A Year in Reading: Ismail Muhammad
More than anything else that I read this year, those two books made me appreciate the unlikeliness of my black life here in this golden state.
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A Year in Reading: Ismail Muhammad
Cole’s photographs and lyrical essays on quotidian sights open up a window into an almost religious realm, one where we become sensitive to the evidence of things not seen.
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The Internet Was Built as a Weapon: The Millions Interviews Jarett Kobek
Everyone who’s doing this has to make a series of moral compromises, and the question these compromises center around is, How big of an audience do you want to have? There’s a way to get your work out there that is legitimate, valid, and enviable, where your ethics aren’t compromised -- but the reality of that is that you sell to 500 people.
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Thinking Another Person’s Thoughts: The Millions Interviews Brit Bennett
To write about black characters is to assert black humanity. By doing that, you’re pushing back against the forces of white supremacy, which have existed before Trump and will continue to exist long after him.
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A Year in Reading: Ismail Muhammad
This is the kind of writing that reorganizes thought patterns and social relations.
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Pressing Closer: On Brit Bennett’s ‘The Mothers’
Bennett’s characters struggle to know one another while navigating a morass of regret, bitterness, and desire; the result is a drama of feeling that explores how trauma shapes the contours of our lives and delineates the limits to our intimacy.
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Frank Ocean and the Black Male Body
Including Trayvon in that pantheon constitutes a refusal and an expansion: black masculinity can look like Yams and Pimp C, yes. It can also look like the face of this boy, whose body was read as thuggish and dangerous for no other reason than his blackness.
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