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    The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture

    By pushing back against centuries-old stereotypes, a historically overlooked community is claiming space it was long denied.OMAR HOLMON WAS in high school when his mother sat him down for the talk. “I thought we were having the talk about being Black in America,” he recalls. “Oh, no. You already know all that,” she told him. “I’m talking about you being such a big nerd!” In Holmon’s room, in the dresser drawers where his clothes should have been, he kept sequentially ordered issues of Daredevil and Green Lantern comics. He watched “Daria” and “Samurai Jack.” He played Mario Kart. This was in Hackensack, N.J., in the early 2000s. Omar’s mother feared her son might never find a date.Two decades later, Holmon, now 36 and based in Brooklyn, is happily married and the co-founder, along with William Evans, 41, of the website Black Nerd Problems. Their book of the same title will be published this summer. Both projects excavate the territory of nerd culture — comics, anime, e-sports, tabletop gaming, science fiction, fantasy and more — from a Black perspective that the broader nerd community has historically overlooked or, worse still, outright attacked.The pair are part of a new generation of Black nerds (or “Blerds,” as it is sometimes styled, a portmanteau of “Black” and “nerds”): critics and creators, scholars and social influencers, artists and activists who are shifting the culture in the years following the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black and Blerd president, by centering unexpected stories of Black characters. Jordan Peele, a self-proclaimed Blerd, has lately exercised his influence, built by advancing the horror genre in film through “Get Out” (2017) and “Us” (2019), and with his reimagining of the classic sci-fi television series “The Twilight Zone” (2019-20). The director Ava DuVernay is also delving into science fiction and fantasy, adapting both Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Dawn” (1997) and DC Comics’ “New Gods” (1971) for the screen. Marvel Comics has in recent years embraced Black characters — witness the forthcoming Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” starring Anthony Mackie as Falcon — as well as Black creators like the director Ryan Coogler, who is working on a new Wakanda series and a sequel to “Black Panther” (2018), which is scheduled to be released next year. Newly visible in part due to the remarkable commercial success of that franchise, as well as to critically acclaimed television series like HBO’s “Watchmen” (2019) and “Lovecraft Country” (2020), the Blerd moment seems to have only just begun.But being Black and nerdy hasn’t always been so glamorous. Black comic book fans report suspicious white store owners trailing them in shops. At Comic-Cons, Black cosplayers are sometimes chastised by officious gatekeepers, told that their chosen characters aren’t supposed to be Black. More ominously, Black gamers hear the N-word hurled casually during online sessions and sometimes find themselves targeted for attack when revealed or presumed to be Black. In addition to these outside pressures, many Black fans of fantasy, science fiction and other genres erroneously coded as white spaces face ridicule from Black friends and family members who see what they do as “acting white.”Touchstones of Black nerd culture include DC’s “New Gods” series (1984).Courtesy of DCA page from “New Gods #2” (1971), written and drawn by Jack Kirby.Courtesy of DCThe tension is this: Black nerds unsettle the myth of a monolithic Blackness. In an American imagination that has historically stereotyped Black people as alternately ignorant and emotional or sexualized and cool, the nerd — smart and cerebral, unsexy and decidedly uncool — creates cognitive dissonance. Not only do Black nerds confound racist stereotypes, they also pierce the protective orthodoxy of Blackness passed down in the United States across generations. Under slavery and Jim Crow, Black people maintaining — or at least projecting — unity proved a necessary protective practice. Strength came in numbers, as did political influence and economic clout. What would happen if we all announced publicly that we were going to start doing our own human thing without regard to the group? Few considered it worth the risk to find out.But who in 2021 benefits from thinking of Black people as just one thing? Certainly not Black individuals, who, like all individuals, are complex amalgams of shifting affinities, of inherited and chosen identities. And certainly not Black nerds, whose very existence is often rendered invisible because they present an inconvenient complication to a straightforward story of Blackness in America.SAY THE WORD “NERD” and it conjures Coke-bottle glasses and pocket protectors, the kind worn by the studious and socially awkward white guys (and they are nearly always white and nearly always guys) bullied in 1980s cult classic films: think Robert Carradine’s Lewis Skolnick from “Revenge of the Nerds” (1984) and Crispin Glover’s George McFly from “Back to the Future” (1985). This is Nerd 1.0. The Nerd 1.0 archetype has its variants, perhaps the most prominent being the East Asian nerd (the flip side to the stereotypical martial-arts action hero), portrayed with model-minority bookishness, either sexless or sex-crazed, like Gedde Watanabe’s Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” (1984). Though Nerd 1.0 might seem easy to dismiss as an all in good fun comic figure, its influence has lingered in the typecasting faced by both East Asian and South Asian actors to this day. But over the decades, the term “nerd” has undergone a dramatic evolution — some would call it a corruption. Once the defiant moniker of the brainy social outcast, nerd is now claimed by anyone with a deep affinity for some area of knowledge. Call it Nerd 2.0. Sneakerheads are nerds now, obsessing over tooling and the vicissitudes of the secondary sales market. So are cannabis connoisseurs, with encyclopedic knowledge of different strains and the legal highs they produce. “Nerd is not an othering anymore; it’s a spectrum,” Holmon says.The most famous fictional Black nerd, Steve Urkel, portrayed for nine seasons starting in 1989 by the actor Jaleel White on the sitcom “Family Matters,” is decidedly Nerd 1.0. He wears high-water pants with suspenders; his enormous eyeglasses are secured to his head by a strap. Clumsy and irrepressible, his running gag relies on him disrupting the lives of his neighbors, the Winslow family, then uttering his high-pitched, nasal catchphrase, “Did I do that?” Urkel is equal parts exhausting and endearing, which explains how he went from a supporting character to the star of the show. Reprise his role in 2021, however, and you’d likely fill it with a Nerd 2.0: perhaps a young Questlove, the polymathic drummer of the Roots, or a teenage Daveed Diggs, the Grammy and Tony Award-winning actor and recording artist who now has a recurring role as an Urkelian interloper on the family sitcom “Black-ish.”“This work is a meditation on the stylistic attributes that have become emblematic in nerd fashion,” says the Brooklyn-based artist Troy Michie, who made this original collage for T. “Using the character of Steve Urkel as a reference, the work starts to unfold, complicating the confines of a singular identity.”Troy Michie, “Did I Do That” (2020)Better yet, think of Issa Rae, the 36-year-old actress, writer and producer behind the hit HBO series “Insecure,” whose fifth and final season will air later this year. The protagonist, Issa — Rae shares a name with her character — seems like a Blerd avatar: a Stanford graduate working at a nonprofit in her hometown of Los Angeles who is at once awkward, quirky and cool. However, when asked by a journalist from The Atlantic in 2018 if she saw her character as the natural Blerd evolution from Urkel, Rae pushed back. “I never identified my character as nerdy, because the classic cultural nerd — the gamer, the ‘Star Wars’ or sci-fi or ‘Lord of the Rings’ geek — just never interested me,” she said. Instead, she sought to explore the “in-between” of Black characters — the complexity and peculiarity often denied by the polarized perspective on Black people as cool or corny. Rae’s reluctance to accept the Blerd designation for herself or her character doesn’t stop Blerds from embracing her and her show: “I don’t know if she realizes that she made such an impact on Black girls who call themselves nerds,” says Jamie Broadnax, 40, the Virginia Beach-based founder of the online community Black Girl Nerds.Nerds are the cool kids now, and it’s not because they’ve changed all that much; after all, a big part of being a nerd is a stubborn insistence on the eccentricities of one’s passions and personality. Rather, cool itself has changed. In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, monastic dedication to a narrow interest is no longer stigmatized. Communities build up around affinities, connecting people through social media platforms that foster the rapid exchange of ideas — or, more succinctly put, are conducive to nerding out. Coolness also follows power, and great power now rests in sectors of society, particularly in technology, where nerds have traditionally thrived.“Nerds hold the keys to the castle,” says Terril “Rell” Fields, the 33-year-old founder of the Raleigh, N.C.-based blerd.com. Growing up, Fields was “almost stereotypically nerdy.” Before he got contact lenses for sports, he wore huge glasses with one lens thicker than the other to correct the vision in his weaker eye. “And I was at the lunch table with the kids playing Magic: The Gathering, which did not help at all,” he says with a laugh. When he launched blerd.com in 2019, after assembling a team of fellow Blerds, it marked a culmination of thousands of hours spent gaming, flipping through comic books and watching anime. “Blerds still love the same types of content [as other nerds],” he says. “A Blerd just sees nerd culture through their Black cultural lens.” They may notice things that other nerds don’t: a Black or brown supporting character in a comic book that might otherwise be forgotten; a political allegory of race and democracy played out in a sci-fi television series.When it comes to finding distinct points of entry into nerd culture, Blerds are not alone. Disability, long a theme in these realms — whether through Professor Charles Xavier and his X-Men or neurodiversity in science fiction — is also a defining facet of the new nerd culture, with fans pushing for accessibility in gaming and greater inclusion at Comic-Cons. Queer and trans nerds are also increasingly visible and, along racial lines, Indiginerds claim space, as do Latina and Asian subsets of the universe. Bao Phi, who grew up a self-described “Vietnamese ghetto refugee nerd” in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, wrote a column in 2010 for the Star Tribune that inspired the website thenerdsofcolor.org, which now brings together a cross-racial coalition.But for many of the Black nerds coming of age in the past two decades, the term “Blerd” was a lifeline. It cast a protective spell, offering a covert way for Black fans to connect and communicate in spaces that were often hostile to their presence. “Most of us calling ourselves Blerds were simply trying to find each other,” explains Karama Horne, the Brooklyn-based founder of a website called theblerdgurl. Before the advent of Twitter in 2006 and Instagram in 2010, Horne frequented message boards and other virtual spaces where she often witnessed women and people of color being bullied. Once the word “Blerd” gained currency, it was possible to support one another against racist and sexist trolls. Ultimately, the word came to define a movement, one that was hiding all along in plain sight.“Star Trek”’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) on a 2002 cover of TV Guide.TV Guide/Courtesy of Everett CollectionJaleel White, who played Steve Urkel on “Family Matters,” on the cover of a 1991 TV Guide.TV Guide/Courtesy of Everett CollectionA BRIEF HISTORY of Black nerds dates back to before the Revolutionary War, to Phillis Wheatley, the young Black woman born a slave who was the first person of African descent to publish a collection of English poetry — only to have to prove her authorship, as well as her knowledge of the works of Homer, Ovid and Virgil, to a panel of “the most respectable characters in Boston,” as the 18 white men described themselves in a note “To the Public” that introduces her “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” (1773). The Black nerd also lives in the pages of Charles W. Chesnutt, whose short-story collection “The Conjure Woman” (1899) reads like a late 19th-century iteration of Peele’s “Get Out,” where the resources of the Black imagination overcome the sunken place of white mythmaking and domination. And it lives in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952), whose nameless Black male protagonist is a self-described “thinker-tinker” writing the story of his life from his underground lair fitted with precisely 1,369 light bulbs; even the novel’s title evokes H.G. Wells’s science fiction classic “The Invisible Man” (1897), repurposing invisibility as a metaphor for the erasure of Black identity under the racist white gaze.Back in the 1980s in Mobile, Ala., two cousins — a boy and a girl — spent hours together conjuring imagined worlds. He loved comic books; the Incredible Hulk series was his favorite because, though the boy could never be white like Bruce Banner, he could perhaps turn green like the Hulk. She loved science fiction; Tanith Lee and C.S. Friedman enchanted her, as did Octavia E. Butler, who was Black like her. Fast forward half their lifetimes and the boy, now a 48-year-old man, the stand-up comic and political commentator W. Kamau Bell, has won three consecutive Emmys for CNN’s “The United Shades of America.” The girl, now a 48-year-old woman, the novelist N.K. Jemisin, has won three consecutive Hugo Awards for the novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. “I get goose bumps thinking about it,” Bell says. “The two of us in my grandmother’s house as kids laying on the floor, her writing and me drawing and ultimately clinging together because we didn’t feel like we fit in.” That sense is common to Black nerds, particularly among those who grew up before there was a name to call themselves. “I was in my 30s before I heard the word ‘Blerd.’ And I thought, ‘That would have been helpful when I was 12,’” Bell says. According to him, it’s about “planting a flag.” Blerd stakes a claim for the free and full exercise of Black individuality within the space of a collective identity.It’s no coincidence that Black creative voices have asserted themselves so powerfully at a time when Black suffering and death have dominated the news: Eric Garner, Elijah McClain, Derrick Scott and George Floyd all cried out “I can’t breathe” before they were killed at the hands of law enforcement. The phrase became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter activists. Bell hears within those desperate words a call to action for artists, as well. His cousin’s novels, set on distant planets, peopled by beings whose names sound foreign on the tongue, are more than escapist fantasies. “This sort of individualist art creates more space for Black people to breathe,” Bell says. “It creates more space for us to relax and be ourselves. [Then] we can actually stand up and fight when we need to fight.”Art and activism have often accompanied each other in Black American life. “Every revolution, every evolution, has some type of aesthetic sister or brother movement,” says the artist John Jennings, 50, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, who has illustrated Damian Duffy’s graphic novel adaptations of Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (2020) and “Kindred” (2017), and in 2015 drew the cover for a lauded collection, “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements,” in which artist-activists explore how fantasy is also a resource for political change. In the foreword, the book’s co-editors, Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown, issue a call to action: “We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”The title page of “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, a foundational Black nerd.Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.“The idea of a Black future is still a radical notion,” Jennings says. “Think about it: Before ‘Star Trek,’ the only time you would see Black folk or people of color in the future — well, you wouldn’t. … Were we murdered? Were we dropped in the ocean? We don’t even know.” Afrofuturism uses literature and the graphic arts, music and dance, film and television to imagine Black people into a future long denied them. These recuperative acts are about more than entertainment, though they must also be entertaining; they argue that even imagined futures must take stock of the past. In these Afrofuturist stories, the most inconceivable plot points aren’t invented — time-traveling portals and Rorschach masks — but real. Both “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country” revisit the searing trauma of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which white mobs killed hundreds of Black fellow citizens and burned the thriving Greenwood district in Oklahoma to the ground. In doing so, both series circumvent linear time, opening up new mechanisms for confronting a tortured inheritance. “A lot of times, we are dragging our pain with us into the future,” Jennings says. By depicting this historical atrocity and recasting it within a salvific Black narrative, with Black heroes ready to fight, these stories offer a way, much like the blues, to transcend pain not by evading it but by making it into art.The New Negro Movement of the 1920s, spearheaded in part by W.E.B. Du Bois, the political philosopher and tactician (and author of a 1920 sci-fi story, “The Comet”), had the Harlem Renaissance. The Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s had the Black Arts Movement. It should come as no surprise that the emergent political insurgency is taking shape at a time when artists are increasingly drawn to speculative fiction and fantasy, horror and weird fiction as a necessary respite from the unrelenting pressure of combating white supremacy, and as a creative resource for addressing present-day challenges. In an era in which the notion of fact itself is unmoored, and space lasers are not the stuff of comic books but of hateful conspiracy theories, sci-fi and fantasy might just provide the necessary distance from our present conflicts to reimagine a shared set of norms and values — not yet here, but in a galaxy far, far away. “There’s nothing wrong with escapism, and there’s nothing wrong with using science fiction and fantasy as self-care,” says Horne of theblerdgurl. “Having moments of happiness and joy in between pain. That’s us. That’s part of our culture.”MICA BURTON IS a nerd renaissance woman: an e-sports host, cosplay model, anime aficionado and Dungeons & Dragons player. She’s also fluent in Elvish, a constructed language J.R.R. Tolkien introduced in his “Middle-earth” books, which she put on display earlier this year during her appearance on Narrative Telephone, a web series developed during the pandemic by a collective of gamers called Critical Role. Officially launched in 2015 by Matthew Mercer, Critical Role livestreams D&D games via the video platform Twitch; YouTube episodes have garnered over 288 million views.Burton, 26 and based in Los Angeles, is not a Blerd, she tells me, but a nerd who happens to be Black. “I’m not trying to assimilate, necessarily, but I’m trying to exist in space without purposefully stating that I’m different,” she explains. This resistance to the Blerd moniker is suggestive of a generational divide, even among those at opposite ends of the millennial band. “I meet a lot of people who are in their 20s and younger who don’t like the term,” Horne says. “They say, ‘I don’t understand why we have to call ourselves something different. Why can’t you just be a nerd?’ I laugh because I’m like, ‘I’m so happy that you feel that there are so many of us that we don’t have to say it anymore.’” Blerd or nerd, the challenge is the same: to be at home in the worlds of one’s choosing. “My entire purpose of my career is to be the representation I didn’t have as a kid,” Burton says.A 2020 graphic novel adaptation, by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings, of Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (1993).© Abrams ComicArts, 2020The cover of a new edition of Butler’s “Dawn” (1987).Courtesy of Grand Central PublishingWhen Burton was a kid, her nerd tendencies were fostered by a supportive family. By elementary school, she and her father were playing video games together, sharing a passion for fantasy and fighting games. “We played Halo together and I kicked his ass,” she says. “It’s how fathers and daughters work.” Mica Burton’s father is LeVar Burton, who as Kunta Kinte on “Roots” (1977), Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the late ’80s and early ’90s and the host of PBS’s long-running children’s series “Reading Rainbow” is something like the patron saint of Black nerds. Early on, though, Mica set out on her own path. “She’s always been a ‘Star Wars’ fan over ‘Star Trek,’” says LeVar, 64 and also based in Los Angeles. That stubborn streak has served her well as she’s pushed to clear a path for nerds like herself — a self-identified cis female Black bisexual — in spaces that sometimes don’t know what to do with her or, worse still, are actively hostile to her presence. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to bring it up to people: ‘Hey, if I’m gonna be on your livestream, do you have moderation that blocks the N-word? Because that’s gonna happen,’” she says.Her father knows the challenge of fitting his Blackness in to places where it isn’t always welcome. Even on “Reading Rainbow,” which he began hosting in 1983 when he was the age his daughter is now, he had to fight to retain the markers of his identity: his earring, his changing hairstyles, the things that defined his young Black manhood. “It’s a part of who I am,” he told the producers at the time. “If you want me to do this show, then you’ve gotta take all of me.” They conceded.These dogged acts of representation, of taking his effortless Black cool to places where it might be least expected, are part of what makes LeVar an enduring presence in American culture. Today, his podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads,” lends his voice to both pioneering and emerging authors of Black sci-fi and fantasy, from Samuel R. Delany and Nalo Hopkinson to Nnedi Okorafor and Suyi Davies Okungbowa. “It was really my love of science fiction that put me squarely in the category [of Black nerd], even at a young age,” LeVar says. “For a young Black kid growing up in Sacramento in the late ’60s, it was preferable to imagine other worlds and other ways of existing that did not involve racial prejudice.” Like any other sci-fi fan, he was drawn to exciting stories of far-flung galaxies; he was also driven by the urgent promise of a future where he might someday be free within himself.Watching Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” in the 1960s, LeVar discovered a world more civil and sane than the one he witnessed one station down the dial, where news reports showed footage of Black people assaulted with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. In Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, he and other Black viewers could see themselves as part of a future that seemed far from promised in the present. Uhura represented the first phase of advancement in Black nerd culture: representation. That representation is particularly profound for Black women. “Uhura is my spirit character: a Black woman at the back of a room full of white guys who has to listen and translate everything,” Horne says. “Nobody thinks about what Uhura does. She spoke every language in the universe. That’s Black women!”Black women continue to act as translators today, helping to bring Blerd culture into the mainstream. You can see this in politics. Stacey Abrams is an avowed Trekkie, and the Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is described by her friend Aisha Francis, the scholar and activist, as the consummate Blerd. You can see it in music. Lizzo, who plays the flute, was a proud band nerd in high school and used that outsider energy to define her distinctive, chart-topping style. And Janelle Monáe once joined Chester French on a 2009 song called “Nerd Girl,” on which she sings, “I’m your nerd girl / Reading comics in the dark / My favorite station’s NPR.” Now she’s the inspiration for Jemisin’s heroine Sojourner “Jo” Mullein in the “Far Sector” (2019-present) comic book series, which reimagines the universe of DC’s Green Lantern.A 1975 edition of Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren.”Advertising Archive/Courtesy of Everett CollectionYou can see Black women nerds’ influence most especially on television. Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, the podcasting duo behind “2 Dope Queens,” dedicated an episode of their 2018 HBO live performances to the topic of Blerds. “What are you nerdy about?” Williams asks one of their guests, the actress Uzo Aduba, who responds with a rhapsodic reverie on Ms. Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat. With “Lovecraft Country,” the showrunner Misha Green created a Blerd extravaganza, drawing on a predominantly Black cast to imagine a fantasy world still in touch with our own. These Black women creators represent the next phase in the evolution of Black nerd culture, advancing past representation alone to creative ownership. “It’s got to be more than putting a face on the screen, it’s got to be authority,” says Broadnax of Black Girl Nerds. “Black people being in positions of power.”This inflection point, of Black people in power both in front of and behind the camera, arrived just three years ago. “When it comes to Blerd culture, you have before ‘Black Panther’ and after ‘Black Panther,’” Jennings, the illustrator, says. The power of the film was partly symbolic — the fact of seeing a Black superhero was inspiring for a generation of Black viewers who previously had to imaginatively project themselves onto white protagonists or subsist on secondary characters. Less visible but perhaps more consequential, the film was the vision and product of a largely Black team of creators, led by Coogler. “If there wasn’t a ‘Black Panther,’ we would not have had a ‘Watchmen’; if there wasn’t a ‘Watchmen,’ they would have never given a Black woman millions of dollars to create the HBO show that was ‘Lovecraft Country,’” Horne explains. These successful works of public art and entertainment are matters of personal consequence for nerds — and Black nerds in particular — who suddenly find their passions vindicated. As Horne puts it, “I wasn’t considered mainstream until 2018.”The triumph of “Black Panther” helps explain the ascendancy of Black nerds today. The film created an opportunity for undercover Blerds to test out their nerdish tendencies in public. Mica Burton witnessed “the feeling of safety among Black people to say, ‘I read comic books. I watch anime. I like Marvel films,’” she says. If your friends were cool with you doing the Wakanda salute, then maybe you could slip in that you still collect Pokémon cards. After 2018, she adds, “we saw a huge uprising of a lot more accounts of Black people on Twitter saying, ‘I like these things!’ and then other people going, ‘I do, too!’ And that’s how communities are formed.”THE FUTURE OF Black nerds is the future of the retro: a return to the timeworn techniques of storytelling. In a graphic novel or a video game, a Netflix series or a role-playing campaign, you can take things for granted — like racial and ethnic diversity, like equality along the spectra of gender and sexual orientation — that the world beyond is somehow still deliberating. These nerdish things offer freedom for self-fashioning that has historically been denied to Black Americans by a racist imaginary that insisted on projecting Black people in ways that served white supremacist fantasy and power. Black nerd culture rejects the grotesque menagerie of racist stereotypes, as well as the compensatory images of Black cool, by insisting on the full and sometimes messy exercise of human agency. It gives license to be Black and awkward, Black and brainy, Black and free.For Black Americans, exercising the freedom to imagine has always been a radical act, even a dangerous one. “Black Panther” and “Insecure” and “Lovecraft Country” prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Black stories can have wide appeal among all audiences — and specifically among white audiences. This is not only a commercial matter but a creative one: Black audiences have long had to project themselves into white stories. Whiteness was the default, and Black stories were thought to be compelling only to Black people themselves, or to white audiences seeking a voyeuristic glimpse into an unknown territory. What’s happening now is something different: the ordinary, everyday capacity of assuming that the particulars of Black lives can — and must — be understood as universal, too.At the end of “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s nameless protagonist asks a bold question: “And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” In 1952, a young Black author giving voice to a young Black protagonist claiming that he might speak for you — whomever you may be — was indeed a wild fantasy. Nearly 70 years later, Black nerds, Blerds and dreamers everywhere are doing the same: daring to speak for a culture that needs their voices now more than ever. More

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    ‘Ain’t Supposed to Die’ Plans a Broadway Return

    The 1971 Melvin Van Peebles musical, about Black life in a low-income neighborhood, is a dream project for the director Kenny Leon.A half-century after its premiere, Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” is heading back to Broadway.The producer Lia Vollack said Tuesday that she is putting together a revival with the collaboration of the creator’s son, Mario Van Peebles, and under the direction of Kenny Leon. Vollack said she expects to present the revival on Broadway next year.The musical, which began a nine-month run on Broadway in 1971, is constructed as a series of monologues, often vivid and confrontational, about Black life in a low-income neighborhood. Nominated for seven Tony Awards (but winning none), the show seems to anticipate both the confessional and personal style of musicals that followed, and the poetic spoken-word sounds of rap and hip-hop.Melvin Van Peebles wrote the show’s book, music and lyrics. Bill Duke and Garrett Morris were in the original cast, and Phylicia Rashad was a standby.Leon has long been enamored of the musical, which he performed in while a student at Clark Atlanta University.“It was so visceral, and so strong, and so powerful,” he said. “It gives voice to people who we normally don’t hear on a Broadway stage, and if we do hear them, we don’t hear their truth, we just hear their suffering.”Leon said the renewed focus on diversity and equity following a series of deaths of Black Americans in encounters with police catalyzed the production.“Right after everything that happened last year, I talked with Lia, and she said, ‘What do you want to do?’” Leon recalled. “I said, ‘I would love to do “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” — I think it’s my life’s calling to do that play,’ and she said, ‘Let’s do it.’”Leon said the challenge facing his production would be “How do you marry the ’70s to the post-George Floyd moment in an artistic way?” He added, “Nothing about it is going to feel like a museum piece. My goal is to make the audience feel as if the play is new.”Perhaps best known as a film director, Melvin Van Peebles also wrote plays, novels, music and journalism. Mario Van Peebles, an actor who is being billed as the revival’s creative producer, said in an interview that he considers the musical (which he saw on Broadway when he was 14) his father’s best work.“It was a transformational experience — I saw people of all colors coming in, some who had never been to a theater before, and many who had, and some laughed, and some cried, and some applauded, but everyone was somehow changed,” he said.Mario Van Peebles said that throughout his life, people have told him that “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” was ahead of its time, and that he has been eager to revive it while his father, who is now 88, is still alive.“Americans now have better tools to understand each other than we did before,” he said. “In a way, America has caught up, and the language and the tools that were once inner-city are now part of our culture.”The New York Times, for one, gave the original production a mixed review.“Whites can only treat ‘Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death’ as a journey to a foreign country,” the critic Clive Barnes wrote, “and on those terms I think it has the power to shock and excite.” (The paper summed up the show this way in a sub-headline: “Blacks Move Through Gantlet of the Slum.”)The show has occasionally been revisited over the years; in New York, there was an Off Broadway production in 2006, when a New York Times critic wrote, “the series of vignettes explodes like a round of mini-riots.”With racial equity much discussed in the theater industry recently, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” becomes the eighth new production with a Black writer announced for Broadway when it reopens.The others are a revival of “Trouble in Mind” by Alice Childress; the Michael Jackson biomusical “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage; a “Some Like It Hot” musical with a book co-written by Amber Ruffin; and the plays “Lackawanna Blues” by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, “Skeleton Crew” by Dominique Morisseau, and “Thoughts of a Colored Man” by Keenan Scott II, as well as an untitled play by Nottage.Denzel Washington has told The Daily Mail that he expects a revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” to reach Broadway next year featuring his son John David Washington alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Danielle Brooks and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The producer Scott Rudin, who has the stage rights to “The Piano Lesson,” has declined to confirm the report. More

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    Serpentwithfeet’s Music Is Otherworldly. But His Message Is Down to Earth.

    On his new album, “Deacon,” the singer and songwriter makes a stark emotional pivot: “I didn’t want to go down in history as the sad boy, because I’ve just experienced so much joy.”The singer and songwriter serpentwithfeet’s 2018 debut album, “Soil,” mingled heartbreak, desperate longing and a search for solace. But he chose pleasure over angst for his second album, “Deacon,” which is filled with songs that savor flirtation, romance, sex and lifelong connection. “I celebrate that I can love and that I’ve been loved,” serpentwithfeet said about the album, due March 26. “And I get to be as jubilant as I want to be.”In a video chat from his home in Los Angeles, he wore a T-shirt with “Kingston” in big letters over a cartoon sun, along with a sunburst medallion. The same medallion appears on the album’s cover photo, which shows serpentwithfeet embracing another Black man. Both of them are dressed in white, as if for a ritual or a celestial ascension.As a Black gay man who grew up in a deeply religious family, serpentwithfeet, now 32, grappled with self-doubt and spirituality alongside love and desire on “Soil” and on his 2016 EP, “Blisters.” “A lot of what I’ve explored in my work is trying to figure out how I can legitimize myself, how I can validate my feelings,” he said, “and that hasn’t always been easy.”His music draws in very individual ways on R&B and the gospel music he grew up singing in a Pentecostal church: “I know church music better than anything else. That will always be my natural cadence.”Yet his songwriting was also shaped by the classical choral music he performed in high school with the Baltimore City College Choir, an award-winning group that competed internationally. “It made me clear about how I wanted to take up space musically,” he recalled. “It was just brilliant to be 14 years old and to have a Black choral director who was like, ‘OK, we’re going to understand classical music. But you’re also going to understand the value and the importance of Black composers and Black people and Black opera singers.’ And we had to sight-read and do our solfège, and to know how to do transcribing and musical notation — all that stuff.”The music serpentwithfeet makes is immediately distinctive, harnessing his gospel and classical training to a startling emotional openness. He works largely as a one-man studio band, fusing his own vocals, instruments and electronics. And he creates songs that are rhapsodic, pensive, harmonically complex, meticulously orchestrated and, often, constructed with layer upon layer of otherworldly vocals.His phantom chorales, he said, are a way of looking beyond himself. “I think about the idea of the operatic chorus, or the village chorus, where I have my limited perspective and then the chorus has the omniscient perspective,” he said. “I’m thinking about a community when I’m making songs. And I’m thinking about me being the younger person in the community. And then there’s the elders, or the village people, who can see more than what I can see.”Nao, an English R&B songwriter, exchanged collaborations with serpentwithfeet. After they wrote a song for her next album, she added her voice and writing — working remotely, largely by exchanging WhatsApp messages — to “Heart Storm,” a shimmering ballad on “Deacon” that envisions love as a deluge.“He had already created this template, and this really beautiful world. I just had to work my way inside of it,” Nao said from London. “He doesn’t songwrite the linear way that I do. He starts from obscure places, with these poetic sequences I just would never think of. I write the way I speak in a conversation. And he writes like he’s Shakespeare. I’d say he’s the Shakespeare of alternative Black music.”“I want people to feel part of the process, and I want people to feel like the thing they are witnessing is alive.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSampha, another English songwriter, worked with serpentwithfeet and the producer Lil Silva on three songs for “Deacon,” sharing studio jam sessions in London before the quarantine. “He’s got an incredible harmonic brain in terms of the way he can build vocal harmonies and his progressions,” Sampha said by phone from London. “It was really a wonder watching him build things up. And in terms of his voice, it’s a real tool. He really knows how to use it, how to bend it, how to make it go straight as an arrow if he needs to.”Sampha also heard early versions of other songs from the album. “It felt like he was making a real conscious effort,” he said. “Not necessarily turning away from the darkness, but acknowledging the light.”“Blisters,” serpentwithfeet’s first release, had ended with songs titled “Penance” and “Redemption.” He opened “Soil” with “Whisper,” which promised, “You can place your burden on my chest,” and later in the album, in the post-breakup throes of “Mourning Song,” he crooned, “I want to make a pageant of my grief.”But in mid-2020 serpentwithfeet signaled a change in tone. “I needed a pivot,” he said. He released an EP, “Apparition,” that set out to exorcise “those ghosts or those spirits or those ideas that don’t serve me at all,” he said. It started with “A Comma,” which declared, “Life’s gotta get easier/No heavy hearts in my next year.”“I’m not sure how many people care about the arc of my life,” he said. “But with my own personal document, I didn’t want to go down in history as the sad boy, because I’ve just experienced so much joy.”Singles released in advance of “Deacon” announced a new playfulness in serpentwithfeet’s music. In “Same Size Shoe,” which delights in finding similarities with a lover, he suddenly turns his voice into a scat-singing trumpet section. In “Fellowship,” he, Sampha and Lil Silva shake and tap all sorts of percussion as they share a jovial refrain, “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends.”Three songs on the album — “Malik,” “Amir” and “Derrick’s Beard” — name men the singer lusts for. They are “men from my imagination,” he said. “People ask, ‘Who was this song about?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, part of it, I was talking to myself, and the other part, I was talking to a person in my head.’ I think sometimes people just think that everything’s autobiographical, but for me, it’s, like, ‘Well, this happened to me. I wonder what would happen if I augmented this scenario? What would happen if I threw this off the edge of the cliff?’ I try to use all my experiences as a diving board, or as the beginning of a question.”While serpentwithfeet’s own story is full of singular details — Baltimore, the church, the classical choir, Blackness, sexuality — none of them, he believes, should separate anyone from his music. “The brilliant thing about individual stories is that the more specific you are, the more universal it is,” he said. “There’s a lot of artists that I connect with and I can’t identify with necessarily. But I can identify with that human feeling of love in the club, or missing your partner, or hope when you get to visit that country one more time.”He added, “They say gay artists don’t make universal work. That’s a lie. I’ve really listened to a lot of straight music. And I enjoy, and I can identify with being heterosexual. I don’t know what that is like. That ain’t my story. But I can still shed a tear.”He expects his own songs to reach everyone. “I want to be an incredible facilitator,” he said. “I won’t say storyteller because I want the audience to participate with me. I want people to feel part of the process, and I want people to feel like the thing they are witnessing is alive. I want to make work that people feel part of, that people feel like ‘serpent needed me here.’ Like ‘If I didn’t listen to this album, it wouldn’t exist.’ I want everybody to feel like it’s theirs, which is a very particular art form.”“I don’t know if I have accomplished it,” He added. “But that is something that I’m in pursuit of.” More

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    Viola Davis and Andra Day Are Up for Best Actress at the Oscars

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonOscar Nominations HighlightsNominees ListSnubs and SurprisesBest Director NomineesStream the NomineesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOscar Nominations 2021: Two Black Women Are Up for Best ActressAndra Day and Viola Davis are the category’s first pair of Black nominees since 1973, when Diana Ross was nominated for “Lady Sings the Blues” and Cicely Tyson was up for “Sounder.”Andra Day, left, as Billie Holiday, and Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. It’s been nearly 50 years since two Black stars competed for best actress in the same year.March 15, 2021Updated 5:03 p.m. ETAndra Day was just the second Black woman to win best actress in a drama at the Golden Globes.Now, she’s part of another milestone: For the first time in nearly 50 years, two Black women are up for best actress in the same year.Day, who plays the iconic singer Billie Holiday in the Hulu biopic “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and Viola Davis, who plays another pioneering singer in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” are the first pair of Black actresses to be nominated since Diana Ross (“Lady Sings the Blues”) and Cicely Tyson (“Sounder”) faced off in 1973.And, in a twist of fate, Day is nominated for the same role that Ross played. Though, she’s probably hoping for better luck: Ross lost the 1973 race to Liza Minnelli, who won for her performance as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”Day told Variety in January that she took an immersive approach to her character, including losing nearly 40 pounds and taking up drinking and smoking cigarettes. “I just asked God to give me all of the pain and trauma,” she said. It was her first acting role in a major film.Though “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” received mixed reviews, Day garnered critical acclaim for what The New York Times co-chief film critic A.O. Scott called her “canny and charismatic” performance. Her voice, he wrote, “has some of Holiday’s signature breathy rasp and delicate lilt, and suggests her ability to move from whimsy to anguish and back in the space of a phrase.”This is Davis’s fourth nomination (she won best supporting actress in 2017 for her role in “Fences”). In “Ma Rainey,” she plays blues singer Ma Rainey alongside Chadwick Boseman’s trumpeter, Levee, in what was the late actor’s final film role before he died of colon cancer in August.“Davis brilliantly portrays both the vulnerable position and indomitable spirit of this sturdy figure,” Mark Kermode wrote in The Guardian in December, “with fiery eyes shining through the dark shadows and battered rouge of her makeup, proudly standing her ground.”Day and Davis will go up against Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”), Frances McDormand (“Nomadland”) and Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”).In the more than 90 years the awards have been handed out, there has been only a single Black best actress winner — Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball” in 2001.“It’s one of my biggest heartbreaks,” she told Variety last year. “The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Chris Harrison Replaced as ‘Bachelorette’ Host by 2 Female Ex-Contestants

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChris Harrison Replaced as ‘Bachelorette’ Host by 2 Former ContestantsMr. Harrison, who acknowledged making comments dismissive of racism, will be replaced on the coming season by the first women to host the franchise, Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe.Tayshia Adams, above, will co-host the next season of “The Bachelorette” with Kaitlyn Bristowe. Both are former contestants of the show.Credit…Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMaria Cramer and March 13, 2021Updated 5:54 p.m. ETChris Harrison will not host the next season of “The Bachelorette” for the first time in the history of the franchise, which began as a guilty pleasure when it debuted in 2002 but has in recent years been criticized for its lack of diversity and insensitive handling of race.Mr. Harrison, 49, will be replaced by Tayshia Adams, who will become the first woman of color to host a season of the show, and Kaitlyn Bristowe. Both are former “Bachelorette” leads.In a statement, Warner Horizon and ABC Entertainment said they supported Mr. Harrison “in the work that he is committed to doing,” and pledged to continue to try achieve “greater equity and inclusion” within the franchise.“We are dedicated to improving the BIPOC representation of our crew, including among the executive producer ranks,” Warner Horizon and ABC Entertainment said, using an acronym meaning Black, Indigenous and people of color. “These are important steps in effecting fundamental change so that our franchise is a celebration of love that is reflective of our world.”Mr. Harrison announced last month that he was “stepping aside” from the current season of “The Bachelor” after acknowledging making remarks that dismissed the racist behavior of a contestant.The decision to feature two women as hosts also follows years of criticism of the show for its portrayal of women as being fixated on marriage or as petty and unstable. The show was also pressured for years by many of its fans, members of “Bachelor Nation,” to include nonwhite leads and more nonwhite contestants.Last month, ABC said that Emmanuel Acho, a former N.F.L. player and the author of the book “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” would host an hourlong post-finale special of “The Bachelor” on March 15.The announcement that Mr. Harrison would not host “The Bachelorette” was the latest development in a tumultuous season, which had intended to break ground by featuring the first Black male lead, Matt James, in “Bachelor” history.Before Mr. James, there had been two Black leads on “The Bachelorette”: Rachel L. Lindsay, who was announced as the lead in 2017, and Ms. Adams, whose father is African-American and whose mother is Mexican, and who was a recent midseason replacement.Mr. James’s season was praised for its diverse cast, but many viewers became dismayed by the producers’ decision to focus on fights between the women instead of the relationships building between the contestants and Mr. James.That disillusionment grew into outrage as offensive social media posts and photos of one of the contestants, Rachael Kirkconnell, emerged.In one post, Ms. Kirkconnell had liked a photo with a Confederate flag. Another photo on social media showed her attending an “Old South” plantation-themed ball in 2018.Last month, Mr. Harrison defended Ms. Kirkconnell, who is one of the two finalists on the show, when Ms. Lindsay asked him about the ball during an interview on “Extra.” Mr. Harrison said that “50 million people did that in 2018.”“Rachel, is it a good look in 2018 or is it not a good look in 2021?” Mr. Harrison asked during the interview, suggesting that such parties might have been acceptable in 2018.Ms. Lindsay replied: “It’s not a good look, ever, because she’s celebrating the Old South. If I went to that party, what would I represent at that party?”Mr. Harrison, who frequently talked over Ms. Lindsay during the interview, accused the “woke police” of going after Ms. Kirkconnell and acting as “judge, jury, executioner.”“I don’t know how you’re equipped, when you’ve never done this before, to be woke enough, to be eloquent enough, to be ready to handle this,” he said.Kaitlyn Bristowe will co-host the next season of “The Bachelorette.”Credit…Jc Olivera/Getty ImagesMs. Kirkconnell has apologized. Mr. Harrison also apologized on Instagram after the interview and said that, by excusing historical racism, he had defended it.“I invoked the term ‘woke police,’ which is unacceptable,” Mr. Harrison wrote on Instagram. “I am ashamed over how uninformed I was. I was so wrong. To the Black community, to the BIPOC community: I am so sorry. My words were harmful.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Rescuing an Off Off Broadway Theater With a Storied Past

    Preservationists hope to save the 13th Street Repertory Company building, with a little help from the Underground Railroad. When Edith O’Hara, the mother hen and indefatigable leader of the eclectic 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, died last fall at age 103, the future became decidedly shaky for one of Off Off Broadway’s longest-operating stages.In an effort to ensure that it’s not the end of the run as well for the antebellum brick house where both the theater and Ms. O’Hara made their homes, preservationists are urging the city to grant landmark protection to the three-story Greek Revival structure.The city Landmarks Preservation Commission told an advocacy group in January that the quaint 1840s rowhouse with the intricate cast-iron portico at 50 West 13th Street was not distinguished enough to warrant landmark protection on its architectural merits, noting that further study was needed to determine the building’s “cultural significance within the context of Off Off Broadway theater.” Consequently, the group, Village Preservation, has dived into the archives to try to demonstrate that the building is a worthy cultural landmark based not only on its theatrical history but also on an intriguing, newly unearthed piece of African-American history involving a prominent 19th-century Black businessman and abolitionist.The new research “is very helpful and we have added it to our records,” Kate Lemos McHale, the commission’s research director, wrote the group on Feb. 24.A commission spokeswoman added in a statement to The Times that the city “is absolutely committed to recognizing Black history in the urban landscape,” which is why the agency recently launched Preserving Significant Places of Black History, “a world-class story map and educational tool.” She said that the city would “continue to review” 50 West 13th Street.Edith O’Hara, the leader of the 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, at the theater in 2006. Ms. O’Hara died last fall at age 103.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesA place of opportunity for generations of theatrical neophytes of varying talents, the quirky, no-frills 13th Street Repertory Company was an early stop for such performers as Richard Dreyfuss and Chazz Palminteri. “Line,” a one-act play by Israel Horovitz, ran there for more than 40 years, an Off Off Broadway record. And “Boy Meets Boy,” New York’s first hit gay musical, was first staged there in 1974, the brainchild of Bill Solly, an Englishman whom Ms. O’Hara had taken in and allowed to live upstairs from the theater.Whether the show will go on is unknown. The building is owned by White Knight Ltd., of which Ms. O’Hara’s three children collectively own a little over a third. The balance of the shares are owned in equal proportion by Stephan Loewentheil, a bookseller, and his ex-wife, Beth Farber. The O’Haras and Mr. Loewentheil previously fought a bitter, yearslong real estate battle that ended, in 2010, with an agreement that allowed Ms. O’Hara and her theater to remain in the building until her death. There is no provision for what comes next.The Thirteenth Street Repertory Company has been placed in the hands of its artistic director, Joe John Battista, who has vowed to continue making theater under the group’s name. But whether that will happen on 13th Street or elsewhere — and whether the building will ultimately be sold — depends on the outcome of an offstage drama.Jill O’Hara, one of Edith O’Hara’s two daughters, at the theater in 2017. Ms. O’Hara is a minority shareholder of the company that owns the building.John Taggart for The New York Times“It’s all still in the air at this point,” said Jill O’Hara, one of Edith’s daughters, who sits on White Knight’s board. “It’s a complex situation that’s not made any easier by the history with this guy,” she added, referring to Mr. Loewentheil.The building is managed for White Knight by Nate Loewentheil, the son of Mr. Loewentheil and Ms. Farber.“As someone who cares deeply about cities, I appreciate the history of 50 West 13th Street,” Nate Loewentheil said, “but the building has fallen into very significant disrepair over the past 15 years, so we are trying to figure out our next steps.” (Both his parents declined to comment.)Ms. O’Hara said that her mother believed that the building was once part of the Underground Railroad, the network of activists who helped enslaved African-Americans flee north to freedom before the Civil War. That belief has been perpetuated in local lore because a trap door in the theater’s dressing room leads to a hidden basement chamber unconnected to the rest of the basement.Although no evidence has emerged to support the Underground Railroad rumor, new research, performed by Village Preservation and supplemented by an independent historian and a reporter, suggests that the claim may not be outlandish.From 1858 to 1884, city directories and other records show, the house was owned by Jacob Day, a prominent African-American businessman active in abolitionism and other civil rights efforts. By 1871, Day was one of the wealthiest Black residents of New York City, according to The New York Times, with a net worth of more than $75,000, or around $1.6 million in today’s dollars.The Greek Revival house has an intricate cast-iron portico.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe building has fallen into disrepair, and its future is uncertain.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesAn 1880 issue of The People’s Advocate called Day “the fashionable caterer of East Thirteenth Street” and identified him as a leading member of “a colored aristocracy” in the city. “Beginning as a waiter, by economy and thrift after years of struggle he saved money enough to go into business himself,” the paper noted, adding that Day owned “several fine houses.”Newspaper articles appear to document Day’s involvement in civil rights causes over more than 30 years. In 1885, the year after his death, his efforts to further African-American self-determination were recognized in a history of Black Americans. “The Colored population of New York was equal to the great emergency that required them to put forth their personal exertions,” wrote George Washington Williams, spotlighting Day, along with his fellow Greenwich Village resident and abolitionist Dr. Henry Highland Garnet, for doing “much to elevate the Negro in self-respect and self-support.”Born in New York around 1817 to parents who were also born in the city, Day appears to have been publicly active in Black civil-rights efforts as a young man. Along with such prominent abolitionists as the New York publisher and Underground Railroad leader David Ruggles, a man named Jacob Day was among a group in 1840 that called, in the pages of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, for a “National Reform Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the United States of America,” an effort to combat the colonization movement that aimed to resettle Black Americans in Africa.Day was also a prominent member and the longtime treasurer of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the city’s second oldest Black church, which moved to nearby 166 Waverly Place shortly after Day bought his house and place of business on 13th Street.Tom Calarco, the author of several books on the Underground Railroad, said that an 1852 article in The Standard suggested a strong connection between the church and leading Underground Railroad figures.The newspaper report detailed an anti-colonization meeting at the church that had been called by the Committee of Thirteen, a vigorous Underground Railroad organization. The Rev. John T. Raymond, the church’s pastor, was a member of the committee and served as president at the 1852 meeting.The entrance to the 13th Street Repertory Company, which was shuttered last March because of the coronavirus. Edith O’Hara lived upstairs until her death last fall, and tenants still occupy the building.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesDay was “a major leader of the Black community, and he was connected up with other important people that were in the abolitionist movement,” Mr. Calarco said. “We know for at least 26 years, he was still participating in these important meetings with people who were leaders of the movement, so you have to make that assumption that he, if not directly, was indirectly involved in the Underground Railroad.”Mr. Calarco also shared a document showing that in 1846, Day was one of a roster of African-Americans given land grants in the Adirondack region of upstate New York by Gerrit Smith, a major underwriter of the Underground Railroad.Mr. Calarco speculated that Day may have used his wealth to fund Underground Railroad operations, whose conductors were often pressed for cash. “They needed the money,” he said, “to pay for the food, to pay for the travel, to pay for the clothes, to pay for people who helped transport” fugitives on boats and trains.After the Civil War, with slavery abolished, Day worked to secure the vote for all Black people in New York State. In 1866, The Standard reported, he was one of a group that called for a convention to remove the discriminatory provision in the state constitution that barred Black people from voting unless they owned property valued at the considerable sum of $250. “The war of steel is over … but the war of ideas must go on until in this country true democratic principles shall prevail,” the group wrote, echoing today’s battles over voter suppression.In 1871, a year after the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution finally prohibited the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote based on race or color, a massive jubilee parade of Black citizens wended its way uptown from Washington Square, with throngs of Black and white New Yorkers lining the route. At a “grand mass meeting” at the Cooper Union, The Times reported, Day was among the officers who issued a resolution declaring that the 15th Amendment could only improve the lot of Black Americans if “the exercise of the ballot shall at once be made safe, and our right to exercise it be maintained by civil authority.”In 1880, when the Black civil rights leader Frederick Douglass spoke at a rally for the Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield at the Cooper Union, Day was among the prominent citizens, Black and white, assembled onstage around him.During the period Day lived on 13th Street, the city’s largest African-American neighborhood, known as Little Africa, had developed nearby south of Washington Square, around Minetta Lane and Minetta and Bleecker Streets. The Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose finances Day managed, had moved to the Village to serve this population. So did the Freedman’s Savings Bank, an institution founded to help former slaves after the Civil War. Day kept an account at the bank, perhaps to support its mission.Reflecting on Day’s house on 13th Street, Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian of the African Diaspora who curated a digital exhibit called “Black New Yorkers” for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said: “It’s important to preserve and show that there was an African and then an African-American presence in that area from the Dutch years and that they had institutions and businesses. It’s important to stress that, contrary to what people think, African-Americans didn’t just arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration, but they had a presence for 300 years before that.”By the late 19th century, fierce competition for housing from Italian immigrants was already pushing Black residents uptown from the Village to the Tenderloin district. And some of the lingering physical remnants of Little Africa were demolished in the 1920s by the extension of Sixth Avenue from Carmine Street to Canal Street.“Virtually all of the great institutions and landmarks and homes of leading figures of the 19th-century African-American community of Greenwich Village have been lost or highly compromised,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation. “50 west 13th Street is one of very few remaining homes of a leading African-American figure, not just in business but in the civil rights arena, that is largely intact from the many decades that he lived and worked there in the 19th century.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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    Hollywood Loses $10 Billion a Year Due to Lack of Diversity, Study Finds

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHollywood Loses $10 Billion a Year Due to Lack of Diversity, Study FindsA McKinsey report that combined previous research and new interviews argues that concrete steps like company bonuses tied to improved representation can lead to change.A scene from “Black Panther,” starring, from left, Lupita Nyong’o, Chadwick Boseman and Danai Gurira. A new study found that when studios “are looking for Black content, they’re looking for Wakanda or poverty, with no in between.”Credit…Marvel/DisneyMarch 11, 2021Updated 12:00 p.m. ETBy ignoring the systemic racial inequities that plague the film and television business, Hollywood is leaving $10 billion annually on the table. That is one of the main findings in a new report from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which for the first time turned its attention to the lack of Black representation in Hollywood. And, unlike many other studies that do excellent jobs of pointing out problems without giving concrete solutions, this one includes a series of steps that could help change the makeup of the industry.The consultants examined multiple existing research reports on thousands of film and TV shows including the “Hollywood Diversity Report” conducted annually by the University of California, Los Angeles; Nielsen’s 2020 “Being Seen on Screen: Diverse Representation and Inclusion on TV”; and annual work by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. The McKinsey researchers collaborated with the BlackLight Collective, a group of more than 90 Black leaders who work in film and television.McKinsey conducted anonymous interviews with more than 50 Black and non-Black industry participants including studio executives, producers, writers, directors and agents. The goal was to both reflect their experiences and identify the “pain points” as they try to create content. Examples of such obstacles include Black talent being “forced to sell stories about personal trauma to get ideas optioned” and white executives’ stereotypical assumptions about target audiences being “valued more than lived experiences of creators.”The study noted that Hollywood’s unique structure — involving unpaid or underpaid apprenticeships, tight-knit networks, small, informal and temporary work settings, often in far-flung locations — contributed somewhat to the ecosystem’s failings. But the report also recognized persistent trends that occur in large corporate settings: Black creatives are primarily responsible for providing opportunities for other Black offscreen talent; emerging Black actors receive fewer chances in their career and have a lower margin for error; and there is little minority representation among top management and executive boards. The film industry, the authors concluded, is a less diverse one than even typically homogeneous sectors like energy and finance.“In the same way that collective action is needed to advance racial equity in corporate American, real and lasting change in film and TV will require concerted action and the joint commitment of stakeholders across the industry ecosystem,” said the study’s authors, Jonathan Dunn, Sheldon Lyn, Nony Onyeador and Ammanuel Zegeye.According to the study, the average production budget for films with a Black lead or co-lead is a quarter less than the budget for films with no Black actors. One creative executive, who talked to the authors anonymously, said that when executives “are looking for Black content, they’re looking for Wakanda or poverty, with no in between.” Added one anonymous Black actor, “I have to take stereotypical works, because that’s what’s out there, but then when I take those roles, they say that’s all I am capable of.”To solve these issues, McKinsey offered several concrete measures, including urging studios, networks, streaming services, agencies and production companies to commit publicly to a specific target for Black and nonwhite representation across all levels and roles that reflect the American population: 13.4 percent Black or a total of 40 percent for all people of color. And the report encouraged those companies to expand recruiting efforts beyond New York and Los Angeles into the South, where 60 percent of the Black American labor force is concentrated, and at historically Black colleges and universities.The consultants also suggested increasing transparency and accountability with regular reporting on the racial, gender and ethnic makeup of their organizations. As reinforcement, the study said, executive bonuses should be tied to diversity targets so companies can “ensure that leaders are held to account for progress on racial equality.”Another idea: financially support a range of Black stories by committing 13.4 percent of annual budgets to projects starring Black actors with Black producers, writers and directors behind the camera.And lastly, the authors encouraged Hollywood to create an independent organization to promote diversity — an arms-length group with vocal backers and strong partnerships with film and TV leaders.“It would seem unreasonable to expect on- and off- screen Black talent to continue spending countless hours trying to reform this vast, complex industry on their own, time they could otherwise be spending creating the next hit series or blockbuster movie franchise,” the authors wrote.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Prince Harry Finally Takes On White Privilege: His Own

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The British Royal FamilyliveInterview and FalloutWhat Meghan and Harry DisclosedWhat We LearnedRace and RoyaltyAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s notebookPrince Harry Finally Takes On White Privilege: His OwnMeghan Markle and Harry’s interview revealed a catalyst for their reinvention, our critic writes: Harry’s racial awakening after attacks on Markle.Prince Harry and Meghan Markle speak with Oprah Winfrey about racism and other issues in a blockbuster interview on CBS on Sunday night.Credit…Harpo Productions, via ReutersMarch 8, 2021Updated 4:30 p.m. ETIt was well worth the wait. The first joint interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle since they stepped down from royal life last year (a process that became officially permanent last month) did not disappoint.I, for one, watched this tell-all with Oprah Winfrey while texting with many of the same Black women with whom I watched their wedding in 2018. Back then, we shared OMG emojis because we were pleasantly surprised by the way Black culture was so powerfully celebrated and Markle’s African-American identity so thoughtfully integrated into their ceremony at St. George’s Chapel.Now, we were aghast at the couple’s allegations that racism toward Markle and its various consequences were a primary reason they fled their home to find freedom in sunny California.Based on Markle’s deep commitment to women’s rights and the interview’s promo clip — Winfrey asks her, “Were you silent or were you silenced?” — I went into this assuming it would be a feminist revision of the couple’s fairy-tale romance. “The latter,” Markle responded in the interview. Later, she’d compare her life as a royal to Princess Ariel losing her voice after falling in love with a human in “The Little Mermaid.” In that analogy, this interview is the final breaking of that spell, with Markle now fully in control of her voice. It reminded us that she never needed a Prince Charming to rescue her, while showing us that their very modern marriage is what saved and ultimately liberated them both from the trappings and the trap that is the Crown.But therein lies the true catalyst for their radical reinvention: Harry’s racial awakening. Here, I do not just mean the accusations from the couple about the deep anxiety some royals had about the potential skin color of their son, Archie — which resulted, they said, in him not being offered the traditional rituals of the royal hospital picture, the title “Prince” and the security that comes with that status. Rather, the second hour of the interview was a culmination of a process that Harry had been undergoing since their first date in 2016, when he was becoming more cleareyed, confrontational and emboldened to take on the British monarchy into which he was born, and the white privilege that holds it up and has benefited him his entire life.Typically, we see racial awakenings as a tragic rite of passage for Black people. In slave narratives and early 20th-century African-American autobiographies and novels, there is often a moment in which a Black child realizes she is not only different from her white peers but that her darker skin or African-American parentage makes her inferior to them. The literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. once described it as a “scene of instruction.” In books like W.E.B. DuBois’s collection “The Souls of Black Folks,” from 1903, or Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing,” from 1929, this traumatic rupture is always intimate and severe, the first and most formative experience in a lifetime of racist insults.An official wedding photograph released by Kensington Palace in May 2018.Credit…Alexi Lubomirski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs Black parents, we try to prepare our children for these inevitable encounters with The Talk, the sage advice and survival strategies we hope might blunt the damage of these betrayals. But every Black person I know has had such a moment. Mine was my senior year in high school when my white classmates charged that the only reason I had been admitted to the University of Pennsylvania was because of affirmative action, an insinuation that equated being Black with being underqualified, and an injury that has caused me to obsessively overachieve in almost every aspect of my professional life.I’ve rarely heard white friends discuss their parallel experiences of first realizing their privilege. In fact, this summer was unprecedented in the sheer number of public figures and predominately white organizations that released statements or tweets acknowledging their role in perpetuating systemic racism. In private, I and many of my Black friends received more sympathetic emails or Black Lives Matter solidarity texts from our white colleagues than ever before. It seemed, suddenly, white people too were having their own version of The Talk.And in popular culture, these awakenings are appearing with more frequency. In this season of NBC’s “This Is Us,” Randall’s white siblings, Kate and Kevin, are, as a result of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, slowly coming to terms with how much their own white household, and their ongoing refusal to deal with racism, has harmed their African-American brother, who was adopted.Without such recognition by our white family members and friends, racial inferiority is merely thrust onto Black people as a unique burden that we must bear, disprove of and reject. This innocence is at the core of white privilege, and by extension, white power.Back in 2005, when Harry wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party, it would have been impossible to predict his trajectory. By last fall, however, his awakening was well underway, with him talking about how his marriage to Markle immediately changed his understanding of race. “I had no idea it existed,” he said of unconscious bias in British GQ. “And then, sad as it is to say, it took me many, many years to realize it, especially then living a day or a week in my wife’s shoes.”Last night, he took it a step further. First, he noted how “the race element” distinguished the tabloid frenzy surrounding Markle from others in the past. “It wasn’t just about her, it was about what she represents,” he said. Next, he indicted his family for not taking on the racist attacks hurled at their own, and then linked their institutionalized reticence or refusal to intervene to Britain’s much longer history of imperialism.“For us, for this union and the specifics around her race, there was an opportunity — many opportunities — for my family to show some public support,” he told Winfrey. “And I guess one of the most telling parts and the saddest parts, I guess, was over 70 female members of Parliament, both Conservative and Labour, came out and called out the colonial undertones of articles and headlines written about Meghan. Yet no one from my family ever said anything. That hurts.”With this provocation, Harry suggests the Royals were not merely unwilling to accept his biracial Black wife and their multiracial child but also what Markle embodied: the millions of Black people throughout Britain and the Commonwealth who finally saw themselves in the monarchy through Markle’s existence, finding optimism in this interracial union.And with that confession, Harry declared his independence from British racism — whether he realizes it goes beyond his family’s treatment of his son and is an essential ingredient to the monarchy itself, I don’t know. But I turned off the interview wondering how American race relations will further change him. That the couple landed in the United States during a pandemic that has disproportionately harmed African-American and Latino families, and in a period of racial protest and rising white nationalism, feels a bit like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.But, maybe that’s the point.Freed from the constraints of not being able to confront racism head-on might mean that he will dedicate his life to dismantling it, not just out of necessity, but also as a way of writing a new chapter in his family’s history and bequeath his children a legacy of antiracism.And if that is the case, it really will be better than any fairy tale ever imagined.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More