A Site For People Who Value Independent Black Women Who Need Equality Without Sameness, along with Interdependence, Reciprocation, and Respect From Those That Love Them In Order To Thrive....
Black American Women have always been feminists. It's just that they were called "having an attitude" instead of "feminists"
Talk about a dream team. Page Six reports that Taraji P. Henson will be the host of BET's Black Girls Rock Awards honoring Issa Rae this August. Held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ, Black Girls Rock is an initiative to empower Black girls to take charge and live their life through the arts. These awards serve as a reminder of just how much they can achieve...
Specifically, 2017's awards will be honoring Issa Rae, creator of HBO's Insecure, which just started airing its second season. Rae will be given the Star Power Award, but many other important women will be receiving honors of their own.
~Refinery29.com
And adding to the Black Girl Magic, Internet Famous Up and Comer Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey will be writing some of Taraji's material for her
Look For Black Girls Rock on BET
Sunday, August 20, 2017
* * * * * From An Taraji P Henson Interview
with Refinery29.com
What do you think is the biggest lesson you learned while working on Hidden Figures?
“Don’t complain about your situation, because it is what it is. The question is: What are you going to do about it? If Katherine Johnson sat around and complained and complained and complained, would we be on the moon? Would we be on our way to Mars?"
"We all need to stop being lazy and pay attention. As a people, with the last administration, we got lazy. We were like: Everything is going good, we’ve got a Black president, LGBT people are getting their rights, it's all good. We got lazy. And then this happened. So when people ask what to do next, I want to say: Wake up, everybody! We’ve got work to do. Pay attention, read, research, figure out what you can do in your own backyard that will make a difference."
"When their father Ernest (Glynn Turman) dies, three estranged siblings Nova (Rutina Wesley), Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) and Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe) must come together to save the failing Louisiana sugar farm they have inherited. With the assistance of their Aunt Violet (Tina Lifford) and her boyfriend "Hollywood" (Omar J. Dorsey), the three struggle through the difficulties of bringing the 800-acre farm back to life, while juggling their previous responsibilities. Season 1 of "Queen Sugar" is adapted from the novel of the same name by Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay and executive produced by Oprah Winfrey."
Ava DuVernay made QUEEN SUGAR more like a movie than a television show. So it might take some folks, who don't love movies like I do, a minute longer than it took me to snuggle up to QUEEN SUGAR. But apparently a lot of people are getting that snuggling done because Rotten Tomatoes have it a 92% rating with the critics.
As for me, the thing I immediately loved about the Bordelons from the outset was the under-story being constructed from the very start.
There are details in this television show that only a black woman would make sure were present. And the story feels so black to me, I'm not sure some white people will get the show at all -- especially not white men.
Because I don't want to give the story away, let me just tell you about where each of the three Bordelon siblings begin their journey
Nova Bordelon is a secure looking insecure pro-black activist journalist who is trying to get an innocent(?) young black kid out of jail before the system destroys him with the help of a white cop boyfriend she's not sure is worth the racial trouble.
Ralph-Angel Bordelon seeks to replace his father and run the family farm. A good-hearted man-child with a son, he is just out of jail making horrendous, good, and bad choices all in the service of trying to prove he IS a man -- at the same time as he seeks being babied by the women of his family, especially his Aunty.
The corporate-ambitious sister, Charlie Bordelon, is the light-skinned trophy wife and manager of a basketball player husband who has just found out her life isn't as perfect as she thought.
These characters manage to be wonderful and aggravating at the same time. That means this character driven story is well done.
Black Male Incarceration
New Black Love
Old Black Love
Black Lives Matter,
Black Male Colorism
Interracial relationships
Ambition
Infideliy
Women's loyalties to one another
Black History
It's all there in the first season of QUEEN SUGAR Season 1is on Hulu now.
I've seen a few one woman acts on stage. And I may have seen a few in documentaries. But I've never seen anything like the mesmerizing performance I just saw given by Aisha Hinds on television as Harriett Tubman.
In this Wednesday Night episode of WGN's UNDERGROUND, Tubman is giving a speech to white abolitionists in Philadelphia.
Tubman doesn't just tell about her life as she's been asked. Furthermore she doesn't just tell of the beatings and horrors. She tells about what happened in her life and what some specific episodes in her life taught her about what freedom means. In the second half of speech, she talks about the immediate future, about courage, about her faith in God leading her forward She also talks about the willingness to give up her life, if God would have it be so, while also planning to live a long life.
As I've said before, one of my favorite things about slave stories written by black people lately is that they do not leave the white women out. Miss Anne's, or this case Miss Susan's, hand is reported as having been on the whip repeatedly and for sport.
Fictionalized account or not, this should be required watching in every school and every church in America --especially white churches in America.
By the time Hinds as Harriett is done, she has even reached forward out of history to take a swipe at Donald Trump and his "Make America Great Again" slogan.
Aisha Hinds gave an incredible performance, an award winning performance. I'm certain she'll win awards for this episode of UNDERGROUND. It's just a matter of how many. As the show ended, I couldn't help but think of Viola Davis' Oscar Speech, the one where she said all black woman lacked in Hollywood was opportunity.
On Opportunity
If a black man named John Legend hadn't taken his relatively new found power and used it to tell our own black story of slavery, hadn't put his power and money into UNDERGROUND, we never would have gotten to see the performance.
And if John Legend wasn't a feminist, you bet your bottom dollar that there wouldn't have been a push to have Harriet Tubman, a black woman, telling us who she was an entire episode and what attitude one should always have when an enemy is coming for you.
This episode of UNDERGROUND was so outstanding, it got it's own article in the New York Times. Aisha Hinds was interviewed for the article. I giggled a little bit when I read the episode was called HARRIET TUBMAN'S TED TALK before the episode was even written.
Here's a link to Season 1 of UNDERGROUND on DVD. The story of the MACON 7 begins here. From this point, if you're not interested in starting UNDERGROUND, you should be able search and find and buy the individual HARRIET TUBMAN episode called MINTY (SEASON 2, EPISODE 6) for $2 to $3. http://amzn.to/2ovIIyh * * * * *
Olivia Pope just got a lot busier. Kerry Washington is currently developing her own drama with ABC: Patrol, which the Emmy nominee will executive produce. Although she might be best known for her role in Scandal, Washington made her debut as an executive producer ...[last year] with HBO’s Confirmation, which she also starred in.
Patrol will follow four female officers—former classmates at the police academy—who re-unite “after a high-stakes, traumatic secret returns to haunt them,” according to Variety. (Would it be an ABC show without a dark secret?) As with Confirmation, Washington will produce Patrol under the banner of her fledgling production company, Simpson Street, Variety reports.
UPDATE: FIRST EPISODE IS FREE ON AMAZON If the talent they've collected for this mini-series is any indication, SHOTS FIRED should be excellent Feeling Rebloggy
The 10-episode limited series by Gina Prince Bythewood (Love and Basketball, Beyond The Lights) centers on the story of two racially charged murders.
The series is first introduced with the slaying of a white college student, killed at the hands of an African-American police officer.
As the investigation of the case unfolds, a second murder case is introduced — that of a black teenage boy at the hands of a white police officer. It's a case that was never investigated.
The cases are investigated by Ashe Akino (Sanaa Lathan), an expert investigator, and Preston Terry (Stephan James), a special prosecutor sent to the town by the Department of Justice...
How Fox’s 'Shots Fired' Is a "Mirror of America"
Read More on how the Trayvon Martin case inspired Gina and her husband Reggie to create SHOTS FIRED
In addition to Bythewood herself, Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou) is directing an episode, Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs,Philadelphia, Manchurian Candidate) Malcom D Lee (The Best Man movies)
Millicent Shelton
Millicent Shelton, recently having directed episodes of ROSEWOOD and SCANDAL, will direct the final episode.
“Do you know if Trump Tower was wiretapped?” the interviewer asks Conway in the video above.
In response, Trump’s counselor says, without evidence:
“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately. There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, through their — certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways, and microwaves that turn into cameras, etc., so we know that that is just a fact of modern life.”
Oooh these twit-wits of Chump's. Will it never stop? Woman, if I was living in another country, I'd be laughing so hard I'd be peeing on myself every time I thought about this.
We're supposed to believe Obama hacked a microwave to spy on Chump, then did absolutely nothing with the information but let Chump win. Yeah. Okay.
KELLYANNE'S THOUGHT PROCESS
Chump tweets something else stupid
Open mouth
Defend him
Think Later
Insert Foot, Leg, and Ass into own mouth
Look even dumber than Chump, be a human deflection
BWAAAAAAA HA HA HA
By the way, this is what happens when a extra stupid white racist goes crazy. Every time something makes this Alt-Right New KKK Wanna-Be Grand Dragon uncomfortable in the slightest way, the most competent black person Chump can think of comes to mind as "the" [ n-word ] that's doing him in.
And you know it's pure racism too.
Hillary was his arch-nemesis. But it's Obama he accuses of wiretapping, revving up the protesters, energizing the townhall meetings against him. I bet Chump sees Obama's face in his nightmares every night.
And I'll bet Obama smiles knowing Chump's driving himself insane with his own racism. Or maybe he's not that petty. But I promise you I would be.
I would send Cheeto Satan a tweet every night that said, "BWAAAAAAA HA HA HA" I pay somebody else to do it, every single night. Hell, if Obama would pose for a picture with me, I'd do it every night for 7 months (the length of time I think it'll take for Trump to get bored with NOT being King and go home)
As expected, Viola Davis won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in “Fences.” As soon as she took the stage, everyone knew we were in for a heck of a speech.
“You know, there is one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered and that’s the graveyard,” a teary-eyed Davis began.
“People ask me all the time — what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories — the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost.”
“I became an artist and thank God I did,” she continued “because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.”
After working with Jessica Williams in his 2015 film People, Place, Things, writer/director Jim Strouse (of Grace is Gone, The Winning Season) recruited her for a lead role and wrote an entire film around her. The Incredible Jessica James stars Jessica Williams as a struggling playwright living in New York City, dealing with a break up. Strouse makes light, amusing, charming films that have fun stories based on real situations. The Incredible Jessica James is no exception, and might just be Jim's best film to date. It's full of so much life and passion and love and, most importantly, optimism. In these troubling, tumultuous times, where depression and frustration are all too prevalent, a little bit of refreshing optimism goes a long way.
The Incredible Jessica James also stars Chris O'Dowd as a guy she's introduced to by a mutual friend as a rebound from her past relationship. The relationship aspect of the film isn't very deep, there isn't a great amount of introspection or any major revelations, except to say that we should stop pushing away people that make us happy. Some of the film deals with how we're caught up in our minds, and how emotions (and nostalgia) push us to act a certain way rather than to stay true to what our heart is really telling us. The film also focuses on passion and having a love for what you do, even if it's not exactly successful. In the case of Jessica James, that's being a playwright, but it's also an obvious reference to filmmakers and making films.
A little birdie told me they saw Lee Daniel's STAR, which has a white woman lead, is a anti-black hot mess. I hear it even features an angry black woman that Queen Latifah talks down to regularly.
I'm not going to judge the show because I haven't seen it.
What I have seen is Daniels' body of anti-black-woman work. That means, it's time for a partial repost... since some black and brown folk appear to be surprised by the Daniels' anti-black content.
FROM SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER IF YOU SEE UNCLE RUCKUS COMING
Despite my shameful addictions [to Scandal] I'm still gonna talk trash about "Empire," "The Butler" and especially what Daniels did to the book "Push" when he made it into "Precious" and Uncle Lee Daniels himself.
Hell, I'd watch "Once Upon A Time" before I'd watch "Empire." And that's saying something because I can't stand "Once Upon A Time When All The World Was White."
Meanwhile Just outside of the arbitrary lines drawn to carve out Africa
"Once Upon A Time" has an ensemble cast the size of a football team but, unlike a football team, it's whiter than the 2015 Oscars. Somehow the producers at OUAT don't think fictional fairy tale characters can be black without ruining the story. (How many bible story people including Egyptian Kings have been white in Hollywood again?)
The first few episodes of "Once Upon A Time When All Was White With The World" started out with one black person, as a bad guy, that showed up for 2 minutes each episode. I wasn't even sure that the darkish-skinned actor considers himself a "Black American" But the thing that really offended me is what happened to the show's first black female character
Presenting Cinderella's Black Fairy Godmother. (Get out your stopwatch)
Black Fairy God Mama died in less than a minute, way less. And I'm not sure you could tell she was black the entire time she was on screen. (I was steaming mad for another 3 episodes before I realized she really wasn't coming back.)
Fairy Godmother In case you blinked
Rumor has it other black characters came and went quickly on "Once Upon A Time"---including Rapunzel with a really long weave (I'm not even kidding). Despite all this, I recently found myself watching a few minutes, on a lark, after a 4 year boycott. The first thing I see is "Mulan," Disney's Asian female warrior character.
'So far so good,' I thought to myself, 'This episiode isn't yet another snow white episode.'
I never saw "Mulan" but I saw the previews. I know Disney's Mulan was a good Asian girl that triumphs over adversity because of her pure heart by the end of the movie because...ya know...it's Disney. That's the formula. Yet 20 minutes into "Once Upon A Time" and it's clear Mulan has lost her way, has become a cynical thief in need of a redheaded white chick for a savior.
By the time 22 minutes had passed the television was off. However, I'd watch the mess that is "Once Upon A Time" before I'll watch freaking "Empire" Hell, I'll send money to get the "Once Upon A Time" DVD before I'll watch freaking "Empire."
I won't watch "Empire" because I don't want him putting and subtle anti-black ideas in my head. And I'm going to be careful around anything Daniels produced, created, or directed because I'm pretty sure Lee Daniels doesn't like black people too much. And I'm a little more sure he despises black women (in more ways than one). He might have a mixed-race-people fetish too.
And I promise you the feeling is mutual from here if he doesn't like black folk. Because I can't stand him either.
Part of me almost wishes Uncle Lee Daniels-es of this world were more like Uncle Ruckus. You can see Uncle Ruckus a mile off and you know not to listen to what he's spouting.
So let me count the anti-black ways of Lee Daniels "PRECIOUS"
I think I hated "Precious," the movie when first saw it. And that's when I thought it was a FUBU movie. I hadn't quite made up my mind if I hated it or not when I found out the white folks loved it.
So I watched sections of it again and thought maybe I was having an respectability-politics-allergic reaction. Then I somebody gave me the book, "Push," which is the basis for the movie. And I found that I loved Precious when she was in the book "Push" while I wanted to slap her half the time during the movie.
It didn't take much to figure out what Daniels had done to give "Precious" white appeal.
PRECIOUS CAST
On creating white appeal in "Precious," "The Butler," and "Empire" To be continued at the link
We may have missed it on TV ONE but going to be on the look out for this film. I can't wait to see it. It's gotta be available for rent on Netflix or Amazon or Itunes SOME TIME.
I think I'm going to promise myself to make it to a film festival in 2017. That's where new black and brown talent can be seen.
Jean of Jones stars Taylour Paige, Sherri Shepherd, Gloria Reuben, Erica Ash, Michelle Hurst, Mamoudou Athie, and Francois Arnaud.
Feeling Rebloggy
In the film, chaos ensues after the estranged patriarch of the Jones family dies on their doorstep. When the paramedic who answers their 911 call tries to win over acerbic Jean Jones, his attempts are disrupted by old conflicts that come to a boil at the funeral.
“Jean” made its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in March of this year, where it received favorable reviews from critics and audiences alike.
Following screenings at top tier festivals like SXSW in March, and the Los Angeles Film Festival last month, TV One has set a fall premiere date (Sunday, October 23 at 7 p.m. ET, with an encore at 9 p.m. ET) for writer/director Stella Meghie’s feature debut, the dramedy “Jean of the Joneses,”
Africans are laughing at the US elections on Twitter.
Allegations of sexual assault, high-level corruption and vote rigging are normally found in less stable countries, but this year's presidential race is testing the resilience of America's electoral system. Nigerians in particular have found the irony of the world's foremost democracy slipping into embarrassing feuds and demagogic threats too hilarious to resist.
Thousands have been picking events apart on Twitter under the hashtag#Nov8AfricanEdition - a reference to the date of the election.
To describe “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s second feature, as a movie about growing up poor, black and gay would be accurate enough...But those classifications are also inadequate, so much as to be downright misleading.
It would be truer to the mood and spirit of this breathtaking film to say that it’s about teaching a child to swim, about cooking a meal for an old friend, about the feeling of sand on skin and the sound of waves on a darkened beach, about first kisses and lingering regrets.
Based on the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, “Moonlight” is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.
The stanzas consist of three chapters in the life of Chiron, played as a wide-eyed boy by Alex Hibbert, as a brooding adolescent by Ashton Sanders and as a mostly grown man by Trevante Rhodes. The nature and meaning of manhood is one of Mr. Jenkins’s chief concerns. How tough are you supposed to be? How cruel? How tender? How brave? And how are you supposed to learn?
~NY TIMES
This movie is getting excellent reviews. I'm looking forward to seeing it as soon as I can. For other women also thinking about seeing this movie, I think a good prequel to watching "Moonlight" might be the documentary, The Mask You Live In available on Netflix. America, and therefore American Masculinity, is the box within which Black American Masculinity is shaped.
“Everybody keeps asking me, ‘Girl, why you ain’t in they movie? You was there. You was down with Ruthless Records right along with them boys,’”
Michel’le Toussaint's intro in her Lifetime Movie on her time associated with the members of N.W.A,
"Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge and Michel’le"
Feeling Rebloggy
"Once Michel’le formally introduces the film, it gets real immediately, going all the way back to when she was a little girl growing up in a neighborhood where police brutality and the physical assault of women surrounded her.
Police brutality and brutality against women are purposely linked. By doing so, it is clear that Michel’le’s story isn’t unique but instead a cycle. When she, as a little girl, proclaims that no man will ever put his hands on her when she grows up, her grandmother, whom she calls Meme (played quite ably by Donna Biscoe), essentially tells her that black men hitting black women is just how things are. As lofty as it may seem, Surviving Compton aims to raise awareness of that cycle without ever sacrificing the core story...."
And now people are pretending not to know Dr. Dre beat that women when he's said he did it. The reason a male public figure like him gives a public half-ass apology to a woman he's beaten is because he was trapped into doing so. The thing that made Dr. Dre's I-was-young-then apology even more worthless --beyond the misgynor lyrics he and Ice Cube defended when the misgynoir reflected in their lyrics-- was the fact that he erased Michel'le from that movie Straight Outta Compton
But Michel'le didn't forget Dr. Dre in her movie Surviving Compton. And Dr. Dre tried to stop the movie from airing and for "good reason" apparently. When the movie showed Dr. Dre beating Michel'le in the movie, apparently this violence became more real because people started tearing Dr. Dre apart on Twitter.
“I’ve been talking about my abuse for many, many years, but it has not gotten any ears until now,” Michel’le told the Times. Well Lifetime must have been listening and turned the spotlight all the way up on her, and we may all be the better for it. Surviving Compton, directed by Janice Cooke, a veteran TV director and producer and written by Dianne Houston, a Howard alum who comes from theatre, is much more entertaining and deeper than most would expect. It has real gravitas. Michel’le narrates the film and even pops into its narrative from time to time, giving it an air of both herstory and a cautionary tale..."
The film largely echoes Michel’le’s accounts to me, though she never went to police with her allegations – unlike other women including television host Dee Barnes and Lisa Johnson, the mother of three of Dre’s children who alleged he beat her many times, including while she was pregnant. (Dre pled no contest to beating Barnes, and received probation, while Johnson was granted a restraining order against him. A Ruthless rapper named Tairrie B also maintains that Dre beat her.)"
[Yesterday was] the 50th anniversary of the show that taught us to “boldly go where no one has gone before,” Star Trek. Star Trek was not only awesome, but ground breaking with its multicultural cast.
Everyone knows about the fabulous Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura and Zoe Saldana who played Uhura in the recent movie. But did you know these Black actresses also appeared on the Star Trek shows and movies?
On September 8, 1966, exactly 50 years ago today, the very first episode ofStar Trek aired on television. More than just science fiction, it dared to imagine a future for humanity where it had moved past war, inequality, and poverty, replacing them with tolerance, exploration, and hope....
Star Trek has had many incarnations over the years—there have been six television shows, 726 total episodes, 13 movies, and one reboot—but its primary mission has stayed the same. The result is a series that won countless awards (31 Emmys!) but has also fostered a massive fandom that includes actors, politicians, and more....President Barack Obama is a fan.
On-screen, it helped popularize diversity in popular entertainment. It made all its viewers feel included and inspired.
A beautiful example is Leslie Jones telling the story of seeing Whoopi Goldberg on television for the first time and being so thrilled to see someone who looked like her.
And that connects back to Goldberg, when she saw Uhura on Star Trek at age nine. “I looked at it and I went screaming through the house,” she said, “‘Come here, mom, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.”
(This quote is from a Whoopi that still knew she was black and that all black people hadn't made it yet. This version of Whoopi Goldberg seems long gone.)
