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

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      #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

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      #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

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      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      The Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June

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      Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June“The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” the introspective, quietly hopeful album she made more than a year ago, sounds just right in 2021.Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021A fire crackled in a cast-iron stove behind Valerie June. She had a bright carnation in her abundant dreadlocks, a mug of tea, a banjo by her side and an Etta James album propped against an amplifier as she chatted via video about her new album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.” She had all but finished the music last January, after two years of on-and-off recording, and was expecting at first to release it in 2020. But her label, Fantasy, convinced her that would be a “bad idea,” she said with a laugh.Now, the 39-year-old musician was ensconced at an Airbnb rental house in upstate New York, where she could make music at any time without disturbing the neighbors at her Brooklyn apartment. She had set up instruments, microphones and lights for home recordings and for the livestreamed performances that she’s substituting, for now, for her years of perpetual touring.“It feels so strange,” she said. “It just feels so different to not travel. I value just being alone, but this is way too much.”Although “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” due March 12, arrives in a different era than the one it was made in, it sounds unexpectedly timely. Even before the isolation of the past year, Valerie June’s artistic intuition had led her toward thoughts of stillness, meditation and inwardness. She also completed a book that is due in April under her full name, Valerie June Hockett: “Maps for the Modern World” (Andrews McMeel), a collection of poems, drawings and homilies about consciousness and mindfulness, like “Visualization”: “When you don’t see a path/Before you,/Maybe it’s time to fly.”Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations. She is simultaneously rural and cosmopolitan, historically minded and contemporary, idiosyncratic and fashionable, mystical and down-to-earth. She calls her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Her voice has a wayward twang and a sly finesse, while her music wanders amid soul, country, folk, jazz and blues — along with nods, on the new album, to hip-hop and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” she said. “Songs are teachers — they’re like bosses, basically. They’re like, this is what we want. They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams. And I have to be the one who’s listening to them and telling whoever it is, what I hear that they want.”She added, “A whole lot of magic has to happen to make music. A whole lot of minds have to see something invisible. The act of making music — that could be spiritual. You’re taking something that’s not physically seen and you’re bringing it from nowhere, pulling it from thin air, so people can experience it.”Valerie June was born in Jackson, Tenn. and grew up in nearby Humboldt. She learned to sing from all the voices around her at church services — young, old, pure, cracked — while she was exposed to the secular music business through her father, a part-time concert promoter. She also dug into the musical history of Tennessee, the Appalachians and the Deep South, from early blues singers like Memphis Minnie to Dolly Parton to the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia. Valerie June moved to Memphis as a teenager and began singing with bands and then as a solo act. In 2010 she landed a spot on an online MTV series about Memphis musicians, “$5 Cover.”“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” Valerie June said. “They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesHer reputation spread fast among musicians. She sang featured backup vocals with the country singer Eric Church, the rapper John Forté and the songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello; she released her own recordings, including a bluegrassy EP, “Valerie June and the Tennessee Express,” co-produced by the fiddler Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was a co-producer for her 2013 debut album with a label, “Pushin’ Against a Stone.”By then, she had moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, though she rarely stayed in New York City for long. “For basically a decade,” she said, “what I was doing was flying to New York, washing my clothes and going back on the road.” “Pushin’ Against a Stone” and “The Order of Time” from 2017, her first albums released nationally, had the naturalistic sound of musicians playing together in real time. They drew comparisons to expansive stylistic hybrids like Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” But for “The Moon and Stars,” Valerie June decided to incorporate some studio time-warping. She wrote new material and dug into a backlog she estimates at 150 songs; one, the fragile “Fallin’,” dates back to the early 2000s. And with her co-producer Jack Splash — a Grammy-winning Los Angeles producer whose extensive credits include tracks with Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson and Anthony Hamilton — she layered live band recordings with low-fi demos and multitrack experiments.“When I was working with Jack,” she said, “I told him certain words and feelings that I want the record to be able to have for people. Spirituality was one, iridescence was one, illuminance was one. Ethereal was one. And magical, fairylike, dreamy, colorful.”From his studio in Los Angeles, Splash said, “Valerie writes like a poet writes. That’s something that very much gets overlooked in contemporary music in the constant quest for hits and success. It’s not often when I get a chance to work with an artist who actually cares enough about the world to want to write those types of things.”They worked on the songs at home and saved up material until they were ready to gather musicians at professional studio sessions. Those tended to be scheduled on nights with a full moon, by “absolute cosmic coincidence,” said Splash. “It was very beautiful though. We felt like the sky was smiling down on us.”Splash connected Valerie June to vintage Memphis soul by bringing in the string arranger Lester Snell, who was a mainstay of the Stax Records studio band and a frequent collaborator of Isaac Hayes in the 1970s; they recorded his ensembles at the renowned Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis. Valerie June also garnered a cameo appearance from the soul singer Carla Thomas, who had mid-1960s hits like “B-A-B-Y” and made duet albums with Otis Redding. On “The Moon and Stars,” Thomas recites an African proverb — “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet” — and then sings along with Valerie June on “Call Me a Fool,” a Southern soul ballad testifying to impulsive love.But the album also includes hypnotic songs like “Within You,” which stays on one chord throughout its five minutes as Valerie June sings thoughts like, “The only truth to know/Is in the letting go.” It’s a sonic assemblage built from a mantra-like acoustic guitar line, tendrils of electric-guitar improvisation, an off-kilter drum-machine loop, wisps of Valerie June’s voice and Snell’s hovering string-section chords.The final track for “The Moon and Stars” was going to be “Home Inside,” a song about a search for peace, which reflects, “I know there is a home inside/Window to soul, where every dream abides.”“You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it?” Valerie June said. “We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesBut during the first months of quarantine in 2020, Valerie June returned to her family home in Humboldt, where her mother still lives. “It was starting to be summer,” she recalled. “I was still out in the country, away from everybody in the world. And all I heard was bird song, day and night. I would wake up and just go out there and record bird song.”Eventually, she decided to give the album a new ending. With her bird recordings, she and Splash layered on keyboards, flutes and the bell tones of a Tibetan singing bowl to make “Starlight Ethereal Silence,” the album’s postscript. “You go into this nature world,” she said, “And you can sit there and let them be the singers — because they’re the best singers — and just be immersed in all of what is around us all the time.”Although the album was finished in 2020, the context of that turbulent year changed the way Valerie June saw her songs. “Smile,” a song that arrives midway through the album, is about a determination to make it through rough times. In 2020, she was listening to the track and watching Black Lives Matter protests and, with the death of the Georgia congressman and civil-rights activist John Lewis, footage from the marches and rallies of the 1960s.“I saw everything that we’re fighting for now, with systemic racism and injustice,” she said. “And I saw this older Black woman sitting on the steps of, like, a sharecropping house or something. Maybe she had been a slave and maybe she had truly known the hard times. And she just started smiling. Because she had done everything. She had fought for freedom. She had tried, you know, and all she could do was smile. And in that smile, there was some joy and some happiness that just couldn’t be taken from her no matter what anyone ever did. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, is that what the song is connecting me to?’”Above all, a willed and unblinking optimism courses through Valerie June’s songs. “One of my lessons for this life is, how can I keep my energy?” she said. “I know darkness. I know the blues. And so how can I use the blues as a fuel for what I wish to say? You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it? We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Chadwick Boseman wins a best actor Golden Globe and his widow accepts in an emotional speech.

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      #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 story‘Nomadland,’ ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ and ‘The Crown’ Led a Remote Golden GlobesChadwick Boseman wins a best actor Golden Globe and his widow accepts in an emotional speech.Feb. 28, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ETFeb. 28, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ET More

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      Emmanuel Acho to Host ‘The Bachelor’ Television Special

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      #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 storyEmmanuel Acho to Host ‘The Bachelor’ Television SpecialMr. Acho, author of “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” will host “After the Final Rose” after the show’s longtime host went on hiatus over comments dismissive of racism.Emmanuel Acho will host “After the Final Rose” after the announcement that the show’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, would be “stepping aside.”Feb. 28, 2021, 4:08 p.m. ETEmmanuel Acho, an author and former National Football League player, will host a post-finale special of “The Bachelor” after the show’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, said he was “stepping aside” after he made comments that were dismissive of racism.Mr. Acho, who wrote the book “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man” and hosts a show by the same name, said in a statement that it was “both an honor and privilege” to host the hourlong special on March 15.“This is an incredibly pivotal episode on one of the most storied shows in television history,” he said.The installment of a Black host caps a season that featured the ABC franchise’s first Black “Bachelor,” Matt James, but has also been overshadowed by a series of controversies amid calls from the show’s fans to increase its efforts toward diversity and inclusion.Mr. Harrison’s hiatus came after an interview with Rachel L. Lindsay, the show’s first Black “Bachelorette,” in which Mr. Harrison defended racist actions by one of this season’s three finalists.The “After the Final Rose” special will “cover the current events about the franchise,” ABC said in a statement, as well as conversations between Mr. Acho, Mr. James and the three finalists.One of the finalists, Rachael Kirkconnell, has faced criticism over photos that have recently surfaced, including one of her attending an “Old South” plantation-themed ball. Ms. Kirkconnell apologized in an Instagram post, saying, “I was ignorant, but my ignorance was racist.”Mr. James said that the interview between Mr. Harrison and Ms. Lindsay “was troubling and painful to watch,” adding that “it was a clear reflection of a much larger issue that ‘The Bachelor’ franchise has fallen short on addressing adequately for years.”Mr. Harrison, who is still listed as the show’s host on its website, apologized, writing on Instagram that his comments, like his use of the term “woke police” in defending Ms. Kirkconnell, were “unacceptable.”Ms. Lindsay had suggested last week that Mr. Acho “would be fantastic” as a host for the special because he has been “very outspoken about racial injustice, for social justice, and has pretty much been the person who said, ‘I can have these uncomfortable conversations and people trust it.’”Mr. Acho said on Instagram about the announcement: “I love being a bridge for reconciliation. Our world is disconnected & divided, my goal is to unify.”Mr. Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports, is a former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns and Philadelphia Eagles football teams. He left the N.F.L. in 2016 to join ESPN as an analyst.His YouTube show, “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” has covered topics like policing, national anthem protests and “Karens & Cancel Culture.” An episode titled “A Conversation With the Police” has more than two million views.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Spike Lee’s Children Are This Year’s Golden Globe Ambassadors

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonHow to Watch the GlobesWhat to ExpectOur Movie PredictionsGolden Globe NomineesGolden Globes SuitAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySpike Lee’s Children Are This Year’s Golden Globe AmbassadorsJackson Lewis Lee and Satchel Lee are the first Black siblings selected to represent “Hollywood’s next generation.”Jackson Lewis Lee, left, and Satchel Lee outside their father’s studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.Credit…Adraint Bereal for The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET More

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      History Meets the Present on the ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Album

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      #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 storyCritic’s PickHistory Meets the Present on the ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ AlbumThe songs inspired by Shaka King’s film about the 1969 police killing of the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton mostly don’t appear in the movie, but they expand its story.“Judas and the Black Messiah” arrived with an ambitious soundtrack stocked with songs featuring a soulful, somber and retro aesthetic.Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 24, 2021, 12:10 p.m. ETJudas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired AlbumNYT Critic’s PickA movie’s message doesn’t have to end with the closing credits. Black filmmakers and musicians have been making the most of “inspired by” albums that are anything but afterthoughts; they boldly extrapolate from the story told onscreen. “Black Panther,” “The Lion King” and now “Judas and the Black Messiah” — the director Shaka King’s film about the 1969 police killing of the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton — arrived with companion albums that connect fantasy and history to their repercussions in the here and now.“Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album” overflows with music and ideas: 22 tracks, many of them collaborative. With Hit-Boy as one of the executive producers (and the rapper on a track of his own), the album gathers past and current hip-hop hitmakers, with Nas, Jay-Z and the Roots’ Black Thought alongside Pooh Shiesty, Polo G, Lil Durk and BJ the Chicago Kid.Although the album is a compilation from dozens of rappers, singers, producers and songwriters, it has a coherent sound: soulful, somber and retro like the film’s closing song, H.E.R.’s “Fight for You,” which is steeped in Marvin Gaye’s mournful determination. Much of the album looks back toward 1990s hip-hop: relying on instruments and samples of full bands, laced with melodic hooks and firmly enunciating the lyrics.H.E.R. provides the movie’s closing song, “Fight for You.”Credit…Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressSome tracks directly address the film’s particulars. The album opens with an appearance by Fred Hampton Jr. in “Cointelpro/Dec. 4”: memorializing his father, reminding listers about Cointelpro (the F.B.I.’s illegal covert 1960s Counterintelligence Program aimed at civil rights groups and other perceived subversives) and firmly connecting political oratory to hip-hop; the track ends with a loop of the elder Hampton proclaiming, “I am a revolutionary!”Rakim’s “Black Messiah” delivers a terse, magisterial biography of Hampton over samples of a 1967 soul single, Them Two’s “Am I a Good Man.” In “Somethin’ Ain’t Right,” over bluesy guitar chords, Masego sings about corruption and Rapsody vows, “Cointelpro got the target on me/But we don’t stand down till the people all free.”But the focus inevitably widens to encompass the present. Polo G’s “Last Man Standing” — with bleak piano chords and a shivery vocal sample — bitterly connects thoughts of Hampton and the Black Panthers to deep-seated systemic racism, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Smino and Saba collaborate on “Plead the .45th,” sketching paranoia and resentment in brisk, jazzy phrases. Black Thought’s “Welcome to America,” with gritty vocal choruses from C.S. Armstrong and flashes of a gospel choir, is a vehement reminder of centuries of exploitation, remembering “every lost body crossed, tarred, feathered and tossed” and insisting, “This American cloth has never been soft/while history was running its course.”Memorial and news flash combine in “What It Feels Like” by Nipsey Hussle — who was killed in 2019 — and Jay-Z, a hip-hop march with foreboding piano, horn-section chords and hovering choral vocals. The song warns that success turns Blacks into targets: “You get successful, then it get stressful,” Hussle rapped. Then Jay-Z’s verse pivots from similar ideas — “You know they hate when you become more than they expect” — to the inadequate police response to the insurrection on Jan. 6: “You let them crackers storm your Capitol, put they feet up on your desk/And yet you talkin’ tough to me, I lost all my little respect.” Jay-Z was born December 4, 1969, the day Hampton was killed in a police raid. The history sounds personal.Various Artists“Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album”(Six Course Music Group/RCA)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More