Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’
"Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.
“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”
OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL: CONFEDERATES
A conversation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Nataki Garrett and
playwright Dominique Morisseau about Confederates.
"This episode of The Archive Project is the second of three in this season’s series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic director Nataki Garrett is back on the mic, this time in conversation with playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose new production Confederates will be on the OSF stage, directed by Garrett, in the fall of 2022. Confederates explores racial and gender bias in American through the parallel stories of two women living over a century apart: an enslaved Black woman turned Union spy and a brilliant professor in a modern-day university."
-The Archive Project
Why Do So Few Blacks
Study the Civil War?
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
image: Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort Lincoln, in Maryland. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the war broke out,
lost nearly 300 men. (Library of Congress)
"For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline."
-Coates
The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History
by Jake Silverstein
"On Jan. 28, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine since 2015, came to one of our weekly ideas meetings with a very big idea. My notes from the meeting simply say, “NIKOLE: special issue on the 400th anniversary of African slaves coming to U.S.,” a milestone that was approaching that August. This wasn’t the first time Nikole had brought up 1619. As an investigative journalist who often focuses on racial inequalities in education, Nikole has frequently turned to history to explain the present."
-Silverstein
The 1619 Project
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
featured in The New York Times Magazine
"In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. t carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. o aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. n the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully."
-Hannah-Jones
Misogynoir: The Other Discrimination That Black Women Face
Black Folk Mental Health: Generational Trauma, Traditions & Truth
The ReidOut with Joy Reid
The Culture is: Black Women
MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Tiffany Cross host a dinner party at Minton’s in Harlem with Black female trailblazers
who are shaping America’s culture, including:
• Ryan Michelle Bathe, Actress and Producer, Star of NBC's "The Endgame”
• Tarana Burke, Activist, Author, and Founder of the Me Too Movement
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist and Creator of the 1619 Project
• Captain Timika Lindsay, Partner, “Diversity Crew” and Retired U.S. Navy Captain
• Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Congresswoman, Democrat from Massachusetts
• Maria Taylor, NBC Sports, Host
• Robin Thede, Creator and Showrunner, HBO Max’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show”
• Tamika Tremaglio, The National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), Executive Director
• Melba Wilson, founder and executive chef, Melba’s in Harlem
Throughout the revelatory dinner, guests share personal stories and experiences about what it’s like to be a Black woman in America and what it’s like to spark change. The episode also features Reid’s exclusive interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in Mississippi. They discuss Harris’ historic role as the first Black woman to hold the office.
Ian Haney López:
The Dog Whistle Politics of Race
What do Cadillac-driving "welfare queens," a "food stamp president" and the "lazy, dependent and entitled" 47 percent tell us about post-racial America? They're all examples of a type of coded racism that this week's guest, Ian Haney López, writes about in his new book, Dog Whistle Politics.
Haney López is an expert in how racism has evolved in America since the civil rights era. Over the past 50 years, politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles -- code words that turn Americans against each other while turning the country over to plutocrats. This political tactic, says Haney López, is "the dark magic" by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests.
Click below to get free trial Audible version of Lopez's book.
Is It Finally Twilight for the Theater’s Sacred Monsters?
by Jesse Green@NYT
Despotic. Agonizing. Crippling. Sadistic.
Those are just some of the adjectives victims use to describe their tormentors in Isaac Butler’s jaw-dropping book “The Method.” But the method they’re talking about isn’t a blueprint for a fascist takeover or C.I.A. interrogation. It’s a blueprint for the American theater.
-Green
by Ekemini Ekpo
Seeing Double: Double Consciousness as a Black Theatre Practitioner
When I consider that as a Black performer, I may paradoxically enable white complacency as I present Black suffering, it becomes difficult to perform the capital W “Work” of acting. An incomplete list of the questions that may arise instead include: Am I a stereotype? Am I an educational tool? Am I a prop? Or a stepping-stone to someone else’s personal development? That doesn’t even touch the ways that other intersecting forms of oppression (like transphobia, colorism, fatphobia) dictate who even makes it to the stage.
-Ekpo
Robert Barry Fleming’s Sense of Scale
by AMERICAN THEATRE EDITORS
So yeah, there was a combination of things that I now can discern or understand as challenges about artistic relevance—a feeling that what we were doing did not have its pulse on what was resonant for people, and the general public reifying the sense that our popular form was now an elitist form for a niche audience, generally a niche audience that was predominantly white and affluent. So we’re kind of jesters for the ruling class, and how effective is that, really? And the lack of infrastructure support, both in physical as well as in sustainable practices—while you can sustain some things for a short term, if they are rooted in exploitation, they are doomed to not be sustainable, because that’s not really a natural state for the human animal. Building capacity and ambition alongside artistic innovation is always challenging, and all of that was just kind of amplified. The subscription model failing, the landscape of philanthropy changing priorities—all of those things intersected simultaneously with two public health crises that are endemic: a lack of investment in our physical, psychological health as a nation, and the construction of race and how that’s led to a foundation of genocide, a foundation of misogyny, on the artificial construction of value based on race and gender.
-Barry Fleming
Iyanla Vanzant
“The most powerful spiritual healer, fixer, teacher on the planet.”
—Oprah Winfrey
In confronting discrimination, racism, rejection, and alienation, Vanzant took an approach that, for a feminist, was very non-traditional—less political and more spiritual. She asserted in a telephone interview, "Spiritual consciousness does not make your problems go away; it does, however, help you view them from a different vantage point.… Your political reality is determined by your personal reality.… Racism and sexism in and of themselves are not what limit black women in America. It is our perception of them."
Vanzant's Faith in the Valley, the companion book to her best-selling Acts of Faith, has inspired thousands of black women to seriously consider how their own behavior might have been causing certain avoidable problems. Her own journey served as an inspiring model for others.
The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman's Guide Through Life's Dilemmas
Is it the job you hate but need in order to pay the rent? Is it that relationship that you gave your all to only to end up with a broken heart...again? Perhaps it's your children, a family member, or a life-long friend doing you in, dragging you down, pushing you to the brink. If you are an honorary member of the Black Woman's Suffering Society, you have probably been told that it's all your fault. Or that struggling and suffering is your lot in life. Iyanla Vanzant says, No! Life is an Act of Faith and suffering is optional! Those everyday challenges, obstacles, and dilemmas are what Iyanla calls "valleys." As bad as they may seem, there is a purpose or, as Iyanla says, "There is so much value in the valley."
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose
by Alice Walker
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Among the thirty-six pieces are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter’s healing words.
Quote
by Patricia Hill Collins
image by Bisa Butler
“We must be attentive to the seductive absorption of black women’s voices in classrooms of higher education where black women's texts are still much more welcomed than black women our-selves.”
From:
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond
![0DB04D09-0C2C-150C-1B28B097C124A4B3[1536332767].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/da502d_3e51f66ca22548ce944504fac5544192~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_33,y_0,w_400,h_387/fill/w_400,h_387,al_c,q_80,enc_avif,quality_auto/0DB04D09-0C2C-150C-1B28B097C124A4B3%5B1536332767%5D.jpg)
Seena Hodges
CONNECTOR. FIERCE ANTIRACIST. EQUITY DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION CHAMPION. DYNAMIC COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL. INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST. PHILANTHROPIST.
Seena Hodges (she/her) is a connector who loves people and is passionate about equity, intersectional feminism, and access to brave spaces for all. She founded The Woke Coach® in 2018 because she wholeheartedly
believes that racial equity is the defining issue of our time.
Through The Woke Coach, Seena and her team engage with clients to facilitate conversations and complete projects that live at the intersection of equity, diversity, inclusion, antiracism, and empowerment. The company’s mission is to help individuals deepen their analysis and develop an understanding around issues of bias and injustice, in turn, helping them become the best, most understanding, empathetic version of themselves. Clients often describe their engagement with The Woke Coach as “transformational,” “though-provoking,” “challenging,” and “life-changing.”
why i don’t f**k with feminism, even if it's intersectional
by Jaimee Swift
image by Bisa Butler
You know, the f-word has never really appealed to me. And by the f-word, I mean feminism.
And whether it is feminism, white feminism and/or intersectional feminism, I don’t f**ks with it. Not nere’ one bit.
Many women (especially white women who claim to be intersectional feminists) get quite frustrated when I tell them that I am not a feminist. They question me on why I am not a part of the movement, even laying out well-versed academic and societal reasonings as to why I should be and must be a feminist.
-Swift