This week’s dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C. was a quintessential display of what Guy Debord called “spectacle.” In his words, what we prefer to refer to as “media” is really the communication of “orders” whereby “those who give them are also those who tell us what [to] think of them.” These…
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Dr. Jared Sexton joined us this week to discuss to his work in Amalgamation Schemes and the politics of multiracial identification in an anti-Black world. As Sexton has written, “Multiracialism cuts its teeth on the denial of this fundamental social truth: not simply that antiblackness is longstanding and ongoing but also that it is unlike other…
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It would be difficult to argue that the filmmakers of the recently-released documentary Black Power Mixtape did not intend the irony that came with some concluding comments from singer Erykah Badu. Her point was that Black people had to document and tell their own stories or disappear. That these comments came at the end of…
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