I’ve celebrated Resurrection Sunday my whole life. I’ve been fully familiar with Black liberation theology’s commentary that Jesus was a brown-skinned Jew who was killed by the state; most of my life I understood Jesus’ death on a cross as a political death. However, the end result of a lot of schooling and mulling over […]
Read more "“He Got Up!” Imagining an Afrofuturist Resurrection"I. Last week, author and essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a full-scale assault of fellow writer and author Ta-Nehesi Coates in an New York Times op-ed entitled “How Ta-Nehesi Coates Gives Whiteness Power.” He makes the case as to why this country’s devotion to race as a construct will continue to perpetuate the deep divisions […]
Read more "How Thomas Chatterton Williams Gets Race Right"“To put it bluntly, the likes of Pharrell and Raven-Symoné can afford to declare their independence from blackness.” In April of this year, Pharrell Williams declared the “new Black” in an interview with Oprah Winfrey by saying: The “new black” doesn’t blame other races for our issues. The “new black” dreams and realizes that it’s not a pigmentation; […]
Read more "The Millennium Negro: The “New Black”"A week later, ABC’s last week #1 comedy, “black-ish” dropped from that position, losing 24% of their audience from last week (however ABC is quick to point out that this is still the strongest showing of a show in the slot immediately following the Emmy Award winning “Modern Family”). Also, while dropping in the number of […]
Read more "The Continuing Blackness of “Black-ish”"Dear White People Concept Trailer from Justin Simien on Vimeo. In the vein of “Higher Learning” and “School Daze” there is a spoof video that is premiering at 2014 Sundance called “Dear White People” highlighting the interactions of black faces in the white space of ivy league-esque collegiate education. I watched the trailer, and of […]
Read more "Dear Black People…"I know it has been some time since “The Great Gatsby (2013)” has debuted and was panned by a few critics, but I certainly would like to offer some discourse to the movie from my perspective. I remember reading The Great Gatsby, the novel my sophomore year of high school, and I actually did pull the […]
Read more "The American Blackness of The Great Gatsby"This morning I log onto Facebook and I see a link to an article entitled “It’s Time for a New Black National Anthem” entitled by black cultural critic and favorite provocateur Touré. He’s making the claim from his opening paragraph that there might be a need for a new Black National Anthem given that the […]
Read more "Should We Change the Black National Anthem? My Response to Toure"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 