Published Work
Myles E. Johnson
Artist
“The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” — Toni Cade Bambara | HAUSMUVA.NET
“The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” — Toni Cade Bambara | HAUSMUVA.NET
Published Work
Beyoncé is at the pinnacle of her career. At the Coachella festival in the Southern California desert on Saturday, she showed that there's nothing this mother of three can't do. But she didn't just kill the performance; she also rewrote the book on black respectability politics.
Historically, whiteness does not reward black defiance. Surely we know that a culture that forgot Zora Neale Hurston until Alice Walker returned her to glory in her work wouldn't reward Beyoncé. American culture has long punished black people who make work that explores black narratives without considering the gaze of a white consumer.
Photo courtesy of Instagram @serenawilliams Serena Williams is looking toward the future, bare-naked against a gray background on the cover of Vanity Fair 's August issue. She is pregnant, both with her child and our expectations.
Suicide in the Black community may be a difficult concept to understand, but it should never be assumed to be cowardly. Last summer was smoldering hot and my ideas were dangerous. The summer was long and I was having my own personal winter inside of the heat of July.
In 2000, The Donny & Marie Osmond Show interviewed Little Richard which led to one of his most candid reflections on his childhood and relationship to masculinity. In front of a virtually all-white audience, he describes the bloody beatings his father would give him while naked and tied up.
On "Sally Ride" Janelle Monae coos: "Wake up, Mary, have you heard the news? Wake up, Mary, you have the right to choose." Monae is speaking to the Madonna, The Virgin Mary, willing the feminine symbol of Christianity from her sleep, shaking the floor of Christian dogmatism with two sentences.
Over the weekend, Donald Glover released his latest visual "This is America" accompanied with a sing-rap song that sounds like something you'd expect as Pharrell's next Billboard hit. If you've somehow missed it, the video showed a deranged Donald Glover sliding in and out of choreography committing acts of violence that echo real life moments of terror like the Charleston Church Massacre.
Drake: Photo by Ethan Miller/BBMA2017/Getty Images, Big Freedia: Photo by Scott Dudelson / Getty Images), Beyonce: "Formation" Video In the first scene of Drake's "Nice For What" video, you hear the voice of the black, queer New Orleans bounce artist, Big Freedia. What you see, however, is a white woman with blonde hair looking sultry into the camera.
The internet is a capricious beast; someone can go from deified to vilified in a matter of minutes. Kim Kardashian and rapper Cardi B, whose single "Bodak Yellow" just made the Billboard Top 10, are the latest examples of how internet-shaming can both inform and disempower, and how the same societal forces that give a celebrity like Kim Kardashian so much influence can cripple black and brown celebrities who commit similar faux pas.
Black cultural productions are often misinterpreted. This is to be expected because the intentions of why things are created move depending on the identity creating it; some folks create to relieve, to express, to entertain, to sell, to fit in with dominant culture, and some create, to dominate.
The grief and tragic energy around any murder can make one forget the political potential each one possesses. And in the wake of recent heightened media attention around cis-heterosexual black male deaths due to state-sanctioned violence or recent high school shootings, many are being reminded of the inherently political nature of taking a life.
As a thought experiment, I sometimes ask myself, "What would they say about me if I were killed?" I know how other black children, often killed by the state, are treated by the media. These stories never feel true; this is not how the black people I know live.
sometimes when I wake up in the morning and see all the faces I just can't breathe -Nikki Giovanni I wake up and pour myself tea because I have bullied myself out of drinking coffee daily. I anticipate working today because it is a type of healing for me.
By throwing the first brick, Marsha Johnson bonded the LGBTQ movement to the Long Hot Summer of 1967 The first thing I noticed about the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City was its cleanliness. It was, in fact, beyond clean. It was sterile. Sanitized.
This is one of three personal essays Bitch Media is publishing today to reflect on the one-month anniversary of the Orlando Pulse shooting. This essay includes racial and homophobic slurs that some readers may find triggering.
"Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!" - Oscar Wilde Language does not get to exist how a photograph or art does, preserved in the Louvre or in a scrapbook until the apocalypse; rather language has a finite life just like humans do.