Sample Commentaries
“Thinking about Watchmen: a Roundtable.” Film Quarterly, June 2020.
“ I think this is a profoundly “playing in the dark” iteration of the black superhero, not by recasting superheroes through black experience but by saying that a racialized nationalism is important to the foundations of vigilantism, heroism, and alienated citizenship at the core of this myth.”
“Removing 'blackface episodes' is easy. Actually confronting racism in media isn't.” CNN, June 29, 2020
“b.O.s 7.2 / Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama”
ASAP/J, 27 August 2018.
“Given the well-documented refashioning of Michelle Obama during her husband’s presidential campaign to combat the reading of her as an angry black woman, the face at rest feels like a refusal of prescriptive and regulatory gazes on black womanhood.”
“These Images of Women Around Kavanaugh Evoke a Familiar Alibi.” CNN, September 2018.
“. . . we need to resist the impulse to believe that people cannot live compartmentalized lives, across time and space.”
And All Our Past Decades Have Seen Revolutions: The Long Decolonization of the Black Panther.” The Black Scholar. February 19, 2018.
“This slow decolonization of the Black Panther is the effort to decenter the white perspective from the construction of the character. If we recognize that representation matters, and that Black representation has been a tool in white supremacy, tracing the character over decades illustrates an epic struggle to make a “real” Black character out of something that was a white fantasy of blackness.”
12 Years a Slave and the Problem of (Black) Suffering. Huffington Post.
Racist resistance to representations of black suffering and anti-racist criticisms of representations of black suffering are actually two sides of the same coin. Producers of both discourses internalize a cultural discourse that sees representations of adult victimization as somehow less artful and distasteful. Looking away has become a national pastime — from the poor, the sick, and the civilians killed by war and drones. It is unclear to me what kinds of representations of suffering can always escape condemnation as sentimental, or manipulative, or “suffering porn.”
