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Just Mercy
Reproductive justice. Climate justice. Food justice. Social justice. Append the word “justice” to any other word and you’ve got a ready-made brand platform for niche activism. As cultural forces shape the meaning of words over time, they risk losing their specificity and sharpness. The word “justice” risks dissipating into a partisan nebula. Depending which side…
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco
At the end of the day, we’re all just looking for a place to call home. Movies have long wrestled with this sentiment and not just in a physical sense. Hitchcock’s characters don’t trust the people closest to them, and are often punished when they do. Kubrick finds humanity and depravity in the cosmos just…
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A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich
Politicians, journalists and experts rarely agree, but they have all named the current opioid situation a plague. It’s an appropriate word, with historical and biblical connotations; in every generation, our country has been marred by the misapplication of drugs. Morphine after the Civil War, opium in the late 1800s, cocaine in the 1900s, amphetamines in…
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If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner only to be supplanted by the true Best Picture winner — Jenkins’ Moonlight. The debacle was a distraction from what should have been…
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
My Spider-Man was the 1981 “Spider-Friends” version, complete with invented sidekicks, incomprehensible Saturday morning subplots, shoddy animation, and a little dog too (spoiler: they were all killed off by a vampire in the 2014 Spider-Verse story arc because… comics). My brother had a Mego doll and Underoos when we were kids (I had the Hulk),…
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Claudine
“I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical, she continues: “much of the film was shot around 145th Street and Convent Avenue, the very same neighborhood where I was raised…Claudine and I were…
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Sapphire
“We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t even credited — but her sharp delivery slices right through a thick curtain of denial that’s always hanging around; the hypocrisy of a United Kingdom…
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Black Panther
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Mudbound
