gorrilla glue v. godzilla glue; who you got?

the duolingo owl has had my family for 3 years, please, por favor, s'il te plait, bitte, help us

• shout out lauren, q, kim, dani, and james for coming through to talk with me about writer’s rooms and building community with ego death production co + the sjv group ✨

• shout out iva’s bakery in bushwick/ridgewood, your tres leches cake is fire 🍰

• no shout out to cuomo opening up indoor dining on love and capitalism day; congrats on that next spike buddy 😑

• shout out the black men can’t jump in hollywood podcast for having me on to talk judas and the black messiah, big up james, jon, and jerah, we go baaaack ✊🏾

• shout out wandavision and jac schaeffer…by god y’all really doing it 📺

• after much deliberation, i decided to release the rough cut of #, the short film about the cycle of microaggressions and macroviolence that black people have to navigate every day that often feels like a time loop. it was shot by quincy ledbetter and directed and produced by michelle thomas. i started crowdfunding for this about four and a half years ago and truth be told i was a much worse artist and writer back then, but i had the research and the ideas under me. that being said, i'm very proud of the work that my team did and you can see it here or on my website 📽

• shout out to my wonderful partner maria, being my rock this last week and for a wonderful valentines day, te amo mucho 😘

• there are activists on twitter and twitter activists. they are different and not interchangeable. 

• the world has adopted speed and brevity in service of convenience but don't forget to allow yourself to take time to parse through your feelings, sit down, breathe and make your own opinions, not ones that people have made pre-packaged for you.

• weaponizing the language of accountability and community will be the death of the movement. quote me.

• we have to decide what community is. a lot of people pretend community is just knowing a lot of niggas, it’s taking care of one another.

• unfollowing don’t mean you care about anyone but yourself and how you look, it is optical and performative allyship if no action is taken outside of it.

• j edgar hoover, fuck you and your vacuum.

beyond berets: the black panthers as health activists

a reminder that fred hampton and the black panthers main goals were to divest from the greater capitalist machine to create health infrastructure for vulnerable black and poor communities. often times we get told that something is bad without questioning all the angles on it, what motivations might be behind them being labeled as bad, or even basically who is the one telling us that these people are bad. for decades the black panthers have been labeled a terrorist organization, on par with the kkk, at war with the police but at their core they fought for the very things that are desperately needed in the world today: better education, better healthcare infrastructure, the freedom for all political prisoners,  and the need for an international proletariat uprising. trickle-down justice works just as well as trickle-down economics. do ya googles.

rodgers and hammerstein’s cinderella

a perfect film. brandy had her face beat to the gods, whoopi and victor garber had a filipino son and none of us asked a damn question, Whitney was sanging, and george costanza had a musical number. 10/10, masterpiece. oh yeah, bernadette peters did her thing, too.

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last week, i promised to do a deeper dive into judas in the black messiah which i watched a few weeks before its february 12th drop.

i also promised a conversation with loosies guest author, ashley hefnawy, but i did not want to do her a disservice by not dedicating a large chunk of the newsletter to our wonderful conversation look forward to that in the next one!

to be clear, i loved this movie; the performances were amazing and there was beauty in the chaotic moments and in the quiet ones. no film is without its knocks, and there absolutely is a commentary to be made on making anti-capitalist stories in a capitalist structure so pervasive like hollywood, but i'm going to focus on the thoughts that the film triggered within me immediately after viewing it.

as promised here is the link for the black men can't jump (in hollywood) podcast link that i was honored to be able to do with james iii, jon braylock, and jerah milligan. we had so much fun together but i had a lot of other thoughts I wanted to parse through here.

creating anti-capitalist awareness within a capitalist structure

my only creative knock on judas and the black messiah doesn't come from the actual scripting or execution of the movie, but the unfortunate circumstances that forces money to be a key factor in what stories get told. i'm sure the lucas brothers and shaka king tried to get more radical in the movie, in fact as a writer who tries to push the limits and then get edited back by people/studios who don't have a full understanding of black experience, i'm certain of it. it is so hard to make a movie about anti-capitalism when budgets are so extremely inflated, stars are paid millions of dollars, and studios are quick to err on the side of caution especially when it comes to historically “controversial” (however you want to define that) figures.

in the last newsletter, i talked about emily in paris and how challenging the typical white household viewers fragile reality where racism is an individual issue and not a systemic one, everything can be sunshine and rainbows, and an overly sanitized view of love and relationships is par for the course when it comes to hollywood. that is no different here however the envelope was pushed more by judas and the black messiah in a way that i have high hopes will allow more people to depict, talk about, and include more radical notions to push the collective consciousness towards not only a more holistic view of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence but also how capitalism insects everything, causing social hierarchies and seeding class warfare. I mean, cops were getting c l a p p e d in this joint, by god…i hope right-wing twitter watches this and has a heart attack.

yes, representation isn't the end-all-be-all of activism, however we can't pretend like the lens of hollywood doesn't shape our reality when it comes to news, podcast, media, and who we allow to tell stories. hopefully, this is one of the first bricks in a hall of radical black filmmaking.

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fred hampton and global inclusivity

fred hampton and the black panthers, black socialists of their time, understood the need for a global proletariat, saw that there were people suffering all over the world at the hands of american imperialism and colonialism, and saw that this was a problem that did not end at the borders of america.  even towards the end of this movie when fred is about to go to jail and his compatriots are asking him whether they should arrange safe travel for him to africa he reminded them that this is a revolution not just about him but what ends up being lost their is that even in the 60s there was an international coalition that was considered dangerous because of its threat to global capitalism one that wanted to free all political prisoners all around the world, one that the black panthers were actively a part of.  this is coming from close to the chest from me being an african who spent most of his life in the united states it is not on black people here that they don't know about black people all around the world. wild radio and television connected the worlds in unimaginable ways it connected all of us to white representation, white media, the white gaze, the white lens, the white microscope. i know plenty of black people who didn't know that they were black people in britain. i know plenty of people period who just learned about afro-latinx people. i know far too many people who know that situations in lots of parts of africa are unstable but never stopped to ask why they are unstable. that is the global connectivity. the colonialism, the genocide, and the west's fervent need for expansion ravaged africa during and immediately following the transatlantic slave trade and that part of the narrative isn't meant to supersede or to be under any black suffering in the united states but it's part of the story. and they knew this in the 60s and garvey and many other scholars knew this even before that.

there needs to be space for healing in the african diaspora and i'm not the first person to say that. but i think it also begins by realizing that the struggle is global and the struggle olympics isn't just with other races it's within our own sometimes as well. 

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can you build comrades out of superficial relationships?

 i think about this a lot because there are plenty of people who have become anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic “activists” through a instagram slideshow and then immediately commodified is. the revolution should not be commodified. the revolution should not be merchandised. the revolution is the revolution and we shouldn't be trying to make a bag off of it. i have tried different versions of organizing my friends and radicalizing them and currently am in a pretty successful collective that shares the same sentiments i do and some of those superficial relationships are becoming deeper as we are seeing each other where we are and not where we thought the other person was.

the answer i landed on? we have strength in numbers however they can be no weak links and it is on us to help build those weaker links whether they don't know the history, the rhetoric, the ways in which they've been impressed, etc and help bring them to the light but sometimes you got to plant the seed and keep it pushing and wait for them to come back to you.  if there's one thing that fred hampton was in this movie it was inclusive, unfortunately it was inclusive to a fault but it was the police using a weak link against him that did fred in in the end.

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ccccccombobreaker: 

“gatekeeping the revolution”

any person who could walk up to a group of neo-confederates (patriot party) and convince them to join the black panther party along with the puerto rican young lords and a chicago gang (the crowns) got the golden tongue and that was fred hampton. 1968 was a different time absolutely however fast-forwarding to the present, in a post trump america that is still dealing with the after effects of trumpism and will be doing so for at least the next five decades, i don't see anyone who's going to be able to look over at poor white people and bring them into the fold. dave chappelle has jokes about it, van jones says he's doing that (but he likes being boo’d up with candace owens, so who knows),  and there is a “grassroots to activist to celebrity activist” pipeline that allows people's brand to be activism.

i'll be entirely honest: i have been involved in grassroots organizing and being a follower at times, a leader at others for the last 12 years of my life, in ohio and new york, showing up when i can, and showing up when i can't. one of my main mediums for talking about racism has been through my art, specifically stand-up comedy, even more specifically using social media. and when it clicked in my mind that i didn't want people to think that i was using my comedy to get famous and to leave my people behind, i got off social media. this was just one reason in a myriad of others however there is a reason why shaun king continues to be prevalent. there is a reason why deray gets to be deray. while i believe on some level that they absolutely care about people, it is not lost on me that both of these examples want to be the one-stop shop for anti-racism, the same way that a robin diangelo gets to, and that is not what i want to be, it never has been. i just want more people to do the work and not flip it into a personal bag and that starts with me and ends...i don’t know. rather than pathologizing my activist community, i’ll try and be the change, be about it not tweet about it.

more and more, people want to gatekeep the revolution more than do the revolution. i’ll keep doing the work to not do that.

activism isn’t a brand it’s a way of life.

i hate this concept of being a brand, building a brand, etc because it is inherently very capitalist. while i have a platform i think that my platform will be better served doing the work rather than telling people i've done the work. i felt very performative even though i knew i was doing everything that i said i was doing and that's the game of social media, it's very capitalist in its own way, and it enforces hierarchies that pretend that they're based on equitable metrics but are actually projections of a lot of our issues in this country concerning racism, colorism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, classism, lgbtqia-phobia, etc. i've seen a lot of people pivot to putting blm or a rainbow flag in their bio and then see them act antithetical to those markers in real life.

rather than project that so generally, i have surrounded and will continue to surround myself with people who get that. people who don’t weaponize the language of social justice for personal ends. people who don’t buy into the disposability politics and reactivity of social media. rather than wait for the world i wanna live in, build it.

“i felt performative in my truth but still performative on social media.”

my manager strongly suggested that i don't get off social media once or twice in the past and she's right: for somebody who's interested in being in the entertainment industry, why not spend my time entertaining? but, one thing that became painstakingly clear over the last few years is that i am not bad at being an entertainer, being a writer, and creating space for other people. but i don't need to be performing that for other people. i just need to be doing it. that goes with the art and that goes with the activism. people who know me know that i'm doing everything i can when i'm not working for my community. 

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dying for this shit

fred hampton died at the age of 21 because the us government, headed by one of the biggest dickheads in american history, j edgar hoover,  considered him a threat. i have no intention of dying and i know many activists have no intention of dying. however that's on the table. i talked about this a lot with yedoye, maria, and with the bmcj boys:  after that night on the bridge where the cops were kettling us,  i looked around me at the 2000 or so scared protesters who were so unified in their knowledge that these protests were for racial justice but didn't know that that came at a cost for those that came before us. 

teaching that dr. king was a passive nonviolent protester, that rosa parks simply just sat on a bus and refused to get up, and that slaves were freed by abraham lincoln and they've just been free ever since has a cost. without the knowledge that rosa parks, was the victim of racism everyday of her life before that incident and probably every day after, that slavery transformed over the past 150 years into our prisons and slavecatchers into our police, and that dr. king and his supporters not only got their ass beat by the cops once they crossed the bridge at selma but he was assassinated, let a lot of my white, more gentrifier-y brooklynites (and i'm sure a bunch of my bipoc neighbors) believed that justice came at little cost, definitely not the cost of our lives. 

am i willing to die for this shit? yes. do i want to? no.  i have looked down the barrel of a gun several times in my life and during those protests we were out there ducking batons and zigging and zagging away from cops,  ones who really believed that they were on the right side of things  despite all evidence to the contrary.  i'm 29 years old and i only recently i've gotten anywhere near the wherewithal that fred hampton landed at at age 18, 19, 20, 21.

whatever work i do will be defined by generations after me and i can't spend anymore time trying to curate my legacy. back to the work, back to the play.

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keep your race analysis if it doesn’t have a class analysis

it wasn't just the blackness that the fbi was afraid of, it anti-capitalism and socialism that made fred hampton a threat. i know a lot of pro-black people in fact i would go as far to say as almost every black person i know is pro-black. however, out of those extremely pro black people, i know a lot of people who are centered on status, and financial superiority, often flexing their wealth, status, connection, love of looking down upon people, etc and that always has sat wrong with me. when you are as disenfranchised as black people have been in the world and specifically in the united states, and the way out has been by playing the game of the system, accruing capital, land, achieving the “american dream,” i can't blame us. 

when we look up at all the people who are societally considered above us (white people, rich people, etc), what we see is wealth however what a lot of these white people have is generational wealth that does not come from the redistribution of funds and resources, something bad black and immigrant communities often have to take into account; settler culture is all about the individual and not about the community. being pro-black means understanding so much more about the world outside of just the color of your skin. 

it's understanding queerness, it's understanding class, is understanding the effects that religion has had upon us, it's understanding global colonialism, and it's about finding an equitable future not a future where people are on top again. it is hard to center equity over superiority especially when we are treated as inferior by almost every corner of this country but it is the right way forward. and that's what struck me the most from the depiction of fred hampton in judas and the black messiah: all he wanted to do is teach kids about anti-capitalism, help them eat, let them know that they could be successful and didn't do it because he believed it being rich. 

i'm not trying to sit on a holier-than-thou throne and look down at all these capitalists however, as someone who navigate to black people who look at africans and caribbeans as less than for not having money, resources, or around richer black people who look down upon black americans who live on the south side of the towns, calling them ghetto and ratchet and poors, i don't care about your pro-blackness if it doesn't have a class analysis at the bare minimum. it was that very class analysis that got fred hampton to convince so many people who the real enemy was. and that’s why they killed him.

• the sanitization of black radicalism will continue to be the death of the movement

• proud boys? boogaloo boys? who the fuck is naming these terrorist organizations

• “you telling me you ain’t never nibbled on no butt?” lmaoooo

• best oscar bait: money, white guilt, british accents, or meryl streep

• stop pretending you didn’t know trump was about to skate on this insurrection by kristi yamaguchi

• we often have to survive in toxic systems by using said systems however how do you make something anti-capitalist using one of the biggest capitalist machines in the world

• war is politics with violence and politics is war without the violence, but no matter what black people are always on the front lines, how dat happen

• the only thing stopping black creators from being ahead of the curve are the gatekeepers being so behind it

• happy valentine’s day aka love getting its back blown out by capitalism day

• just hopped on the fenty skin train so it’s officially bad bitch season for me, my dudes

• getting these abs right because it is a crop top summer my niggas, gonna have the shirts up to my aereolas