He saw me that day I stepped through the river and saw the portal to this nothing land. This Beyond is a chaos pit of screams and cackles; a dim iridescent sky that stretches over a bright, breathing landscape. The hounds of Tindalos barked and snared all around us. Cthulhu, Azathoth, all your favorites were there. And so was Howard’s pasty nervous ass.

Now I'm just laughing at the absurd nature over it all. How apparent and repetitive it all is. I'm blankly curious where the tipping point is anymore. It's not in the sanctity of the church. It's not in the pre-k classroom. Certainly not in the predictable banality of shopping on a Saturday morning.

One of my friends immediately pointed out the fact it was my anniversary. They had been there for it, driving me to and from doctor appointments and surgery. Watching me pull myself across the backseat of their car, struggling to find a way to lift a leg with a ruptured tendon. I read their message, carefully crafted from several miles and a few time zones away. They wanted to make sure I recognized all that an anniversary could bring. And gave their message a heart react and I thought I got that. Fast forward to about a week later when I’m telling another friend that I spent my 8 hour day at work fighting off a panic attack

Were we so busy looking for the marginalized to eat the rich, for an American made apocalypse lead by mystical horsemen that we missed the maternalistic double agent we were happy to give the keys to?

The issue with all of these scenes of racial complexity is not their existence but that it’s hard to tell whether these moments are intentionally awkward or if it’s the byproduct of the white male gaze.

There’s an implied hope then that BlacKKKlansman can therefore also make a lasting impact on its audience. I believe it will for some folks.

But I know it won’t for those of us already doing the work.

"[H]ow do I explain at my jovial workplace that I woke up crying thinking about Killmonger again?

You don't.

You just tell them “it was good” and try to drop it.

But I almost called in black on Friday."

I sometimes find myself fascinated with certain women. How they move in the world, completely aware and yet still at ease. I hesitate to call them “strong women” because we have such an immediate concept of what that must mean. Ripley firing a huge gun with a child in her arms, yes, is an image of a Strong Woman™ but it’s not the only one and not the type I write almost 2000 words for. I’m drawn to strength because of femininity, not in spite of it. Strength in tandem with vulnerability. Strength through unapologetic honesty. It’s that duality in that I see in Eris Eady, who I’m sure was not expecting all of this when she asked me to take some photos of her getting a new tattoo last Saturday

There are bills to pay and personal crises to solve and grocery shopping to do and repairs to the roof or the car or to those favorite pair of pants. The dog needs walking and the kids need back to school supplies and you should call your mom and reply back to all those emails and figure out what to do for dinner and this is true of literally all of us. That’s the key. All these things are true for all of us and, on top of that, for us there is also a sizable part of the population that actively wants us dead. That sees a modicum of success after centuries of abuse, violence, broken promises and systemic oppression as an encroachment on their existence. That is reality.

White guys of course know best what it’s like to be a white guy in America. Stories like Fight Club and American Beauty have to be told from a white male perspective because to change one of those elements would be to change the meaning of the story itself. I’m sure that can hold true for a Superman comic as well. But to get to the heart of Superman, you have to get to the heart of being a perpetual outsider.  Clark Kent is an act that Kal El performs, he just happens to in the right costume to do so already. 

This attempt to “other” our worse behavior does nothing to solve it.
 

 The Killing Joke isn’t about Barbara becoming Oracle or the simple plot of the Joker’s assault and kidnapping. It’s about the relationship between the Batman and the Joker and whether or not their ultimate fate -death- is unavoidable.  It’s a story about extremes and parallels. The Joker’s hypothesis that one bad day is what keeps everyone from going mad like himself and Batman. 

[S]ixteen students were chosen to go.  We were kind of a big deal, even if only in our mind. We had worked really hard to go and in some cases (like mine) our families sacrificed a lot for us. We were better than the kids who were only going out of state that summer and we were certainly a step above the weird anime nerds that could only dream about visiting Japan someday. We were learned and tested. We were all feeling pretty proud of ourselves and of our clear intellect.

Or at least I was.

I’m going to say a lot of negative things before I say anything positive so let me give you the TLDR up front: It’s good. It’s worth the movie price in 2D. It proves that female directors have been grossly overlooked for literally no reason at all but sexism. It’s fun and it delivers. 

But the hype is too high.

The excitement black people have taken to social media to share is based in the fact that this kind of representation already delivers in meaning. 

My shear will, my drive, my dedicated focus that is so much a part of my being that it oozes from my pores and speaks before I do, wasn’t enough.  It was met with something greater.  And today I can only guess that this helpless feeling is what one is left with after God closes a door on you, though I still couldn’t begin to tell you why He would close said door.

I’ve been trying for hours now to encapsulate how this kind of total disregard to the gravity of this situation hurts so damn much. I can’t find words that speak to how invisible I feel as a black woman, that even in death there is no guarantee those in power will have the decency to see me as a human being.