Tag: history

What I Am Actually Thankful For

I am grateful for a lot of things in my life. My family, having a car, having a job, my friends, my Buddhist community, food, water and the list goes on. However, I also understand that for American Indian and First Nation peoples, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning, to remember all of the brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers lost in the genocide that the white European settlers committed against American Indian folks. As someone who is not a member of the First Nations, I now use this day as a time for education and awareness. As a kid, I went along with the typical traditions and cultural brainwashing of Thanksgiving as this harmonious ceremony during which white settlers at Plymouth Rock coexisted with American Indian people.

And then, when I grew up and started reading more books and talking with actual American Indian classmates and people, I realized that perspective on history was incorrect. So, I had to educate myself and un-learn a lot of the white colonial bullshit that my elementary school teachers fed me, and I threw that pile of shit back into all of the shitty textbooks that taught me that Thanksgiving was this beautiful holiday. That shit stank, but the truth sometimes has to piss you off in order to set you free. As I grew older, I started reading more literature by First Nations authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie and Tommy Orange. For an online book club that my college alma mater does, the moderator chose a novel called Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, a Cree Canadian author. The novel describes the traumatic history of residential schools in Canada and the impact and legacy that these schools has had on the Indigenous Canadian adults who survived its horrors as children. I don’t know much about Canadian history, unfortunately, but reading Five Little Indians gave me much needed insight into how fucked up the residential school system was. It also helped me understand that like the history of the United States of America, you cannot fully understand the history of Canada unless you learn about the countless atrocities that Indigenous men, women, children and non-binary peoples faced throughout the nation’s history. In this government-funded residential school system, many Indigenous children were abducted and separated from their families and placed into these residential schools in an attempt to erase Indigenous education and cultural traditions from Canadian history and assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian society. There was a significant lack of resources, the staff abused children and white authorities at the schools punished Indigenous children for speaking their own languages. I watched a video to learn more about the history of these schools and when the survivors were describing to the reporter the abuse they experienced and witnessed, it really fucked me up, but I needed to get my mind fucked up because I needed to know how fucked up the residential school system was. I cannot begin to describe the horrors that the kids experienced at these schools. I will just say that reading that book, Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, will stick with me for a while.

One author I really love is Tommy Orange. He is an author from Oakland, California who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. I really love his writing and recommend his novels There There and Wandering Stars. Movies-wise, I recommend Killers of the Flower Moon and Fancy Dance on Apple TV. Fancy Dance is a movie directed by Native American filmmaker Erica Tremblay, and it is about a young queer Cayuga woman named Jax who investigates the disappearance of her sister, Tawi, while caring for Tawi’s daughter, Roki. I didn’t know much about the history of missing and murdered Native American people before watching this movie, but watching Fancy Dance made me want to learn more about the history of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. Even though I really loved Killers of the Flower Moon and thought Lily Gladstone was fucking incredible in their role as Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone goes by she/her and they/them pronouns), I really loved that in Fancy Dance Gladstone got to play the main character in the movie and also that their character, like Lily Gladstone in real life, is part of the LGBTQ+ community.

TV Review: Season 6, part 2 of The Crown

Well, it’s official. I finally finished watching the last part of the last season of The Crown, a biographical drama on Netflix depicting the life of the late Queen Elizabeth II. This later season covers some crucial turning points in the lives of the people in the royal family. In episode 8, “Ritz,” Margaret, Elizabeth’s younger sister, has to confront serious health issues. She suffers a serious stroke while partying with her friends. She is reciting a poem while smoking a Chesterfield cigarette, and then she loses consciousness, and she hears loud ringing in her ears. Before she knows it, she has collapsed. She gets serious medical attention, and the doctors tell her she has to make serious changes to her lifestyle, one of which is that she cannot smoke any more cigarettes or drink alcohol. In the earlier seasons, Margaret is seen in just about every scene smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of alcohol. Even after she gets a lung operation (the same one that her father, King George, underwent because he, too, smoked a lot), she continues to smoke. However, as she gets older, the doctors tell her that she cannot continue smoking and drinking anymore because they could be triggering her strokes. This is really painful for Margaret, and she starts to have a “screw-it” mentality, thinking, “Well, I’m going to die anyway.” After she gets her first stroke, she is shown having to learn how to speak and walk again, and the staff are shown dumping her many bottles of whiskey and her Chesterfield cigarettes down the toilet. While on vacation with her longtime friend, Ann, she still smokes cigarettes and drinks alcohol, and while in the shower, she experiences the ringing in her ears and then collapses. She turns on the hot water and collapses, leaving her with serious burns on her feet. Elizabeth is worried about Margaret’s health, but Margaret tells her that it doesn’t matter anymore and that she is going to die anyway, so she might as well do what she wants. Margaret’s birthday is coming up, and she wants to celebrate her birthday at The Ritz. However, Elizabeth doesn’t want anyone to know about her time at The Ritz because she is still a public figure and anything she reveals about her past could be used against her, so when Margaret tries to bring it up at her birthday celebration, Elizabeth cuts her off and gives a moving speech about her relationship with Margaret. There is a flashback to May 8, 1945, to when Margaret and Elizabeth are looking out the window and seeing everyone celebrating Victory Day in the streets because World War II has ended and the Allied Powers, which included Britain, won. Margaret and Elizabeth leave Buckingham Palace, which they are not supposed to do, and go to a hotel in London called The Ritz. Elizabeth thinks they shouldn’t be doing this because it’s against the rules, but Margaret just wants to party and have a good time. An African American soldier leads Elizabeth downstairs to a jazz club where people are partying and dancing. Elizabeth dances with the soldier and has a lot of fun, and Margaret and her friends go downstairs to find Elizabeth dancing and so they join in. They walk back together to Buckingham Palace the next day. This memory is significant because so much has changed between Margaret and Elizabeth since Elizabeth became Queen. Before becoming queen, Margaret and Elizabeth were sisters having fun and running around the palace. But there is one scene in one of the seasons that sets up the tension between Elizabeth and Margaret as adults. Since she is firstborn, Elizabeth faces a lot more pressure to keep herself together, and her father, the king, trains her in government and politics because she is destined to become queen when he passes away. Elizabeth feels a lot of pressure, especially since she is reserved while Margaret is outgoing. Margaret tells her that she could be queen because she likes to boss people around, but when Tommy Lascelles, the private secretary in the palace, hears of this, he immediately tells Margaret that she is not fit to be queen and that Elizabeth is. When Elizabeth becomes queen, she begins to distance herself from Margaret. Margaret wants to do what she wants, including marrying Peter Townsend, who she has an affair with. However, Elizabeth can’t let Margaret do what she wants anymore since there are laws and structures that end up prohibiting Margaret from marrying Peter. Peter ends up getting kicked out of the palace and has to spend time abroad away from Margaret, and Peter ends up marrying someone else, leaving Margaret feeling frustrated and resentful towards Elizabeth. Even as they become adults, Margaret asks for work to do, but Elizabeth can’t just give her a job because she is under a lot of restrictions as well about what she can and cannot do as queen. So, Margaret has to find work to do, and while seeking therapy for her mental health, she ends up finding out about two cousins who were cast out by the royal family for having mental illness and tracks them down. Honestly, I admire Margaret in the show for doing this because quite a few characters in the show struggle with their mental health, yet it’s seen as taboo to discuss it. In season 4, Princess Diana suffers from an eating disorder but no one in the royal family asks if she is doing okay. They just think she is acting out or sulking, but in reality, she is in a terrible unhappy marriage with a man who has been unfaithful to her, and not only that, but Camilla, the woman he is having an affair with, relishes in manipulating the young Diana into feeling worse about herself.

Season 6, part 2, shows how Diana’s sons, William and Harry, grapple with the death of their mother, Princess Diana, and their strained relationship with their dad, Charles. William faces a lot of pressure because he is the older of the two siblings, and as the season continues, Harry and William’s relationship grows increasingly tense. William argues that he faces a lot more pressure than Harry in the public eye, and Harry becomes envious that William is seen as the perfect child while he, Harry, is seen as the redundant child, the spare. (Honestly, after watching this season, I want to read Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.) In a later episode, Harry and William go to a party that is themed “Colonials and Natives.” William dresses up as a lion, while Harry decides to wear a Nazi uniform with a swastika on the armband. At first, it seems like no one notices, but two students end up taking a picture of Harry’s Nazi uniform and share it with the press, and the newspapers eat this up. Obviously, the royal family isn’t happy to know that Harry did this when they read the morning papers the next day, and Harry feels a lot of humiliation and anger after finding out that someone took a photo of him wearing the uniform and sent it to the press. While meeting with the Queen, Prime Minister Tony Blair tries to make it seem like it was no big deal, and that Harry was just being a teenage boy who didn’t know any better, but Queen Elizabeth tells him that Harry did this two weeks before Buckingham Palace was going to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, so they can’t just pretend like it was no big deal. This made me think of when photos and videos of Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau wearing blackface resurfaced, and Trudeau addressed it and apologized because at the time he didn’t know it was offensive. Harry also said that he regretted wearing that Nazi uniform, and later on decided to meet with a rabbi and get educated on the Holocaust. There have been times when I have called people out on stuff that was racist, sexist or homophobic. However, there have definitely been times when I have said something that was uninformed or ignorant myself, and I had to apologize and then educate myself, but I’ve grown in the process of doing this. One time, a few years ago, I made an offensive joke, and someone told me “Hey, that’s offensive,” and at first, I took it personally, but then I realized that what I said was in fact ignorant and so now I don’t tell that joke anymore because I understand that it was hurtful.

Season 6 also shows William’s relationship with Catherine, or Kate, Middleton. Kate’s mother and Kate are walking through London, when they spot Princess Diana and her son, William, signing autographs and giving out magazines to adoring fans. Catherine and her mother approach Diana and William, and Catherine is starstruck and falls in love with William. Back home, she is shown sitting in bed with magazines splashed with William’s handsome face, and her mother tells her that she can find a way so that Kate will end up with William. Kate doesn’t believe it’s possible, but as the show progresses, her mother basically gets her to stalk William. Kate’s mom listens to the radio to figure out where William is staying and where he is going to college. She finds out that William is taking a gap year and so she sends Kate on the same gap year. She finds out that William is going to St. Andrews, so she sends Kate there, too. William falls in love with Kate, even though he is dating another girl named Lola. Lola, like William is wealthy, while Kate works at a restaurant to support herself, so it seems like she doesn’t have a chance at first. However, when William finds out that Kate borrowed the books for the art class they have together, he approaches her and they talk about their memories of the gap year program. They are having a great conversation, but then Lola comes along and feels disrespected that William is flirting with Kate. When a girl asks William for an autograph, he snaps at her to go away. Both Kate and Lola think he was being rude, but then he tells them that they don’t know what it’s like being ogled all the time and constantly having girls harass him for autographs. However, as young women in a sexist society, they deal with being ogled all the time, so they both ditch him. William dealing with the fame and being good-looking reminded me of this guy who worked at Target named Alex. In 2014, a young woman snapped a photo of a sixteen-year-old cashier working at Target named Alex because he was good-looking, and the photo went viral on social media. Alex didn’t know that someone had snapped a photo of him, but pretty soon he achieved this Internet fame and he found it overwhelming, with news agencies camping outside his home and his phone blowing up with notifications and messages. He had to leave his high school and had to be homeschooled due to all the unwanted attention he was getting. He said he preferred a private life away from the spotlight, and I feel that William in The Crown was like Alex from Target because he didn’t want all this publicity. He wanted to be private about his life, but everywhere he went, even in college, girls kept approaching him for autographs and he had very little to no privacy, to the point where a young woman’s mother (i.e. Kate’s mom) is tracking his whereabouts so that her daughter can achieve her dream of being William’s girlfriend. There is one scene where William and his bodyguard are getting groceries, and no one else is around. That is one of the few scenes (probably the only scene, actually) where William is in a public place and doesn’t have to deal with screaming girls and camera-happy paparazzi. In an earlier episode, he gets letters from his schoolmates letting him know to reach out to them if he needs anything, but then he gets another bag of letters from mostly girls around the world. Some are sympathetic, but most of the letters are about how cute and sexy William is. It’s a lot of pressure for William to deal with because he is still grieving the loss of his mom and juggling schoolwork and extracurricular activities, and he just wants to have that time to himself to deal with his grief, not attend all of these engagements and deal with fame.

The last episode is about Queen Elizabeth planning for her funeral in the future. She is overwhelmed at first that Prince Philip wants her to have this big celebration at her funeral because he himself wants to have a lively celebration after his death. She wants a quiet funeral at Balmoral with little noise. At the same time, she and her cabinet are arranging for her funeral in the future, Charles asks her permission to marry Camilla. The Queen wants to say yes, but the archbishops at the various churches approach her and say that it’s not as simple as giving her son her blessing because both Camilla and Charles are divorcees, and they had an affair while they were both married to other people. Their only option is to have a public ceremony where Camilla and Charles confess their “sins” (aka the fact that they had an affair together). Camilla and Charles end up marrying and many people celebrate the wedding.

The Queen also deals with an existential dilemma where she is questioning whether she should step down from her responsibilities as queen and find a successor. There are a few scenes in the last episode where she talks with her past versions of herself (played by Claire Foy, who was in seasons 1 and 2, and Olivia Colman, who was in seasons 3 and 4.) Olivia Colman’s version of Elizabeth tells the 80-year-old version (played by Imelda Staunton), that she should find someone to take her place because other countries have done it before, such as Luxembourg. The 80-year-old version of Elizabeth rejects this idea that she should find a successor, but word goes around that the Queen is finding a successor, and because Charles is firstborn, he is in line to be king when she passes away. Charles is super excited about this, and word gets around that Elizabeth is going to announce his succession to the throne. However, the younger version of Elizabeth (played by Claire Foy) appears and tells 80-year-old Elizabeth that she needs to continue to run things because she has been doing this job, being the Queen, for several decades and no one else has the kind of job experience she has gone through. So, when Charles and Camilla are at their wedding celebration, they think Elizabeth is going to announce Charles becoming king after she dies, but she doesn’t address it and only gives a short speech about how proud she is of Charles and Camilla getting married. Charles is very disappointed that she didn’t make the announcement, but by then she doesn’t have time to chit chat. Once she makes her speech, she leaves the party and goes to pray in a private place in the church away from all the noise. I thought it was so cool how they brought out all three Elizabeths to show how much time has passed from the time Elizabeth became Queen to when she was 80 years old. Also, all three actresses were excellent in their roles as Queen Elizabeth, and they’re great actresses in general. My family and I watched Women Talking, a very intense film about a community of female Mennonites who escape sexual abuse in the male-dominated colony they have spent years in. Claire Foy played one of the women in the movie and she was absolutely incredible. Honestly, that film still gives me chills. I really loved Olivia Colman in The Favourite, which is a movie in which she plays another British queen, this time Queen Anne. The raw energy she brought to that role was incredible, and I was so happy when she won that Academy Award at the 91st Academy Awards for Best Actress. I also saw her in some supporting roles in The Lobster and Fleabag. In Fleabag she plays the main character’s godmother, and in The Lobster, she plays a hotel manager who doesn’t elicit any emotion when telling Colin Farrell’s character that he must find a partner in 45 days, or else he will be transformed into an animal of his choice. It was a very dark and disturbing movie, and by the end I’m pretty sure I had nightmares. But as a single person I found this movie very relatable at times, even though it’s a dystopian movie. And Imelda Staunton made a really good Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I will always remember her pink checkered suits, her smug smile as she enforced all these draconian policies at Hogwarts, the annoying way she said “Hem-hem” whenever she wanted to make a point, the torture she put Harry through when she forced him to write “I must not tell lies,” and the scene where she gets swept away by large winged horses called thestrals while Harry tells her “I’m sorry Umbridge…I must not tell lies,” turning the tables after the disrespect and pain she put that young wizard through. Yep, I will remember all these things because Imelda played her so darn well.

Movie Review: Till (content warning: disturbing descriptions of racism)

I just finished the movie Till. To be honest I am still processing it since it was a very hard film to watch but I am going to do my best to write as much as I can about the movie. I got it from the library because I heard it got a lot of great reviews and Ariana DeBose, the actress from West Side Story, gave a shoutout to Danielle Deadwyler while singing a medley of “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” and “We Are Family” at the BAFTA awards. (Side note: Danielle’s face when Ariana gave the shoutout was priceless.)

So now on to the movie. The film opens up in the 1950s in Chicago, Illinois, and Mamie Till-Mobley and her 14-year old son, Emmett, are driving through the city listening to the radio and singing. However, within a few moments of seeing them singing, Mamie’s face suddenly gets serious and the radio music is overshadowed by suspenseful music and if you know about what happened to Emmett Till, you know she has a sense that something bad is going to happen to her son. In fact, leading up to Emmett’s brutal lynching, the camera forces you to sit with Mamie’s deepening anxiety about her son going to visit his cousins in Mississippi. She warns Emmett that he needs to be careful because the South is known for lynching Black people and his life as a young Black man is basically in jeopardy if he goes down there. But he doesn’t take her seriously and says that he knows he needs to be careful. He goes down to see his cousins and they have to work in the cotton fields as sharecroppers. When Emmett makes jokes and goofs off while they are working, his cousins get upset with him and tell him that he is going to get them in trouble with the white people that they work for, but Emmett doesn’t take them seriously. Unfortunately, Emmett sees the ugly side of this Deep South racism when he goes to a corner store for some candy with his cousins. He browses the store and then goes up to the counter and sees a white lady named Carolyn Bryant working at the counter. He grabs some candy out of the jar and he then tells the lady that she looks like a movie star and pulls out a photo of a white lady and shows her. Emmett’s cousins realize that none of them are watching Emmett, so one of them goes into the store and sees him talking to the white woman, and he’s thinking, I need to get Emmett out of here because he is not supposed to be doing that in this part of town, so he The white lady is offended and then when she comes out of the store, before leaving, Emmett smiles and whistles at her. She grabs a pistol and runs after them, and Emmett and his cousins race into their truck and run off as she stands with the pistol pointing at them. When they get home, his cousins’ parents are up late worried about what happened to them, but then they arrive home and Emmett is laughing and talking about how much fun he had. The dad tells him to be careful and Emmett tells him he knows, and then one of the cousins, while on another night out on the town, is angry at Emmett and tells him that he can’t get off from that incident scot-free and that the white folks are going to go after him and them. Emmett tells them it was just one time and that he would be careful next time.

Meanwhile, while all this is going on, Mamie is worried about her son and has a feeling that something dangerous is going to happen to him. And she has every reason to worry, not just because she is Emmett’s mom but because he is a young Black man in 1950s Mississippi and so his life is pretty much at risk simply because of how white people treated Black people down there. She tells her partner, Gene, that she needs to have a night out with the ladies to get her worries about her son off of her mind, and he agrees, so she takes time away to spend time with her friends, playing cards with them and smoking and chit-chatting. However, her sense of calm quickly disappears and she finds herself once again worrying about Emmett and sensing there is something not okay with him. Unfortunately, she is right. Things are not going great during Emmett’s trip, and the husband of the white lady Emmett was talking with at the corner store comes to Uncle Mose’s house and searches the house for Emmett and the white men take away Emmett. When Uncle Mose tells the men to leave Emmett alone, they threaten to shoot him. While we don’t see the actual brutal lynching of Emmett, we see several men, including some Black men who work for the Bryants, drag Emmett into the truck and we hear Emmett’s screams as the men brutally murder him.

The movie in general was hard to watch, but I think the hardest part was seeing the scene where Mamie goes to see her son’s mutilated body after it was found dumped in the river. The camera does it to where we don’t see the body immediately, but it goes up from under the table to where we can see the body during the autopsy . And man, it is brutal to watch this scene. I had studied about Emmett Till in my U.S. history classes, but when I actually saw Emmett’s mutilated bloated face and entire body on the screen it showed me how brutal his lynching really was and also how fucked up Jim Crow and the legacy of racism was and still is. It reminded me of when George Zimmerman, a police officer, shot and killed a young Black man named Trayvon Martin, who was just going into the store and living his life. Young Black men don’t get to live and enjoy their lives because white America is constantly policing their bodies, and that is how it has been for centuries, even dating back to enslavement. There is a scene in the film where Mamie tells Emmett that when he is down in Mississippi he needs to “be small,” meaning that he has to act servile towards white people and can’t be his confident joyful self because white people just can’t stand seeing a young confident Black man being himself. When Black people resisted the policing of their bodies and experienced freedom and joy, it threatened the idea of safety for many white people and the system of injustice and so instead of letting Black men experience Black joy they did everything in their power to squash that Black joy, including robbing them of life. In the wake of Trayvon being killed, I remember doing a class video project and one of my classmates make a joke about Trayvon Martin and I remember being pretty upset but I was also a coward at the time and was too afraid to say anything because I didn’t want to be pegged as this angry Black woman. I really wish I had spoken up though because Travyon’s murder was not something to joke about. I have become much more hyperaware of how ugly this racism is especially after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black people in America. In the film, Mamie wants everyone to see Emmett’s body in the open casket because she knows that no one will take his lynching seriously if they don’t see the damage that these men did to his body. Seeing Mamie crying over her son’s body on the autopsy table gave me chills, but I had to see this because many times when I was watching historical movies like The Butler and they briefly showed Emmett Till’s body, I would look away or not want to see it. But they portray it for what it was in this movie, and there was no way they could sugarcoat how fucked up the lynching of Emmett Till was, so I had to see it for what it was. I remember when George Floyd got murdered and Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, sat on his neck for about eight minutes. A young woman outside the store videotaped the entire lynching on her phone, and it circled across the internet. Many people, including white people, were shocked and disgusted, and as a Black person, it wasn’t new for me because I had seen countless news articles by this point about people who look like me being brutally murdered at the hands of police. But for many people, they had not seen or learned about police brutality, so for them it was painful to see a human being devalue the life of another human being simply because he was Black. And sure, some people argue that oh, Those Black kids were just walking the wrong way or They were talking too loudly. But that doesn’t mean what Derek Chauvin did was in any way right. He literally took someone else’s life when he didn’t have to. I think had the young woman not videotaped the murder on her phone, I don’t think anyone would have seen how painful and traumatic George Floyd’s murder was. At Emmett’s funeral, the attendees walk past Emmett’s corpse and are deeply pained but they see how brutally he was lynched.

I thought about stopping the film shortly after that, but I had to keep going because the acting was just so damn good. The rest of the movie shows how Mamie works with the NAACP to investigate the lynching of Emmett and the pain and trauma she has to grapple with throughout the trial. Gene doesn’t want her to go to Mississippi alone, but she insists that she needs to go because she needs to bring justice to her son and make J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two white men who lynched Emmett, pay for what they did. As predicted, Milam and Bryant got off scot-free and so did Roy’s wife, Carolyn. Carolyn lied while giving her testimony. She says that Emmett raped her behind the store and that he had been with white girls before, but Mamie clearly sees through this white woman’s bullshit, and so she leaves the courthouse and says she is going home to Chicago because she knows that these white people are going to get off scot-free and that the verdict is going to be that these white men were not guilty of killing Emmett. She speaks at an NAACP rally in Harlem about how the U.S. government and the Mississippi court stood idly by and did nothing to prosecute the white men who killed her son. She returns home though and remembers the life of her son, and when the movie ended I didn’t cry but I was just filled with a deep sense of anger that these men got to go off scot-free while Mamie had to deal with the grief of losing her son to a brutal lynching for the rest of her life. I had to remember though that what happened to Emmett was not an isolated incident. In my intro to Black culture class, we had an unit on the lynching of Black people in the United States, and we had to read an excerpt from a book (I cannot remember the title and frankly the excerpt is still seared into my memory, so I don’t know if I have the stomach to revisit it again) where they detailed the lynchings of Black people in graphic detail. I don’t think I slept well that night of course because all I could think about was that reading. But the reading showed me once again how dehumanizing this system of racism was to Black people and how we need to learn about it because unfortunately, the U.S.’s history was founded on ideals of freedom and justice, but in reality that freedom and justice was not granted to all people, namely Black and Indigenous peoples.

After watching this film I thought about this book I read called The New Human Revolution. In the book Daisaku Ikeda is traveling to the United States in the 1960s and he sees a young Black boy watching a group of white boys playing a game in the park and they exclude this boy because he is Black. When one of the children loses, the Black boy starts cheering and laughing. There is an older white gentleman watching the game and he cheers on the white boys, but when the Black boy started cheering, he runs up to him and started yelling at him. The boy ran away feeling rightfully angry and hurt, and Daisaku Ikeda makes a promise in his heart to the Black boy that he will build a world where this boy feels respected and loved for who he is and not looked down upon for the color of his skin. This scene really moved me because it reminded me that while the U.S. and many parts of the world have an ugly legacy of racism, I can’t give up hope. That doesn’t mean I need to be overly optimistic or simply wish away centuries of slavery, bloodshed and genocide, but I can look at reality but also envision a more hopeful future where people can respect the inherent dignity of each person’s life, and in particular the lives of the marginalized.

Even though this movie wasn’t easy to sit through, the acting is absolutely incredible. Danielle Deadwyler played Mamie Till-Mobley so well, and you can just see Mamie’s raw pain and emotion that just reverberates through her entire being when she loses her son and how she grapples with her loss and also a fucked up system of dehumanizing Black people’s lives. I got goosebumps during the end credits because they feature this powerful song by Jazmine Sullivan called “Stand Up.” I didn’t get out of my chair. I just had to sit there and process the entire experience of watching such a powerful film.

Till. 2022. 2 hr 10 min. Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs.

Historic Profile: Gladys Bentley (1907-1960)

April 10, 2019

Categories: LGBTQ+

This past February The New York Times published an issue of obituaries dedicated to influential African-American figures who never got an obituary when they died. One of these figures is Gladys Bentley, a queer entertainer who defied gender standards at the time.

Bentley was born in 1907 and raised in Philadelphia, and it was a very unpleasant childhood because her parents were homophobic and couldn’t accept their daughter’s sexuality. To escape this painful reality she played piano and wrote songs, and moved to New York City at the age of 16 to perform in illict bars. One of these bars was the Clam House, Harlem’s hub for LGBTQ+ people. Even though Gladys used she/her pronouns in public, she was the first prominent performer at the time to identify as trans. During the Prohibition Era, there was less stringency on what was allowed in the entertainment industry, so people were more relaxed about Gladys expressing herself. But as time went on and the Great Depression hit America, the public lost favor with Gladys and the police even cracked down on one of her performances, so she left NYC and moved to Los Angeles, where she once again gained her status as the leading queer entertainer there. She performed mainly at Mona’s 440 Club, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy instilled anti-Communist ideologies in the public mind, and so any individual thought to be working against the government faced serious punishment. McCarthy mainly attacked artists and LGBTQ+ people, and so under this threat, Gladys changed her image to appeal to a straight audience and underwent hormone treatments to try and make herself straight. In 1960, she died from flu while studying to be a Christian minister.

I remember taking a course in The Harlem Renaissance, and I vaguely remember learning about Gladys Bentley in he course. The Harlem Renaissance was a crucial time in which Black queer people such as James Baldwin, academic Alain Locke, and Bentley flourished. Reading Bentley’s obituary taught me the importance of recognizing those people who are often forgotten in history. The pain she suffered as a queer person of color is so real, even for today in an age where more queer POCs have mediums through which they can make their stories heard and help shift the public’s consciousness. I often take it for granted that we have public figures such as RuPaul and Todrick Hall, but the fact that it isn’t until centuries after her death that Bentley got recognized in The New York Times once again taught me to always educate myself on the people who don’t make it into the history textbooks, who don’t get a huge social media following. I also take it for granted now that LGBTQ+ artists such as myself can express themselves without the government always punishing them or censoring them for their work, but back then Gladys Bentley had to try and change her sexuality because she was literally fighting for her safety against the government. It reminded me of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and how deep-seated homophobia was in Britain during the 19th and 20th century (Turing was forced to undergo painful hormonal therapy to try and make him not gay anymore. All it did was cause him misery, to be honest.) Reading Bentley’s obituary taught me that I must make my own voice heard so that I can inspire other young queer artists (especially queer artists of color) who somehow think their voice doesn’t matter. Because trust me, these narratives matter and it’s how we can gradually bring about more open dialogue about LGBTQ+ people of color in history.

So I thank you Gladys from the bottom of my heart, for being a pioneer for queer POC artists everywhere.