More than half a century later, a sign was placed on the shore of the Tallahatchie at the spot where Emmett’s body was found. The sign was ripped from the ground and probably thrown into the river as forcefully as his body had been. By the time its replacement was removed, it had been punctured by 317 bullet holes.
Yesterday was the first time I have seen him on the big screen, and I had to stop myself from telling the box-office person and film festival volunteers that I knew someone acting in the film I was about to see.
Bask in a sunny garden and watch the birds. Hike slowly through the woods and listen for their calls. Pull up the new, free Merlin app to find out which bird sings that song. Gradually, you will learn intimate details about the lives of these “winged dinosaurs that have given up stored fat, hollowed their bones,” to fly.
One of the ironies of Afrofuturism is that it is less concerned with the future than it is the mythological reconstruction of a past that would enable Blacks to see themselves differently in the present. Whether the idealizations of Wakanda are ultimately debilitating or liberating for the Black mind and its struggles with persistent racial persecution and the enfeebling belief in Black inferiority is open to debate.
Courtesy Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 ee I was in the library when I heard the young man talking on the phone: “I got our one-billion-dollar lottery ticket, so I feel like we have to be prepared. ‘What would you do?’ my wife asked me, but to…
Blacks got syphilis and Whites got polio, or so it was said. Naturally, the racist practices of the White medical establishment led to polio being underdiagnosed and undetected among Blacks. The differential susceptibility theory was, in part, a way to flatter Whites—more advanced races got polio—and to justify the unequal distribution of medical resources.
In the Halloweens of my day, in a defunct little coal town in the Midwest, we had a hell of a good time.
Ross Gay’s point is that “joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another.” What if, he says, joy is what bubbles forth when “we help each other carry our heartbreak?” To know that, though, we have to invite sorrow in. We welcome it with open (not crossed) arms. And once we stop resisting sorrow, guess what? We no longer resist or brush aside joy.
"Bosnian St. Louis" reminds us how beautiful Bosnia and Herzegovina was, and how readily people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds intermarried and socialized. This small country with a mouthful of a name was first part of Yugoslavia—and it was the only Yugoslav republic established purely by geography and history, not ethnicity.
For a solid year, Christian Okeke works twelve hours a day—doing construction, working in a factory, mopping up spilled beer and sticky foam at a bar—to buy his own cello. It arrives naked—no strings, no pegs, and no bridge—so his cellist friend helps him find all he needs.