Tag: social justice

Book Review: On the Come Up

April 27, 2019

Categories: books

I just finished On the Come Up by Angie Thomas and think there needs to be a sequel to the book. It is that good. I read her novel The Hate U Give about a year ago and devoured it within a few days. For those who haven’t yet read the book, The Hate U Give is about a young Black woman named Starr who loses her childhood friend when a police officer kills him. Starr, over the course of the novel, learns to transform her grief into a call for everyone to protest racial profiling. This novel earned Angie Thomas a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Amandla Stenberg as Starr.

On the Come Up is also incredibly good. It is about a young Black woman named Brianna (nicknamed “Bri”) Jackson who lives with her mom and her brother after the murder of her father, who was a prominent rapper. Bri, like her family, is struggling to make ends meet while aspiring to be a famous rapper, but then her Aunt Pooh encourages her to enter a rapping battle to get a record deal with Supreme, a prominent rapper who was in competition with Bri’s dad. Bri enters the battle even though her mom and teachers want her to focus on studying for the ACT so she can get into college, and she ends up roasting her rival, Supreme’s son Milez. Her song goes viral and everyone at school now knows who she is, but the further immersed she gets in her career as a rapper, the deeper in trouble Bri gets with her family and friends. Jayda (nicknamed Jay), Bri’s mom, was able to recover from her substance abuse and get a job at the local church, but when she gets laid off, she struggles to provide for herself, Bri and her son, Trey. Bri’s fame becomes the talk of the community, and not in a good way. One day, two police officers profile Bri and accuse her of having drugs in her backpack when she actually has candy she is selling to make money. Everyone at the school sings Bri’s hit, but a lot of people criticize her because the lyrics seem to the public to glorify drug use, gun violence and money. Supreme tries to sell Bri out, but Bri eventually realizes how, in the end, the money and fame doesn’t matter if it jeopardizes your safety and the safety of your friends and family. She realizes that one can still be a rapper and not have to play into people’s mainstream ideas of who rappers are. In fact, rap can be used as a means of fostering community and addressing social injustice. This book really spoke to me, especially with Trey’s character. Trey went to college, got straight A’s in high school, and got a degree in psychology. However, he couldn’t find jobs in his field, so he got a job working at a pizza restaurant to support the family while looking for a better job and applying to graduate school. His grandfather pities him for having a college degree and working in food service, but Trey’s situation is a real reality that speaks to a lot of us millennials who get these college degrees but don’t have many opportunities after college to use these degrees in the real world. However, even though Trey doesn’t directly use his psychology degree in a job-market sense, he still uses it to his advantage when helping out Bri. In one scene, Bri cries because she is overwhelmed with the unwanted attention she is getting at school for getting her music out there, with her family’s financial situation, and with the death of her father. She gets on a radio show and calls out Hype, the interviewer, when he belittles her music and makes her out to be this violent person when she’s really just trying to survive, and she gets backlash from it. It is overwhelming, and she thinks she is weak from crying in front of Trey, but he tells her that crying doesn’t make you weak and that “admitting that you’re weak is one of the strongest things you can do.” (Thomas p. 362)

This made me think of the film Moonlight, which is about Chiron, a young Black gay man growing up at a time where no one other than a few people would accept him for who he is. In one scene, Chiron cries in the principal’s office because Kevin, the guy he fell in love with, beats him up after a homophobic school bully pressures him to do so. The principal tries to convince him that he should have told someone that he was being bullied, but Chiron tells her that she doesn’t know how hard it is for him to do that. In another scene, we see Juan, a drug dealer who supports Chiron when his mom doesn’t, break down and cry at the dinner table because Chiron is living this painful reality where kids at school are calling him slurs and his mom also neglects him at home, and he just doesn’t know what to tell this little kid when Juan himself is just trying to survive. This movie shows that crying is human, but that Hollywood hasn’t always been good about just letting Black individuals, especially Black men, have space to just release their pain through tears. I totally agree with Trey that crying doesn’t make you weak, even though our society has historically stigmatized the shedding of tears. Crying shows that you are willing to admit that something is wrong, and it is a powerful way to communicate. Of course, crying too much is not always a good thing (I’m an empath, trust me, I know.) So even though it seems Trey’s degree is useless, it actually helps him read people and know what they are going through. This is how I feel with philosophy and Africana Studies. As much as people love to bash philosophy majors, our degree really isn’t useless because regardless of whether you pursue economics, STEM, or the arts and humanities, you need a solid philosophy on which to base your studies, otherwise you’re just doing all this research with no purpose. Even when working all these different jobs not related to my major, I learned how to think and act like a philosopher. As a philosophy major I learned how to question everything: What is the purpose of being a creative? What is my purpose in life? Are there perks to being a perfectionist? I have applied philosophy to everything: when I listen to music, when I write, when I watch movies, when I go to my job every day, when I interact with my fellow human beings, when I perform music. I live philosophy every day even though I don’t get to sit in my dorm room and reread Descartes’ Meditations ten times like I did in college.

The Mask Stereotype

Even though my second degree, Africana Studies, didn’t get me a job working at the Smithsonian (I still need to just get a ticket and go visit the National Museum of African-American History), I have used my training as a philosophy major to think more deeply about the deep roots of Black pain in our country’s history and how we can continue to address these roots through music, writing and other mediums of expression. When Bri’s song becomes a hit, Supreme goads her to do more music with lyrics about gun violence, but after understanding the risk that producing this music has on her loved ones, Bri realizes that Supreme is using her as a pawn to beef up his already successful career. When she goes into the studio expecting to rap her own lyrics, Supreme says Dee-Nice, another rapper, already wrote the song for her. She reads the lyrics and finds that it’s the same subject matter she rapped about in her hit: possessing guns and killing other people in the community if they criticize her. James, an older white man who is friends with Supreme at the record label, only has this single perception of the Black community: problems. Everywhere problems. Drugs, gangs, violence, prison, unemployment. He doesn’t know rap’s potential to address the institutional inequality that caused these problems in the first place. But because James only cares about making a profit from Bri, he thinks that all she wants to rap about is “sassy black-girl shit” (Thomas 381) and that pigeonholing her will make the record label richer. However, as an outsider, Bri can see through their nonsense even though she has gained access to this rich powerful boys club of music producers, so she speaks to Supreme in private and tells him she’s got her own music and won’t rap what Dee-Nice wrote. Supreme tells her that she can’t worry about all that because she is in the music business and “this is about making money” because James has the money they don’t have to succeed in the business. In reality, if Bri were to keep making songs that didn’t personally speak to her, she would just keep getting paid less than a profit while James and Supreme enjoyed most of the money without really doing any of the hard work themselves (aka writing the music from their hearts.)

Bri says the moment when Supreme is threatening to end her career reminds her of when she went to the zoo, and these little kids were making faces at the animals in the exhibit and trying to get them to come up to the glass or make sounds, solely for the sake of entertainment. Even though these animals obviously didn’t pay attention to these kids, Bri remembers feeling bad for the animals, and after giving in to Supreme and rapping the song Dee-Nice wrote, she feels like she’s “in an exhibit, and there’s room full of people waiting for me to entertain them. I have to say what they want me to say. Be what they want me to hear.” (Thomas 384) There is a concept I learned about in one of my Africana Studies classes, and that was “putting on the mask,” or what happens when Black individuals feel like they are always performing for the public eye. Black individuals have diverse identities and experiences: straight, gay, trans, Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, biracial, multiracial, rich, poor, middle class, the list of identities goes on. However, race is about perceptio, and how people were brought up to view Blackness can condition how one wants to see Black people behave, and often these perceptions of Blackness are not very well-founded. James operates from a position where he feels it’s okay to belittle Bri, her dad and other Black citizens, because he promises her money and fame if she lets him say all these bigoted things about Black individuals. Instead of feeling like she can be free with her music, Bri feels trapped in the industry and is trying to hold onto her sense of self, but when her mom finds out what happened, she asks Bri who she really is and Bri can’t answer on the spot because she has other people telling her who she is. She realizes that she can still kill it as a female rapper without catering to macho bigwigs who couldn’t care less about her humanity.

This book reminded me so much of the film Dope. In the film Malcolm, Diggy and Jib are three high school “geeks” living in Inglewood who love ’90s hip-hop, want to go to college, and play in a punk band called Awreeoh. The school bullies pick on them for loving these things, and when a drug dealer named Dom invites Malcolm, Diggy and Jib to a party , Dom and the other partygoers at first make fun of them, but then when Malcolm finds out that Dom put a gun and cocaine in his backpack and Malcolm and his friends sell the cocaine on the black market, they suddenly become popular very fast. But when they get further enmeshed into the pickle of selling the cocaine, Malcolm’s ego gets in the way and I worried his friends were going to desert him. But Jib and Diggy stick with him through the whole thing even if it nearly costs them their future dreams. The friendship between Jib, Diggy and Malcolm reminded me of the friendship between Bri and her friends Sonny and Malik. They give each other the Wakanda handshake from the film Black Panther:

and they also love quoting Yoda from Star Wars. Their friendship is tight, and even when Bri’s hit goes viral and gets her backlash, they stick through with her all the way. I also liked how Bri and Malik never make Sonny feel different from them just because he is gay. Similarly, Jib and Malcolm love Diggy for who she is even when other people make fun of her for being a lesbian. As a queer POC, I was really happy that the rare gay characters were well-represented in Dope and On the Come Up.

While reading this book, I couldn’t help but plead in my mind: pleease let there be a movie for this. And sure enough, I Googled “on the come up movie” and Variety had just published a piece a couple of months ago about Fox purchasing the rights to produce the upcoming film based on the novel. I cannot begin to emphasize how important it is that we teach The Hate U Give and On the Come Up in our high school English classes (then again, I am lightyears removed from high school so I don’t know how the curriculum is nowadays.) We need to give kids of all races, especially young Black and Latinx kids, an opportunity to read books where they feel well-represented. I remember we read the occasional Gwendolyn Brooks poem for English class and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, but for the most part the books we read had few to no POC characters with rich backstories and character development, and a lot of the authors, frankly speaking, were dead white men. After taking Africana Studies and reading literature by writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nell Larsen, I at first got angry because I never got to read these writers in school, but then came to appreciate in the end my college education and understand how much of a privilege it was to have access to even just knowing these writers exist and that they published these deeply personal works for us to read. Not everyone knows these works exist, and English teachers who just have their students read The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Julius Caesar (8/10/21: not hating on these books, I enjoyed them as much as the next person) aren’t giving their students a chance to know that these narratives like those of Starr and Brianna exist. On the Come Up is especially powerful because it encourages kids who might want to be rappers or other musicians that, while it’s okay to make money from your art to pay your bills and put bread on the table, music should also speak to social inequalities and musicians not be afraid of speaking up when something is wrong or people are taking advantage of their well-being. Brianna later uses her music to address the sexism she has encountered as a female rapper and people’s expectations for her to be someone she isn’t. As a musician who doesn’t say much, Bri’s story was inspiring for me because as an introvert she uses music to express her anger. At this point, after watching so much news, it’s hard for me to express how overwhelming it is. I could just shut off and not think about it, but I feel inspired after reading On the Come Up to use my music to address racial injustice, climate change, sexism, domestic violence and other forms of injustice. I recently came across this powerful performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings by Cremaine Booker, and in the video description he dedicates the performance to the late Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two unarmed Black men who died at the hands of police in 2016. After seeing this performance I gained the confidence to use my music to address things that make me angry but that I didn’t have the words to express my anger about. I have seen orchestras on YouTube perform this beautiful solemn piece, but Cremaine’s was the first version I have seen that was directly dedicated to addressing social injustice.

Overall, excellent novel. I wouldn’t mind reading it again. Truly a blessing to read another work by Angie Thomas! 🙂

On the Come Up. Angie Thomas. 452 pp. 2019.

Movie Review: If Beale Street Could Talk

June 26, 2019

Categories: movies

I didn’t think I was going to cry when I saw this film. But alas, by the end I found my shoulders quaking as I erupted in tears. And while I was of course super ecstatic when Regina King won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this film. I didn’t truly understand at the time why she won the award because I hadn’t yet seen the film. It wasn’t until I saw the film that my appreciation for Regina King’s acting deepened.

The film, based on the novel of the same name by James Baldwin, is about a young Black couple, Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt and Tish Rivers, living in Harlem. Tish announces to her family that she is pregnant with Fonny’s child and while her mom, dad and sister, Ernestine (played brilliantly by Dear White People’s Teyonah Parris) celebrate her pregnancy, Fonny’s family does not. Tish not only has to deal with Fonny’s family’s disapproval of her, but also Fonny’s incarceration. Victoria Rogers, a young Puerto Rican woman, accused Fonny of raping her when she has to point out her rapist in a line of Black men. Sharon, Tish’s mom, goes to Puerto Rico to tell Victoria that Fonny didn’t rape her, but it doesn’t end up working too well. Even when they are young, Tish and Fonny still live in a brutal world where police will still accuse them of doing things just because they are Black.

This film is important because racial injustice is still a messy reality even though social media has allowed people to spread awareness of incidents of this injustice. In Fruitvale Station, for instance, the white lady Oscar Grant meets earlier at the grocery store records the moment where the white police officer holds Oscar and his friends hostage and accuses them of starting the fight on the train, when in reality the white inmate of Oscar’s started the fight. However, at the time James Baldwin wrote If Beale Street Could Talk, there was no social media or smart phones. Barry Jenkins, the film’s director, illustrates this point by putting historical photos of white police officers beating Black men and arresting them. I know the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is overused, but in this case, it’s more relevant than ever. Even without physical words, seeing these brutal images of police brutality in the 1960s reminds us how important it is to talk about the intersectionality of criminal justice and racial injustice, even if it is hard to discuss.

I was sad I never got to see it on the big screen, but the benefits of seeing a movie like this on a DVD player is that you get to watch extras, such as deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Also, like, let’s be real. If Annapurna Productions can give us gut-wrenching films like Detroit, they can certainly deliver a gem like Beale Street. The deleted scenes, while they didn’t make their way into the film, are key to the storyline and left me trying to catch my breath because the acting is just so brilliant. Also, watching the feature about the making of If Beale Street Could Talk was pretty awesome because I learned about why Barry Jenkins made the film, the inspiration behind the costume design and makeup, and why the cast was perfect for this film. I got to hear what the actors had to say about their characters and hear about what Barry Jenkins loved about working with these actors. In one powerful scene, Fonny’s family confronts the Rivers family about Tish’s pregnancy, and I swear, I was snapping my fingers the whole time and my mouth stayed in an “O” shape for as long as I can remember because there were so many disses that Ernestine, Sharon and Fonny’s mom dished out to each other.

Barry Jenkins was the perfect director for this film. If you haven’t yet seen his film Moonlight, I recommend you watch it. While you don’t of course have to watch it before watching If Beale Street Could Talk, watching Moonlight and then watching If Beale Street Could Talk gave me a greater understanding of why Jenkins chose a certain lighting or way of zooming in on the characters. The cinematography of Moonlight (courtesy of James Laxton) was incredible, and I don’t think I will ever get tired of this film for that reason. I honestly wouldn’t know how to describe the beauty of Jenkins’s filmmaking, because it has its own unique style. The lighting, the focus on the characters’ facial expressions, and the brilliant beautiful music score made Moonlight a kind of beautiful that’s just super hard to describe unless you see the film for yourself. It’s the same with Beale Street; you just need to watch it to know why it’s so incredible.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t also recommend you read the novel If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. I first heard about it when I heard they were making a movie based on the book. Before that I had read Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and I also saw the documentary on James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro (if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do so. Powerful film.) But I didn’t know about If Beale Street Could Talk; maybe I had passed by it in the library and ruffled through its pages, but I didn’t read it until I saw the trailer for the film adaptation. When I heard Barry Jenkins was directing it, I immediately grabbed a copy and started reading. I devoured that book like it was a delicious meal; it grabbed me and didn’t let me go. Baldwin’s raw depictions of sexuality, Black womanhood, Black masculinity, love, pain and racial injustice got deep down into the pits of my soul and tugged so hard at my heartstrings I thought I would pass out. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The cast of Beale Street wanted to pay tribute to a legend (aka James Baldwin) and they certainly delivered that tribute through their hard work and dedication during the production of this film. Incredible novel and film. This review doesn’t do justice to how moving both of them are.

If Beale Street Could Talk. 2018. Rated R for language and some sexual content.

Movie Review: In the Heights

This past weekend I watched In the Heights. When I first saw the trailer I was super excited for the film because I had seen Hamilton on Disney + (which I will be eternally grateful for because I have yet to see the Broadway in person.) I was also excited because Stephanie Beatriz is in the movie, and I love her as Rosa Diaz in the sitcom Brooklyn 99.

So last night I watched it, and the dancing and singing were absolutely amazing. My friends and I found ourselves bobbing our heads and snapping to the music, and my heart warmed when I watched how Usnavi and Vanessa’s love for each other develops through the film. Even though I myself am not Latinx, I have friends with similar stories to Nina’s. In the film there is a character named Nina who went to Stanford and dropped out because she encountered racist microaggressions from people at the university and was made to feel like she didn’t belong there. When Nina is at a restaurant with her dad she tells him that at an event she attended a lady thought Nina was one of the servers and handed her a dish to take back to the kitchen. This is a common microaggression against students of color who are at predominantly white universities and in predominantly white spaces. In the film Nina performs a number called “Breathe,” and in this number she talks about how everyone in her community has big hopes for her and tells her she will go far in life, but after burning out from the racism and stress she encountered in college, she feels like she let everyone in her community down. It honestly gave me chills, but it’s an all too common experience for first-generation BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students. I also learned a lot listening to my undocumented peers and it encouraged me to read more books by authors who are undocumented immigrants and/ or authors who write about the experiences of undocumented immigrants.

I really loved the film, especially Anthony Ramos’ portrayal of Usnavi, and the beautiful choreography and rapping (I also had forgotten that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote In the Heights before he wrote Hamilton, I thought he had written Hamilton and then In the Heights. My bad.) I also love how Usnavi learns that he can create value right in the Washington Heights community where he’s at even though he has big dreams at the beginning to leave for Puerto Rico.

And at the same time, I want to acknowledge the problem of colorism in the film. Before I watched the film I heard a little bit about the backlash against the film, but it wasn’t until after I watched it that I started reading up more on it. In a Vox piece by Jasmine Haywood titled “In the Heights exemplified the ugly colorism I’ve experienced in Latinx communities”, she explains that while the film was lauded at the beginning for portraying Latinx actors in leading roles, it did a bad job of showing the actual diversity within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, particularly of the Afro-Latinx communities who reside there. In the film most of the Latinx actors who play main characters are light-skinned and white-passing, while the Afro-Latinx people who have dark skin in the film play background roles such as dancers and hair salon workers. Jasmine, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and from New York state, further explains that the film does not adequately portray the diversity of Washington Heights. In reality, Washington Heights is historically a Dominican community and nearly half of the residents of Washington Heights are Dominican. Moreover, many Dominican people identify as Black Latinx, and as Haywood adds, much of Dominican culture has its roots in the African diaspora.

Haywood then gives historical context about why a lot of Afro-Latinx folks encounter discrimination within the Latinx community, and it goes back to European colonization and slavery, which touted that phenotypic features of white European people–fair skin, straight hair, narrow nose, or light eyes–are superior and should be privileged over Afro-centric features. This has led over many years to dark-skinned people lightening their skin with skin lightening creams and using other methods to alter their bodies, and this deeply toxic systemic colorism has manifested over the years in cinema with dark-skinned BIPOC folks being passed over for crucial roles and light-skinned BIPOC folks getting those roles. A key example of this is the film West Side Story. Natalie Wood was a white actress playing the leading role, a Puerto Rican woman named Maria. Rita Moreno, who is actually Puerto Rican, plays Anita, a supporting role. Another example is when Zoe Saldana, a light-skinned Black actress, had to darken her skin to play Nina Simone in the 2016 biographical film Nina. These are just a few examples though. Haywood also points out (which I didn’t know until reading her piece) that the film omits a scene in the original stage play in which Nina’s father expresses prejudice against her boyfriend Benny because he is Black. Omitting this scene left out room for a discussion around the complicated anti-Blackness within Latino families. Haywood also points out that John M. Chu, who directed the film, did the same thing when he directed Crazy Rich Asians; Singapore is more racially diverse than the film depicts it to be, and in the movie most of the East Asian actors in leading roles are lighter-skinned. At the end of her piece, Haywood concludes that while she was glad to see the music, culture and food of Latinx communities being well represented, she was disappointed that the film did not take the opportunity it had to represent Afro-Latinx folks within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, and that more needs to be done particularly in the wake of more recent awareness of anti-Blackness. Monica Castillo, in a review of the film for NPR, recognizes that while she loved the film and resonated strongly with the characters, she is a white Latina and hasn’t experienced the same kind of erasure that Afro Latinx and Indigenous folks have faced, and recognizes that this erasure of Afro Latinx folks has been going on for far too long and should be better addressed.

Right after the backlash, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized, explaining that he wrote In the Heights because he didn’t see Latinx folks like himself being represented on screen, but he had also been listening to people and keeping up with conversations around the lack of Afro-Latinx representation in the film. He apologized to everyone on Twitter and thanked everyone for having these conversations about the film’s colorism, and promised to keep learning and doing better in his future projects to honor the diversity of the Latinx community. The full apology can be found in this NPR article.

While I can’t say much more on this topic, like Lin-Manuel Miranda I have learned a lot from the conversations around colorism in In the Heights, and I am also going to keep learning from these conversations. Lin’s sensitivity and awareness of the issue of colorism, and his willingness to do better, also encouraged me as someone who is interested in social justice conversations and is always figuring out how I can do better.

Here is the In the Heights trailer:

In the Heights. 2021. Directed by Jon M. Chu. Based on the stage musical of the same name by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes. Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.

Book Review: Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind by Daisaku Ikeda and Stuart Rees

September 26, 2019

Categories: books

I just finished this amazing dialogue between Soka Gakkai International president Daisaku Ikeda and Stuart Rees, who is the former director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Sydney. This dialogue was published just last year and we need dialogues like it more than ever.

I needed to read this dialogue because there is so much happening in the world. The trade war between the U.S. and China, Britain threatening to leave the E.U. and recent mass shootings, as well as the damage that has been done to the planet and is just getting worse. But then I read Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind, and I can honestly say how empowered I feel to be part of a movement to foster a more just and peaceful society. What I love about this dialogue is that Professor Rees and President Ikeda go deeper than the surface-level definition of peace, which usually means no more war. Because, as Ikeda and Rees agree upon, the discussion around peace and justice is more complicated than just stopping wars. It involves bringing peace and justice studies into our schools’ curriculums, finding ways to take care of the planet and giving voices to marginalized individuals. They also emphasize in the dialogue the need for more discussion around the history of settler colonial countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, where Indigenous populations faced genocide and greed at the hands of white European settlers. Climate justice should involve Indigenous voices because this was their land first. Indigenous communities still face a ton of injustice today at the hands of the state, and while the communities of persons have fought so hard and so long for their sovereignty to the land’s resources, and while individuals in the U.S. and Canadian and Australian governments have spoken out against this injustice, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

That is the thing, I guess, about social justice. You have to keep talking about it. It’s not something you talk about and then all the problems of the world are gone. And more people are aware of this reality. In Nichiren Buddhism, if you want to understand what is happening in the present, you need to look at the past, and in order to understand what will happen in the future, you need to look at the present. Individuals create karma throughout their lives, and so this collective karma that we have with settler colonialism, global warming, the trade war, gun violence, injustice against immigrants and poverty, is because certain individuals created the cause of abusing their power and after many years, the effects have shown themselves in ugly ways. Which is why art is so important. It’s why I painted a picture of an elephant and a polar bear standing on melting polar ice caps and sweating while the sun, which has a hole in its ozone layer, beats down on them. I was angry with the status quo and wanted to do something about it, and watching how Greta Thunberg fought hard to address climate change showed me that even as an introverted person, I can still speak up about these issues through creative means. Rees, in the dialogue, says that “artists break down the walls of habitual practice and promote visions of world citizenship. In this way, they touch the hearts and minds of so many people.” (p. 59 of Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind) As an artist, I need to speak out. And as a human, I need to be willing to have the tough conversations. I need to also use my art and my pen to create art that will move the human spirit, inspire a dialogue about the tough stuff.

Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind: Conversations on the Path of Nonviolence. Stuart Rees and Daisaku Ikeda. 2018. 218 pp.

Why Everyone Should See Loving At Least Once

April 18, 2019

Categories: movies

I just got done with the film Loving. I had been meaning to see it when it came out three years ago, but I never got around to it. Fortunately, last weekend I went on a binge with movie rentals from the library, and Loving was on the shelves, so I picked it up.

I am so incredibly glad I saw this film, because honestly I can’t really remember if I studied it in my U.S. history classes in school, or even my Africana Studies courses in college. We often learn about Brown vs. Board of Education and Plessy vs. Ferguson, but until Loving came out, this was my first time hearing about the ruling. Loving vs. Virginia (1967) ruled that people couldn’t discriminate against interracial couples, and in June (the same month as LGBT Pride month) Loving Day is recognized for transforming the way society viewed marriage equality.

The film Loving is based on the true story of Richard, a white man, and his Black-Native American wife Mildred, who lived in a rural community of Virginia called Central Point and are expecting their first child. They get married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., and begin raising their family; Richard is also planning the house he is building for him and Mildred. They live their normal lives as an average couple, until one night police officers brutally arrest them and lock them up in jail for living with each other. This takes an emotional toll on the couple, and when they are finally let free, they are told that they can either divorce or leave the state of Virginia. They decide to leave for a new life in Washington, D.C. Mildred goes into labor and tells Richard she wants his mother back in Central Point to deliver the baby. When they go back, he returns to the same comments from both white and Black people in the community: that he got Mildred in trouble simply for marrying her at a time when the Racial Integrity Act made it illegal for any person of color to marry a white person. Nevertheless, his mom helps Mildred deliver the baby, but then the couple gets arrested yet again and are released a second and final time after the lawyer tells the judge he told them he could return to Virginia even after they were told before that they couldn’t come back to Virginia. Frustrated with the wider problem of systemic racism and inspired by watching the Civil Rights movement in D.C., Mildred writes to John F. Kennedy about the discrimination she and Richard faced. John F. Kennedy refers her to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and lawyers Bernard Cohen and Phil Hirschkop help them get their case to the Supreme Court. At first, Richard doesn’t agree with Mildred that they should make their case public, but after seeing how much happier his wife is, he decides that it is all for the best and supports the case going to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, seven years after the case won, Richard was killed by a drunk driver. His wife continued to live in the house Richard built for her until her death in 2008.

What really captivated me most about this film was its use of silence and lack of dialogue. I had to learn more about the film after watching it simply because unlike many films about Supreme Court cases where someone is running around, there is a lot of dialogue and debate, and at least one person has to be the loudest in the room, Loving shows that even the most introverted people can speak the loudest through their deeds behind the scenes. Colin Firth (yes, the Colin Firth. I squealed when I saw him listed as one of the producers of the film!) said that what makes this film about racism so unique is that the film doesn’t feature a lot of violence, explosions or high-stakes Jim Crow racism, but instead uses the long periods of non-verbal expression to build a “slow-burning menace” throughout the film. And don’t get me wrong; I love dialogue in films, and during the Civil Rights movement, silence was never going to protect you in the long run if you were a Black person during that rough time. But Jeff Nichols specifically wanted to make this film about the impact of the case on Richard and Mildred’s lives instead of depicting the entirety of the ruling. Indeed, I think it was much more effective to focus on their marriage rather than witnessing a mostly-white jury talking about their marriage, and also to make use of the silences rather than fill them with dialogue. Otherwise, it would have been like any movie with a huge court case scene. We don’t really get to gain insight into the individuals’ thought processes because the court is speaking for them, so I really like how Jeff wanted to focus on the marriage of Richard and Mildred so that we could appreciate these precious moments of quiet intimacy between them. Richard and Mildred speak a language of their own through their facial expressions, their kisses, their embraces, and even though they don’t show the actual court ruling going down, we see how these scenes just between Richard and Mildred, and the moments with their kids, cannot be separated from its political and social context.

As a quiet person who has a passion to fight for climate change, racial justice or LGBTQ+ rights, seeing this film taught me that even if you are shy and/or introverted, you can still shake the world, like Gandhi said. Mildred and Richard were in real life quiet people, and Jeff wanted to truly depict what life was like for these two individuals, so he cast actors who both looked like the people involved in the case and who could also embody these people and stay true to their stories. I really was hoping Ruth Negga would win an Oscar for her role in this film because she speaks volumes through her worn, quiet expression throughout the film. When we see Joel play Richard, we get a profound sense of how hard his feelings are to describe in words. His expression is one of constant thought, and as Nick Kroll, who plays Bernard “Bernie” Cohen, noted that he has more lines than Richard even though he isn’t the main person in the forefront of the story. This is actually one of the few films I have seen that actually pays tribute to the introverts who made a difference in the Civil Rights struggle. We hear about Rosa Parks, but that’s really about it. We need to hear more about those people in the movement who weren’t always in the demonstrations, who were in their rural communities just living their lives. Richard and Mildred did a lot for the Civil Rights movement simply by living their lives as a married couple at a time when racial integration was still seen as taboo. And they weren’t super extroverted people. Even writing to the president or your Congress representatives can make a huge difference (especially nowadays, in a world that’s just going to keep becoming more technologically advanced day by day), and when Mildred first initiated the conversation with President Kennedy, it led to more opportunities for the couple to have their voices heard.

The music score also works really well with the film’s effective use of non-verbal communication. The strings play drone notes for the most part, and it reminded me of the film score for Arrival, the theme of which are just a few long notes played over and over again, but getting louder each time. The film is about a female researcher who is trying to cope with the death of her daughter and communicates with extraterrestrials that seem threatening to humankind, and it’s really a film about how we need to have face to face dialogue so that people can develop trust in one another. The music for Arrival is somber and goes along well with the film’s overall serious thought-provoking subject matter. Similarly, the use of largo (when a piece is played slow and long) for the score in Loving expresses the deep thought the film puts you in. This film makes you think, especially because the silences throughout the film allow for such deep thought. The music also didn’t play much during many of the dialogues, similar to A Ghost Story, which didn’t need a big orchestral film score because it was a story about reflecting on the loss of a loved one, so viewers needed the silent space just to have that time to reflect.

One scene that really stuck with me is when Richard comes home after drinking with his buddies. Richard is the only white person sitting with his friends, who are all Black. While drunk, one of the guys jokes that Richard thinks he’s Black just because he hangs out with Black people all the time, and that he should divorce Mildred so that they won’t get followed everywhere anymore. But then Richard comes home and quietly sits with Mildred on the edge of the bed, and thinking about what he said at the bar about agreeing to divorce Mildred, he slowly breaks down into tears, and Mildred gently wraps her arms around him. He tells her through his tears that he is going to care for her even in a tumultuous time. While I didn’t cry through the film, this one scene almost got me choked up because it is just so real and raw to see Richard, who is normally quiet and stoic-looking, convey his pain and frustration through tears. This incredibly intimate moment shows how incredibly important this case was, and how messed-up it would be if Richard and Mildred Loving had never fallen in love or gotten married, or even took their case to the Supreme Court. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga both brought this incredibly mature and self-aware humanity to such profound roles, and it is truly moving to see them recreate this sensitive humanity so naturally. Neither Mildred nor Richard wanted to be considered heroes even though their case made the Supreme Court, and I am so glad Jeff Nichols wanted to stay true to this. We see several reporters gather around Richard and Mildred when they are walking down the street, and although Mildred is slightly okay with answering the reporters’ questions, Richard is not as interested, and so he leads him and her away from the conundrum.

The film made me think a lot about the Ad Council’s Love Has No Labels campaign, and how we take those commercials for granted, when it’s really the Loving vs. Virginia case that launched the discussion on embracing different expressions of love even if it happened a few decades ago. Even though people are more progressive now, there are still people who don’t like interracial marriage, LGBTQ+ marriage or any marriage that seems to not conform with the white heteronormative definition of marriage. While this film specifically delves into the institution of race-based discrimination against interracial couples, it made me think about how important this case was for LGBTQ+ people and the legalization of same-sex marriage. Richard and Mildred’s narrative is something that we should study more in schools. The mere words of this post simply cannot convey how truly incredible this film was.

Loving. 2016. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements.

Movie Review: Fruitvale Station

June 12, 2019

Disclaimer: this post cannot do justice to what happened to Oscar Grant or any unarmed Black or Brown person who has been murdered at the hands of police.

I just finished watching the 2013 film Fruitvale Station. If you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend it (5/23/21 edits: I also rewatched the trailer and just remembered that Forest Whitaker produced it. He’s one of my favorite actors. Also I realized there’s a reason Billie Eilish keeps saying in each of her Vanity Fair interviews that Fruitvale Station is her favorite movie, and it wasn’t until I saw the film that I appreciated this point).

It is a powerful drama based on the true account of the late Oscar Grant, a 22 year old Black man who died at the hands of a white police officer on New Year’s Day in 2009. Before seeing Fruitvale Station, I saw the film Black Panther. For that film, Michael B. Jordan starred opposite of Chadwick Boseman in a powerful performance, and Ryan Coogler directed the film, with Ludwig Goransson producing the score for the film. Black Panther is an uplifting movie, and it’s a film that, while political in the sense that it’s one of the few superhero movies that features an all-Black cast, is really a feel-good movie that I left feeling empowered and happy watching. I also remember Melonie Diaz from the comedy Be Kind, Rewind. In Fruitvale Station her performance almost moved me to tears.

Fruitvale Station will stick with me for a pretty long time (which it should do, because discussions about social injustice are hard to talk about). It shows how it’s not easy to blame all white people or all Black people for racism. Instead, it shows how crucial it is to know the full story, because it’s individuals that cause disharmony, not an entire group of people. For instance, there’s a scene where Sophina, Oscar’s girlfriend, and Oscar are partying with their friends on the subway to San Francisco to celebrate New Year’s. When they don’t get back in time, every passenger on the train-white, Black, Latinx, Asian, gay, straight–all unite together in saying “Happy New Year” when midnight strikes. Oscar doesn’t hate white people even though he lives in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood, and even strikes up conversations with white individuals, particularly a young woman named Katie and a married man whose wife is pregnant. Oscar asks a shop-owner to let in Sophina and her friend so they can use the bathroom, and the store owner, at first refusing, lets them in to use the bathroom. When a pregnant lady and her husband come up and the lady has to pee, too, Oscar asks the store owner if he can let her in, too. While waiting for his wife, the guy, Peter, chats with Oscar about how he was out of work for a while and now runs his own web design business. When she’s finished, they part ways like they were old pals. Moments like these, when Oscar is talking with these individuals, when Oscar is spending time with his family before going onto the train, shows how devastating the impact Oscar’s murder had on his loved ones and on people he just met.

This film is also crucial because it shows the psychological toll that police brutality has had on not just communities of individuals, but on individuals themselves. Even just a few seconds after shooting Oscar, the police officer realizes, too late, the consequences of his actions. It reminds me of the film Detroit, which didn’t show the Civil Rights movement itself, but a scene that belongs in a horror movie (I would even argue that Fruitvale Station and Detroit count as horror movies because they show the horrors of racism). One of the cops gets in trouble because he basically just shoots at just about every Black person coming home from getting groceries or just going about their daily lives. The film also shows how the business of police brutality messes up officers of color, particularly Black police officers faced with confronting Black individuals accused of wrongdoing. Implicit bias is real, and the guy who started the fight with Oscar ended up staying on the subway and got off scot-free, while Oscar and his friends didn’t because the police didn’t actually see the guy initiating the fight. This guy was an old inmate of Oscar’s and fought with him on numerous occasions, and the fact that he didn’t get in trouble makes me so mad.

Then again, this film brings up a lot of complicated discussions about racism and police brutality. A lot of people were divided about the Black Lives Matter movement because they assumed that it said that only the lives of Black individuals mattered. However, this is not what the Black Lives Matter movement was trying to say. As the film shows, yes, we know, it’s a given, everyone matters, and it’s also important to understand that some lives are given less social value than others. This is why it’s important for us to talk about uncomfortable topics like racial injustice because it’s not just Black people’s problem, it’s our entire nation’s problem and always has been. All lives matter, and also, don’t forget Black lives in that equation. White, Black, Brown, whatever our race, it’s hard to not talk about it because we live a racial reality every day. Because of our nation’s history of dividing people up by how others perceive them, we have to deal with this messy discussion around race and race-based prejudice. The only way we’re going to come to terms with these tough issues like police brutality against unarmed Black citizens is if we just talk about it and also educate ourselves on racism if we haven’t done so already. Fruitvale Station opens up this discussion and forces us to reckon with its festering historical wounds of slavery and Jim Crow, but they’re wounds that frank unabashed discussions can heal, even if it’s inch by inch.

Malcolm and Marie, Misogynoir and Abuse

When I wrote my review for Malcolm and Marie, I was gushing about the film, talking about how great the acting was and everything. But then I read more reviews about the film, and a lot of the reviews pointed out that the film depicts abuse, not a genuine loving relationship. Gloria Oladipo breaks down the abuse in the film in her film review “‘Malcolm and Marie’ is a Voyeuristic Exercise in Emotional Abuse and Misogynoir.” At the beginning of the piece Oladipo makes the point that Sam Levinson, the White director of the film, uses Black women’s trauma to shock and provoke audiences. She gives many examples in the film in which this occurs. While Malcolm is boasting about how successful his movie is and how the critics of his movie don’t know what they’re talking about, Marie is making him macaroni and cheese without saying a word. He doesn’t thank her for the macaroni and cheese and pushes her to tell him why she’s so sullen and won’t talk to him. She then tells him that he didn’t thank her in his awards speech, which Oladipo explains is problematic because as the movie continues, we learn about Marie’s struggles with drug addiction and recovery and that she is the reason he became so successful, because he based his character’s trauma off of Marie’s trauma without thinking about how doing this would affect her psychologically and emotionally. Malcolm hasn’t had to deal with the trauma Marie has; he gets to relax at the end of the day and eat her macaroni and cheese while she has to relive that trauma every day.

Oladipo also points out that Malcolm insults Marie from the very beginning of the film. He insults her throughout the movie, making insidious jabs at her struggles with mental illness, her insecurities, that she didn’t get as many acting and film opportunities as he did. He also brings up his past girlfriends to her to make her further feel bad about herself and says they, not her, deserve his thanks and his attention. When Marie tries to challenge Malcolm by pointing out his weaknesses, his ego, his superficiality when it comes to his “love” for her, he gets extremely defensive and lashes out at her to make him feel better about himself. He doesn’t care about her feelings, he doesn’t want to put himself in her shoes, he just wants to feel justified in putting her down.

Oladipo breaks down one key scene in the film; when Malcolm and Marie are on the couch, Malcolm tells her she shouldn’t have quit acting, but Marie makes the valid point that he wasn’t really there to support her in her ambitions the same way she has supported him all this time. He once again tries to win at an argument that he started in the first place by bringing up her suicide attempt and addiction, and this breaks her down in tears. Each time she tries to bring him down to earth and remind him of his ego, his pride, he tears her down, arguing that he can hurt her far more than she can hurt him. He also makes it seem like she had nothing to do with his commercial success as a filmmaker, when in fact, the protagonist of his movie, Imani, is based off of Marie and has the same struggles with mental health and trauma that she does. While Oladipo acknowledges that Marie has some insults of her own to deliver to Malcolm, her insults don’t cut as deeply as Malcolm’s insults towards her. I agree, because it seems Marie is giving Malcolm the opportunity to reflect on his ego and his inflated sense of self-importance, but he doesn’t appreciate this about her and instead sees it as a personal attack.

I don’t really even want to list all of the other cruel stuff that Malcolm says to Marie because after reading Oladipo’s piece, I am pretty sickened just thinking about all the abuse Malcolm put Marie through in that film. I should have listened to the little voice in the back of my head while watching the movie that said, “Hey, you know this isn’t a loving relationship right? You know it’s painful and draining to watch this narcissistic man tear this woman down.” Oladipo reminded me that the abuse Marie faced at the hands of Malcolm is not an isolated incident, and it’s a reality for many Black women, who face high rates of intimate partner violence, rape and homicide. According to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy and Research, “in addition to physical violence, perpetrators [of domestic violence] often use psychological, verbal, and economic abuse to control, monitor, or threaten intimate partners (Buzawa and Buzawa 2013; Stark 2012). Breiding et al. (2014) estimate that 47.1 percent of all women in the United States experience psychological aggression by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetimes, including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control (which includes behaviors intended to monitor, control, or threaten an intimate partner). Black women experience substantially higher rates of psychological aggression (53.8 percent) than women overall (Breiding et al. 2014).”(“The Status of Black Women”, p. 142) Now when I think of that last scene in Malcolm and Marie, where Malcolm goes looking for Marie and then finds her on top of the hill and hugs her, I don’t think I’ll look at it the same way again because as Oladipo points out, that wasn’t a happy ending. He most likely would probably continue to heap abuse on her well after the movie was over.

I also wanted to learn more about the misogynoir that’s depicted in the film. According to a piece titled “What is Misogynoir,” misogynoir is a specific type of sexism rooted in racism against Black women (misogyny + noir- “black”) and there are many ways in which this misogynoir has played out in society. Stereotypes about Black women stem from this misogyny: because of the Strong Black Woman stereotype doctors perceive Black women as having a higher tolerance for pain and thus treat them differently, Black women are viewed as angry when they try to speak up for themselves, Black women are viewed as strong, so many of them feel they are not allowed to show emotion, pain or distress and they often are perceived as being overly sexual even when they are girls. Malcolm tries to portray Marie as this angry, vindictive Black woman who is always tearing him down, but really his view of her is troubling because he’s making it seem like he’s perfectly justified in taking out his anger on her, but if she voices her opinion about his work or his personality flaws, then she’s angry even when she’s really just calling him out on his B.S. He somehow thinks that she will never know what it’s like to work in Hollywood, that she’ll never get the world of acting, but really that’s just his arrogance talking.

I’m actually really glad I read Oladipo’s piece because I myself have not experienced abuse or domestic violence, but now I realize I need to educate myself and to be more careful about celebrating movies that make that kind of abuse look ok. I actually regret lauding the film that highly in my review of it because at first glance, as someone who hadn’t educated myself much on misogynoir or domestic abuse, watching the film seemed harmless, but then when I wrote the review something told me that something was up and I needed to get my facts straight before gushing too much about this movie.