allow a white patron to idle indefinitely while simultaneously calling the police to remove black patrons by force in two minutes is more than mere unwitting partiality. It is an active decision to view a black presence in white spaces as something that needs to be explained, validated, and adjudicated — which is to say that it is just good ol’ fashioned racism. Marking it as “unconscious” is a way of releasing the person from responsibility for their own actions. A training predicated upon this false premise is not likely to be effective.

It remains to be seen whether the measures undertaken by Starbucks executives are meant to address the actual treatment of black customers, or whether they are simply meant to mollify the backlash. And even if executed rigorously, not only is it an open question whether unconscious-bias training actually works, it’s unclear how we should even measure its impact. Nevertheless, it’s important for us to look at the broader context: We treat the presence of black people, especially in places in which there aren’t many of them, as inherently suspicious, and truly coming to terms with the society-wide implications of this behavior will take more than a one-day corporate workshop.

The Death and Afterlife of Stephon Clark

Originally published for the Daily Intelligencer at NYMag on April 2nd, 2018.

On March 18, Stephon Clark’s life was brutally taken by police officers in his grandmother’s backyard. Body-cam footage shows police, who were responding to a report of break-ins in the neighborhood, opening fire seconds after one of the officers yells, “gun!” All that was found on Clark’s lifeless body, however, was an iPhone.

According to acclaimed forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu (known for his work in discovering CTE in deceased football players), who was hired by the Clark family for a private autopsy, eight of the 20 bullets the officers fired hit Clark, six of them from behind. Four bullets struck Clark in the back, two struck him in the neck, and one each in the armpit and thigh. The gunfire pierced Clark’s lung and shattered bones into “tiny bits.” It took him between three and ten minutes to die. This violent assault not only robbed him of his life, but also his family’s ability to execute a proper faith-based burial for him as a Black Muslim.

In the Islamic faith, as with all Abrahamic religions, death is not viewed as the cessation of life, but merely the end of a soul’s existence on Earth; the holy Quran describes in detail the process by which they are resurrected and transported into the afterlife for judgment. In reverence of this transition, a thorough and austere burial ritual is performed to prepare the deceased’s body, following four steps: (1)the cleansing ritual (ghusl), (2) enshrouding the body in an unadorned white cloth (kafan), (3) a funeral prayer (Janazah), which is distinguished by supplications for the deceased and wishes for a peaceful transition into their next phase of existence, and (4) burial, with the departed’s head pointing toward the holy city of Mecca.

All four steps are expected to be completed in as close to 24 hours as possible — or in the case where someone passes under suspicious circumstances, immediately after the cause of death is determined — and, in the case of possession of the physical body, are considered prerequisites for the person to enter Jannah (heaven). In Clark’s case, the process took 11 days before commencing, due to the time between both the coroner’s examination and the secondary private autopsy.

The ghusl is a thorough cleansing process in which all possible residue and “impurities” (blood, bodily fluids, nail polish, dirt residue) must be removed from the body before it is washed three times. This includes any bone fragments and residue in bullet wounds. After participating in the preparation rites for the final burial, Imam Omar Suleiman announced on Twitter that because Clark’s was body riddled with bullet wounds, shattered bones, and perforations, the ghusl couldn’t be performed. When asked to elaborate further he indicated that Stephon’s “body was ripped to pieces” and “mutilated in the worst possible way.”

A Black Muslim’s untimely death at the hands of a battery of bullets from law enforcement is not a 2018 anomaly: Amadou Diallo infamously met the same fate in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx just over 19 years ago. Instead of a cell phone, it was his wallet, and it was his own house versus that of his grandmother’s, but the sequence remains the same: The victim was misidentified as a suspect, an officer yelled “gun,” and each man died in a hail of bullets. It took two weeks for Diallo to have his proper burial in Guinea. All that remains to be seen is if the cycle will be completed with the acquittal of the police officers responsible for Clark’s death.

Black Muslims are used to being overlooked as members of Muslim diaspora, as well as one of the largest growing demographics of the American Muslim population. In the week after his passing, few publications mentioned Clark’s faith in describing his legacy. But in a country in which justice is far from guaranteed in a black person’s earthly life, we still possess faith; whether that be in a higher being, in our communities, or in the institutions that are pledged to uphold our civil rights. In the Black Muslim community, that last part isn’t always so cut and dry — the institutions ignore them and the communities are under constant surveillance, despite our perceived invisibility.

For Black Muslims in the U.S., day-to-day existence can feel like a never-ending fight for humanity and acknowledgement against the systems constructed to strip justice away. Despite that, these communities continue to offer supplications in the face of state-sponsored violence, down to the final Janazah prayer: “O Allah, forgive our living and our dead, those present and those absent, our young and our old, our males and our females. O Allah, whom among us You keep alive, then let such a life be upon Islam, and whom among us You take unto Yourself, then let such a death be upon faith. O Allah, do not deprive us of his reward and do not let us stray after him.”

What persists is belief in the holy Quran and the hadiths adjacent to it, and that adherence to these mores and traditions will aid in entering Jannah in the afterlife. This faith, that repeated injustices on Earth will be washed away in the afterlife by salvation and liberation endures, despite repeated infringements on freedom. But acts like this massacre, which not only end lives but violate victims’ faith practices, threaten to rob people of that conviction. If we seek to do these victims justice by honoring their lives, it is our duty to embrace their whole identity as the bullets try to strip them away.

The Counter to Trump’s Xenophobic Racism Is Not Exceptionalist Immigrant Narratives

Originally published for VerySmartBrothas on Jan 12, 2018.

Sometime Thursday, Donald J. Trump waddled into the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., and not only blustered that immigrants from the countries of Haiti, El Salvador and the entire continent of Africa are “people from shithole countries” but also encouraged more immigration from countries such as Norway and the continent of Asia because of some perceived economic benefit to the U.S.

None of this sentiment should come as a surprise to anyone. This is the same Trump who campaigned on building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, and who implemented an Islamophobic visa ban and repealed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a regulation that protected undocumented residents who arrived in the U.S. as minors, a position that I myself was in many years ago. This latest outburst is just an extension of the long-standing record of racism and xenophobia that Trump has exhibited going back to the Central Park Five.

Nevertheless, the backlash was swift—anchors across cable news reveled in the opportunity to say the word “shithole” ad infinitum with the socially appropriate level of disgust that should be assigned to such a fiasco. Anderson Cooper gave a moving monologue speaking about his time and experience in Haiti and why their lives are just as valuable as anyone else’s. Don Lemon openly called Trump a racist and disengaged with the conservative guests on his program that demurred from the label.

Then the inevitable happened: Story after story arose of how amazing Haitians and Africans are, of how African immigrants have a high rate of postsecondary education in the United States, of the beautiful beaches and infrastructure and urban hubs that are widespread across the Diaspora, as if it is our pedigree and wares that make us worthy immigrants.

Let’s get one thing straight. Africa could indeed be composed of 54 individual, sentient piles of shit, and it would not make Trump’s immigration policy and rhetoric less abhorrent. The social contract that we abide by comes with an expectation of respect for our basic humanity, an expectation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—not a degree audit. These “exceptional immigrant” narratives being peddled are unnecessary and irrelevant and feed into the idea that people born into poor circumstances do not deserve the same opportunities as others.

My family is from the Comoros Islands, the 11th-poorest country in the world. The median age is 20. The gross domestic product per capita is around $1,500 in U.S. dollars. My immediate family is largely comfortable, but many are not, and those people deserve to seek better circumstances for themselves and their families, especially since these conditions are no fault of their own. Colonialism devastated our nations and tasked us with putting the rubble back together in less than a century’s time—in Comoros’ case, less than 50 years (we obtained independence in 1975).

Countries like mine—which went from being one of the largest producers of vanilla and ylang-ylang in the world to having the French government steal an island from us and hire mercenaries to orchestrate coup after coup to destabilize us—are constantly being maligned for struggling to crawl out of the hole that our former Western overlords placed us in, which is akin to having someone cut off your leg and then complain that you are walking too slow.

There are professors and engineers and diplomats in my family, but frankly, there’s no need to showcase their pedigree to prove our humanity, especially considering that there are also impoverished Comorians in my family. Both realities exist, and the need to erase the realities of many of our fellow Diaspora members—that some people ARE severely struggling and DO live in shacks/huts and have limited access to resources—is a performative exercise we need to stop.

Buying into that line of counterargument is buying into the validity of our value being dependent on what we have to offer the West. We are more than a brain and resource drain. Fuck that Western colonialist mentality and fuck Trump. He can think my cousins shit on banana leaves all he wants, but they still deserve fair treatment.

In general, when it comes to rebutting the never-ending stream of incoherence that Trump insists on hammering us with in 2018, we need to stop accepting his parameters for debate. Stop letting Trump determine the rules of engagement. Proving to Trump that we can be perfect Americans—migrants who assimilate and accept the incumbent institutions of white supremacy without question—is degrading bullshit that we need to leave in 2017.

Further, don’t forget that this racist and xenophobic mentality is not limited to Trump, conservatives or even Americans. French President Emmanuel Macron—a self-defined centrist—has been doing a grand tour of the continent degrading the African Francophonie repeatedly, stating that African nations have a “civilizational problem,” encouraging African women to engage in family planning for population control and mocking the plight of Comorians who have died trying to cross the Indian Ocean to arrive at our fourth island of Mayotte, which France annexed from us.

The toxicity of white supremacy and imperialism is not bound by party affiliation, and in a lot of ways Trump’s proclamation is merely a reflection of our increasingly xenophobic approach to immigration as U.S. foreign policy standard. That is a reality we have to contend with whether or not the person sitting in the Oval Office is about as qualified as a radioactive Cheeto.

I’ll always love my homeland of Comoros—Udzima wa ya Masiwa, the union of the great islands—from the nicest beaches to the roughest roads. I don’t need to prove the worthiness, beauty and richness in our lives to anyone, especially not Trump, and I behoove other people in the Diaspora to do the same. We are rich; we are poor; we are educated; we are not; but most importantly, we are human, and we are loved.

Shamira Ibrahim

Portfolio of a Professional Malcontent