Fire in Freetown

From Auntie Paula.

This is also why I post on Instagram and while the things that inspire us are mainly different, the principle is the same.

Black women don’t have to be your political mules and we don’t exist to fill your feeds with intersectional insight. There are plenty Black women writing books about that. There are plenty Black women on Patreon right now writing about the intersection of class, race and the virus. Go support them and kindly fuck off thinking every Black woman you come across must be rending her clothes and gnashing her teeth for your woke porn.

We are not tour goddamn mules.

I’m sitting on the precipice of something new in me.

There is art in me that wants to be made, although I am still unsure of the medium. The stirring in me is something that wants to be said, needs to be expressed as it comes. However that may be.

I’m letting go of the need to have MY medium, a title I can safely fit into. The one designated space for me to dump all of my creativity and need into.

That apparently, isn’t how this works.

In the meantime my eyes and my heart has been drawn to what’s small and arresting, little universes unfolding unnoticed.

I don’t know where the art is taking me just yet. Hopefully you join me here anyway.

Donald Glover is back in a big way. While debuting new music on SNL, he dropped the video for one of the songs, ‘This Is America.’By Monday morning he was close to 20 million views (a mark he sailed far past by Tuesday) and has dominated Twitter’s trending topics and all our favorite pop culture sources since. The visual itself is laden with shocking violence, religious symbolism,easily haunting visuals and the latest dance trends. But the reception has been largely mixed.After putting out two towering works, Awaken, My Love! and ‘Atlanta’, Donald Glover is still not entirely forgiven for his past sins-something that’s almost entirely his own fault as he has never apologized and still repeats some, in new ways. So as the video climbs it’s way past 50 million views in under a week, the question remains what is it that Childish Gambino is really saying here?There are a few messages and/or critiques that pop out of the visceral display but which ones you see and how you choose to see them depend on how and when you view Donald Glover the person and Childish Gambino the artist. There are two ways we’ve collectively decided to look at this video.You can look at the video and see :a critique of Black coping mechanisms and behavior in the face of violence.
a critique on America’s focus on Black trends/popular culture while violence is occurring
It depends on who you think the perspective of the video was shot from (is this White America cherry picking the focus?)and who it is for. And all of that is skewed by who you know Donald Glover as and what that version of him is most likely to be saying. the entire thing here