I found myself reading ’s essay, “When Black Unity Can’t Survive Scrutiny,” and I was struck by how cleanly he names a problem many of us feel but struggle to articulate: accountability becomes “dangerous” when Black institutions are forced to operate under backlash, austerity, and an unblinking public gaze that treats our flaws as proof of our unworthiness.

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When Black Unity Can't Survive Scrutiny

When accountability is deferred, failure doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. Like a water leak behind a wall. Small problems that could have been addressed early compound into crises. And by the time attention is forced, the damage is broader and much deeper…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Chad Deshawn

There have long been issues within the Black community that thinkers, cultural icons, and professional groups have tried to address (sometimes quietly and sometimes publicly), but often without the kind of sustained traction the moment demands. Not because we lack insight, but because we live under the threat that any internal critique will be stripped of context and repackaged for audiences already trained to suspect the worst of Black people and our contributions. Some of that suspicion is inherited through bad history, recycled stereotypes, and a national habit of confusing Black pain for Black pathology. Some of it is structural: segregation still shapes who resonates with whom, who gets treated as “credible,” and who gets dismissed as “messy” the moment they tell the truth too plainly.

Black America exists inside a jar, observed, measured, and interpreted, while the country pretends the cost of repair is too high. It’s an old American trick: manufacture a crisis, deny its cause, then complain about the price of the cure.

Deshawn describes how this pressure distorts the internal life of Black institutions. Leadership organizations are wedged between survival and self-correction. They risk funding, reputational capital, and sometimes literal safety when they name contradictions that slow Black progress, or when they admit that institutions can reproduce hierarchy inside the community. That hierarchy is woven into the American story: who was relatively free and who was in chains, who could accumulate and who could only endure. Those divisions do not disappear after emancipation; they evolve. Like many postcolonial societies across the world, we can find ourselves living with power lines influenced by the same tools colonizers used to divide and conquer, only now the instruments are grant cycles, media narratives, social capital, and gatekeeping.

And now we’re at a moment when Black contradictions have become a liability. Not because Black people are uniquely conflicted, but because the stakes are rising. The fight to protect voting rights, secure public funding, and reclaim basic dignity is happening amid widening inequality and political cynicism. Many Black Americans who never felt held by the classic elite institutions of Black life no longer feel deferential to them. In that vacuum, the mafioso appeal of American demagoguery becomes seductive with protection, swagger, and “I alone can fix it,” even when the fine print is written in our community’s blood. When accountability conversations get shut down, that silence becomes a political weakness: it leaves leaders sounding managerial while people are living in emergency, surrounded by the drug trade, weapons markets, failing schools, and the carceral state.

An example of how accountability gets swallowed by narrative war is the long-running controversy around the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF). It involved questions about governance and transparency that detonated into a national spectacle after reporting revealed that the organization had purchased a roughly $6 million property in the Los Angeles area with donated funds. The purchase became less important than what it could be made to symbolize, which a right-wing media machine treated as proof that the movement itself, its grief, its organizing, its insistence that state violence matters, was a scam.

The truth is messier, and mess is exactly what hostile storytellers know how to monetize. Cullors defended the purchase in an Associated Press interview and acknowledged the property had been used twice for personal purposes, obviously an admission that understandably deepened suspicion, especially among people living at the sharp end of inequality. At the same time, viral claims that donations directly funded Cullors’ personal home purchases have not been substantiated, as partisan outlets implied. In other words, there are credible governance questions here, but the most combustible conclusions have not been cleanly proven in court.

And that is precisely the trap Deshawn is warning us about.

In the moment, internal critique can feel like betrayal, not just because critique is wrong, but because the external gaze is hungry. Federal authorities have reportedly pursued investigative steps in recent years, while the organization has said it is not the target of a federal criminal investigation, and some state-level inquiries have ended without public enforcement action. Financial filings and conflict-of-interest disclosures can invite scrutiny without resolving it, and separate cases involving other BLM-branded entities blur in the public mind into one undifferentiated scandal. Civil litigation, including disputes over donation handling, adds another layer of smoke.

So the property purchase is a fact.

The sweeping “self-enrichment” story remains a contested narrative.

But contested narratives are still politically useful. When a community cannot hold a public, rigorous conversation about accountability, wealth gaps, incentive structures, grift, institutional efficacy, and the limits of blaming “bad cops” without confronting deeper structural decay. Well then, that conversation will be held for us by people who do not love us, using tools designed for demolition.

That’s what it means to confuse silence with unity inside a hostile test-tube of American apathy.

I’ve been watching Apple TV’s “Manhunt” with two of the most important Black women in my life, and it reminded me of an older American habit of blaming the turmoil on those demanding inclusion rather than on the system that made exclusion profitable. Reconstruction wasn’t only sabotaged by policy. It was also sabotaged by narrative, by the insistence that Black citizenship itself was chaos. That move still echoes: punish Black claims to full personhood, then cite the punishment as proof the claims were illegitimate.

Black people are diamonds in the American cave. We are expected to be refined, polished, perfected, and made legible to meet standards that were never designed to be humane. Those standards demand flawlessness from the targeted while granting endless excuses to the powerful. And the industry that insists on purity has never been pure but built on extraction, violence, and the human itch to dominate dressed up as virtue.

Deshawn’s metaphor of the leak behind the wall is the one I can’t shake. When accountability is deferred, failure doesn’t vanish but accumulates. And because post–civil rights America never truly held itself accountable for what it has done to Black bodies across time, even its patchwork reforms cannot hold back the flood. That flood doesn’t remain “Black.” It spills outward and upward. It becomes America’s pool of democratic drift with corruption normalized, cruelty rationalized, public goods hollowed out, and then everybody acting surprised when the house starts leaning.

This is why Deshawn’s reframe matters. Accountability isn’t disloyalty but maintenance, care, and the ordinary work of self-governance. Unity that can’t survive scrutiny is not a strength. Instead, it’s fragility wearing a crown. And the institutions that will carry us through what’s coming won’t be the ones that demand silence to preserve an image but instead will be the ones sturdy enough to tell the truth, correct course, and keep moving.

We don’t owe anyone perfection.

We owe each other honesty. If the world insists on watching us, let it watch us repair what we build, protect who we serve, and refuse to confuse love with quiet.

References:

• Apple TV+ Press. “Manhunt.” March 15, 2024. https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/manhunt/.

• Deshawn, Chad. “When Black Unity Can’t Survive Scrutiny.” IAMCHADDESHAWN (Substack), January 16, 2026. Accessed January 16, 2026. https://iamchaddeshawn.substack.com/.
  (Note: the specific post URL wasn’t publicly indexable in the sources I could retrieve, so this cites the publication and homepage.)

• Murphy, Sean. “Oklahoma Black Lives Matter Leader Indicted for Fraud, Money Laundering.” Associated Press, December 2025. https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-oklahoma-city-fraud-dickerson-9457bac0f4587f394fae4756ffca9c3d.

• Morrison, Aaron. “$6M Black Lives Matter House Welcomes Families into Space of Freedom and Healing.” Associated Press, November 2023. https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-finances-mansion-dc28cf47e3724c31d5791c90555b5b75.

• “The AP Interview: BLM’s Patrisse Cullors Denies Wrongdoing.” Associated Press, May 8, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/business-los-angeles-race-and-ethnicity-philanthropy-only-on-ap-db1db730c77540f0cbc614b0d3522b88.

• “Justice Department Investigating Fraud Allegations in Black Lives Matter Movement, AP Sources Say.” Associated Press, October 30, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/371e3277ff3b78bc73d3467c4692c66c.

• PBS NewsHour. “Justice Department Investigating Fraud Allegations against Black Lives Matter Leaders, AP Sources Say.” October 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/justice-department-investigating-fraud-allegations-against-black-lives-matter-leaders-ap-sources-say.

• ProPublica. “Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc.” Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed January 16, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824862489.

• United States Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Oklahoma. “Executive Director of Black Lives Matter OKC Charged with Wire Fraud and Money Laundering.” Press release, December 11, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/executive-director-black-lives-matter-okc-charged-wire-fraud-and-money-laundering.

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Why Tides and Black Lives Matter Are Fighting Over $33 Million.” May 23, 2024. https://www.philanthropy.com/news/why-tides-and-black-lives-matter-are-fighting-over-33-million/.

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I watched It Was Just an Accident last night, and I can’t recommend it anymore. It opens in Iran with a moment so ordinary it’s almost sinister: a family man driving at night hits a dog, upsets his daughter, and tries to wash it away with the phrase that doubles as an authoritarian lullaby: "It was just an accident." Then his car breaks down, and he needs help. And that’s when we meet the film’s central character, a mechanic named Vahid, who becomes convinced the man in front of him is his former interrogator and torturer.

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Today, I just want to sit with the truth that this has been a brutal time for women in America.

What I keep returning to is the quiet tragedy of all these hundreds of thousands of Black women being told, not because they’re incompetent or unqualified or because the economy is bad, but precisely because they were perfected and polished to be the most capable, most qualified versions of themselves that they could be, and then used as pawns in a chess game of politics. Just like misogyny is not an intersection of oppression, it conspires.

But it’s not just Black women. It’s all women. We have now twice elected a man credibly accused of sexual assault, a man found liable in a civil case of battery of a woman, a man who treats women reporters, women voters, and women elected officials as playthings to be mocked. Piggies, garbage, whatever gets the crowd going. And he does it knowing full well that there is a culture that craves that very thing.

That same culture has learned to weaponize women, especially on the right: supporting the ambitious ones just long enough for the photo-op and then tossing them aside the second they actually ask for power rather than proximity. Marjorie wants a Senate seat. Elise is looking for a diplomatic post. Instead, they get a front row seat, watching the machine they served eat them up like it did everyone else. It is misogyny with a loyalty clause.

And the psychic toll of all this? Huge. We live in a country where women are told to work twice as hard, be twice as kind, and carry twice the burden, but are passed over by men who wouldn’t know how to write a job application, much less a considerate essay. Yet, we’ve seen other countries, even other authoritarian countries, elect women. Here we have two of the most prepared public servants of modern times, both felled by a man who couldn’t even stop campaigning during his own criminal trial.

And now we have a Secretary of Defense who is accused of sexual misconduct and war crimes in a country where the oppression of women is background noise.

So today, I just want to light a candle. Not just in mourning, but in witness. For every woman whose story was dismissed. For every professional who listened to and played by the rules, only to have the rules change. For every daughter growing up in a world that’s always debating whether or not she’s worthy.

More on that in the weeks to come. I just needed to say it out loud.

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I just finished All Her Fault, and I wanted to let you know how satisfied I was to see a woman-centered drama about the quiet wars women wage inside homes dressed up as havens, and how it’s through real, gut-level female friendship that the two lead women can extricate themselves from the hands of the husbands who had slowly and insidiously tried to own them.

The series opens with Marissa (Sarah Snook) arriving to pick up her son from a play date, only to find he is missing and the woman who answers the door doesn’t appear to know who she is. The series is about lying, hiding things, the secrets we keep, and the things we bury. Symbolically, the mystery is a pressure cooker that slowly depicts how deeply the women are enmeshed in marriages that not only fail them but erase them.

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In a nation where it is now normal for the president to call a journalist “piggie” and accuse public servants of sedition for urging military personnel not to follow illegal orders, we must ask ourselves: has the worst yet to come?

This week, the U.S. Coast Guard considered allowing swastikas and nooses to be reclassified as merely “potentially divisive” rather than outright hate symbols. That decision, though swiftly walked back, is pretty on the nose. It’s an ominous development for a once-storied branch of the military. It’s a reminder that institutional rot often starts with rhetorical decay.

The devolution of this moment is built on a fractured national memory of the Civil Rights era. Some profited from the belief that racism had been solved, treating the era as a closed chapter in a moral fairytale. Others lived in its reactionary aftermath, where the backlash against Black advancement was rebranded as political consensus, an embrace of economic inequality and militarized policing, so long as it was marketed with fear of the other.

What’s most tragic is that the people entrusted with narrating this moment, the so-called stewards of democracy, are trapped in a language and framing that not only birthed the current moment but now actively alienates the public. Their tone-deaf commitment to civility politics, and shallow historical analogies makes democracy feel like a stale rerun from the ‘90s rather than a vital experiment in peril.

History and memory are deeply intertwined. Those who recall the Civil Rights era as an existential threat to American hierarchies, legal, racial, patriarchal, are drawn to today’s neon-lit authoritarianism with its branded dominance and casual cruelty. Meanwhile, those who saw that period as a turbulent but resolved moral reckoning are still clinging to illusions of civic rationality and institutional norms, even as those very norms collapse in real time. America’s long-standing identity groups, be they racial, regional, religious, or ideological, remain the true organizing principles of its politics, not pluralism or policy.

We live in interesting times, yes—but also hazardous ones. The president of the United States is using the bully pulpit not just to insult journalists, but to label his political opponents as seditious traitors, laying rhetorical groundwork for violence.

His followers hear the call. His sympathizers excuse it. His enablers shrug.

And yet, democracy is being sold back to us in algorithmically-optimized pundit-speak by legacy media and elite commentators who still believe David Broder and the Clinton Global Initiative were high-water marks of civic health. This is not just a communications failure, it’s a moral one.

Bathed in the floodlights of spectacle and terror, the nation teeters toward decadent decline. The post-Cold War years increasingly resemble a grand exercise in elite navel-gazing, where myth-making replaced reckoning, and historical amnesia passed for unity. In the harsh light of unfiltered memory, Trump doesn’t appear as a deviation, but as the inevitable sequel to the triumphalism of a nation that elected its first Black president and then refused to confront the consequences.

The great failure of centrist storytellers, past and present, is not just their inability to stop the slide. It’s that they still can’t tell the story honestly.

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A House of Dynamite

I watched Kathryn Bigelow’s film A House of Dynamite, and it is haunting. The film essentially shows a world where all the defense spending in the world can’t avert nuclear annihilation. After decades of arms races and failed disarmament, we now live in a house packed with dynamite—silent, inert, until someone flips the wrong switch or stumbles in the dark.

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I find myself skeptical that this is a major inflection point in America’s long, tortured reckoning with Trump’s political power. Yes, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427-1, the Senate unanimously, and Trump has now pledged to sign it. That is, on its face, remarkable. But in a country where Access Hollywood was just the overture to a years-long spectacle of scandal survival, we should pause before mistaking catharsis for change.

The nearly unanimous vote to release the Epstein files feels like a moment of bipartisan moral clarity. But that feeling itself should raise questions. When every faction in Congress rushes to the same moral podium, it’s worth asking whether we’re watching a reckoning or a ritual. Maybe a pre-scripted act of narrative containment disguised as accountability.

Many pundits are already declaring Trump weakened, his grip loosening, the walls closing in. Perhaps they’re right. But I’ve learned to distrust the choreography of elite consensus, especially when it emerges so suddenly around something as grotesque and painful as Epstein’s network of abuse. From the Mueller report to the Ukraine scandal to the twin impeachments to January 6th, we’ve been here before. Each moment was supposed to be the one. Each time, he survived and often came out stronger.

This isn’t meant to dampen the justified outrage or the profound need for truth. Survivors deserve transparency. They deserve justice. But that’s exactly why I worry. Because too often in America, transparency becomes a stand-in for transformation, and trauma becomes a stage for performative righteousness. The bipartisan unity here risks retraumatizing survivors by placing their pain inside yet another political morality play.

Meanwhile, the costs of groceries, healthcare, and housing continue to rise. The job market is tightening, and structural pressures grow. And we’re left with the uncomfortable possibility that the Epstein file release will become a weekend of headlines—not a month of movement.

Yes, Epstein’s crimes and the monstrous system that enabled him should horrify anyone. But the populist right has long used that horror to feed a different beast: a conspiracy machine powered by White nationalist anxiety and masculine grievance. Trump doesn’t suffer from the stain of association in that world. He thrives on it. He is their monster. And for many, that is his appeal.

If the files are explosive, Trump will point to his role in releasing them. If they’re underwhelming, he’ll claim vindication. Either way, this moment could strengthen, not shatter, his mythology.

We still have three years to go. And the desire to believe this is the turning point, the moment when justice wins and Trumpism fades, is deeply human. But we’ve seen what happens when hope is sold too early. When catharsis is mistaken for consequence. When survivors are placed center stage, only to be moved offscreen when the credits roll.

We have a long way to go. Let’s not confuse the opening of the files with the closing of a chapter. Not yet.

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From American Son to Trump’s America

I love watching the 30 for 30 documentaries on ESPN. They’re more than just sports stories. They’re windows into the American psyche, past and present. They show us what the nation wants to believe about itself, and what it refuses to confront.

I recently watched American Son, which tells the story of Michael Chang, the youngest man ever to win the French Open, and the first American male to do it in decades. At 17, he beat Ivan Lendl, a dominant force in tennis, despite cramping so badly in the final sets that he could barely move. But the drama wasn’t just on the court. Off it, Chang represented an America that rarely got screen time: Asian American, devoutly Christian, reserved yet fierce. A son of Taiwanese immigrants rising on a global stage at the very moment tanks were rolling into Tiananmen Square.

The documentary is beautifully made, filled with reverence and emotion. It’s about tennis, yes, but also about representation, assimilation, and the soft projection of American values during a time when the U.S. needed to look morally superior to the rest of the world. While student protesters in China were being crushed under authoritarian boots, here was a Chinese American teenager triumphing in Paris, humble and patriotic, embodying everything America wanted to say about itself.

It made me think about the world that shaped the centrist political commentators and Never Trump conservatives of today. The ones who seem so baffled, so genuinely blindsided by the rise of Trumpism.

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an excellent movie, and you should absolutely catch it in IMAX. It’s a big-screen, big-heart kind of film. But as I watched, I couldn’t help but reflect on how deeply steeped it is in 1960s idealism, a golden age in the American imagination, rudely interrupted by the mess of history.

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I’ve been watching 90 Day Fiancé with my partner, and it’s been... extremely enjoyable. Normally, I steer clear of reality TV like it’s a checkout line with too many tabloid covers. But lately, as storm clouds gather in the world and in the soul, it’s become my guilty pleasure of choice.

For the uninitiated, 90 Day Fiancé is a TLC reality show where Americans fall in love with foreigners online and then have 90 days to get married once their partner arrives in the U.S. on a K-1 visa. It’s drama, delusion, paperwork, and pillow talk, all rolled into one.

The show is an operatic mess—equal parts comedy, chaos, and cringe. It’s a reminder of what people do when they forget a camera is on them, or worse, when they remember and think the camera is their big break. The thirst for attention is exquisite.

Chef’s kiss.

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Author’s Note: If you’ve been keeping score, yes, I write about Disney a lot. It’s not a mouse cult thing (I swear), it’s part of an ongoing exercise in memory, identity, and mild media-induced existentialism. These essays are how I sift through the slightly fogged-over vault of my childhood and interrogate how deeply a cartoon empire managed to program entire generations, myself included, without most of us noticing.

Disney was a huge part of my upbringing. But it also served as a mirror to the world I inhabited—one that signaled stability, cultural competence, and a deep, unquestioned trust in the institutions that now seem... let's say, shakier in hindsight. These pieces are part nostalgia, part critique, and part therapy. (All unpaid until now.)

If this resonated, or at least made you laugh-while-crying, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Support more dives into the sparkly depths of soft power, childhood mythology, and the occasional talking animal pushing empire with a smile.

Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999) is one of those flicks you saw as a kid and still recall during your quarter-life crisis, because it’s just spooky enough to stand out from the saccharine sea of other Disney Channel Original Movies. It follows Frances McCausland (played by Erin Chambers), who suddenly becomes the prime suspect behind town-wide pranks, from power outages to gelatin‑flooded pools, in her sanitized suburb of Middleburg. Enter Larry Houdini (Ty Hodges), an imaginary friend visible only to her, guiding her through the breadcrumb trail of boogey-infused chaos. Sure, it leans into some old-school tropes, but it also hits like a surprisingly raw portrait of grief, guilt, and childhood trauma.

This was Disney in its formative DCOM (Disney Channel Original Movie) years, when they hadn’t yet found the assembly‑line formula. It’s a relic from the moment when Disney had scoped out its core audience: kids from stable homes, raised to see diversity as inevitable, ready to chase self‑actualization instead of just surviving. In that mix of branding and ideology, we got films about growing up “wrong,” literally becoming a ghost story, and maybe, just maybe, finding your way back.

The boogeyman exists in nearly every culture: La Llorona in Mexico, the Kludde in Belgium, Japan’s Namahage, and, of course, the Middle English “bogeyman” from the 15th century. Disney, of course, adapted the trope for modern America, creating an allegory about emotional and cultural exclusion, all while doubling as a Y2K babysitter.

Don’t Look Under the Dream

Middleburg is peak Stepford-lite suburbia: perfect lawns, drama-optional schools, emotionally literate parents who bake muffins and have heart-to-hearts. But flip that glossy surface, and it’s a story about who gets to belong in this so-called utopia.

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American Rhapsody

Every time I listen to Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin, I’m transported to early twentieth-century America: a place teeming with both optimism and dread, swaying between the poles of modern wonder and industrial dehumanization. The composition fuses solo piano with jazz band in perfect sync, like bees to honey. The keys lay the foundation; the band builds upon it. Together, they craft an opus of urban chaos, jazzy inflection, and musical storytelling. From the unmistakable clarinet glissando that opens the piece to the final swell of converging instrumentation, Rhapsody in Blue becomes the soundtrack of a nation transforming, from candlelit farmhouses to electrified city centers, from small-town innocence to mass-marketed madness.

Premiering on February 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall in New York City, the concert billed itself as “An Experiment in Modern Music.” An apt title. Jazz was the music of modern America—restless, improvisational, and wildly alive. Rhapsody feels less like a composition than a sonic migration, a sweeping movement from old-world melancholy to new-world spectacle. But its legacy is complicated. Beneath its sweeping beauty lies a history of appropriation and stereotype, echoing America’s unresolved relationship with Black communities and Black musical innovation.

Contemporary jazz composer Ethan Iverson put it bluntly, calling Rhapsody “corny and caucasian” in a 2024 New York Times reflection. “We are blessed and stuck with this piece,” he wrote, “a flawed classic that exemplifies our nation’s unsettled relationship with the originators of African American music and technique.” His critique is echoed in a Grammy.com write-up on the piece’s centennial resonance, tracing the long debate over Gershwin’s work, one that stretches back to Duke Ellington himself, who once argued that Porgy and Bess failed to reflect a genuine “Negro musical idiom.”

And yet, not all within the Black artistic tradition condemned it. Musicians like Art Blakey and Billy Strayhorn found value and beauty in Rhapsody, proof that cultural critique is never monolithic. A century later, amid revanchist politics that make even that hopeful distance feel fragile, modern artists like Lara Downes have taken Rhapsody in Blue and reinterpreted it, reshaping its meaning by deepening its connection to the African American roots it once obscured. Downes also weaves in diasporic traditions from Central and South America, Asia, and the Middle East—communities long othered in the American project, but central to its true cultural language.

Gershwin himself was the product of Russian Jewish immigrants and grew up in the heart of America’s melting pot, Brooklyn, New York. Though the lens of his time was retrograde and even offensive to modern sensitivities, he was attuned to the palpable energy rising in the Harlem Renaissance. He had enough dynamism in his own experiences to seek it out.

Rhapsody in Blue, with all its tension, grit, and advance, was playing in my head as I dove into Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. The themes of urban landscapes amidst an anxious nation were translated onto the silver screen for unsuspecting audiences, and unfortunately, brought the ugly racial paradigm with it. But just as moving through Rhapsody in Blue showcases both the energetic hopes and lost dreams of America in the 1920s, these two films reveal the heart-pounding Depression-era escapism of Berkeley’s choreography and its visceral ability to strip away the American mask in an era of betrayal.

42nd Street

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Programming Note: This post was originally intended for Friday, but I hope it offers a meaningful start to your week. Going forward, Screen Musings will appear on Saturdays rather than Fridays. While Friday movie nights shaped how I first fell in love with film, moving the series allows for a more balanced rhythm — and Saturdays feel like a natural mome…

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Reader Note: Starting this month, two of my four monthly Monday posts will be available exclusively for paid subscribers. These pieces will be deeply researched and centered on challenging my own priors, with the goal of normalizing intellectual growth, curiosity, and the ongoing work of identifying our blind spots. This space is about engaging with com…

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A twisted, inverted fairy tale took home Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, and that’s precisely what Anora delivers. Directed, written, and edited by Sean Baker, the film is a raw and haunting exploration of power, wealth, and expl…

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Riddick (2013) is a typical early 2010s blockbuster, one that was clearly made before the reckoning of the Me Too movement. The film’s only prominent female character is hyper-sexualized and exists primarily through the lens of Riddick’s affection, rather than having an authentic narrative of her own. This was the first thi…

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The Illusions of Empire

The Quiet American (2002), directed by Phillip Noyce, is a deeply pensive film that unfolds against the backdrop of a Vietnam teete…

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The Age of the Overblown Blockbuster

One of the perks of being a mid-1990s millennial is remembering the world before the streaming revolution while also reckoning with the consequences of this technology renaissance. On Friday nights, I distinctly remember renting movies with my family. There were spy dramas, animated famil…

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