I ended up where half the country ends up now, on TikTok, watching a white man explain why men are failing. He was going on about why so many men are single, why they’re angry, why they feel displaced in a world that used to feel like it was built for them. The comment section was full of men nodding along, blaming feminism, blaming women’s standards, blaming everything except what’s staring back at them in the mirror.

And I kept thinking: this is not a crisis of men. This is the collapse of an economic and moral monopoly that once guaranteed men relevance without requiring principled, emotional, spiritual, ethical, or relational growth. What we’re watching in TikTok comment sections and state legislatures is what happens when that guarantee expires.

• • •

First, let’s be clear about the history. Until 1974, women in the United States could not independently access credit without a husband or male co-signer. No credit cards, no loans, no mortgages in our own names. Banks could legally deny women financial agency simply because we were women, and married women routinely needed their husbands’ permission to participate in the economy at all. Divorce often meant immediate financial freefall, and that’s if you could even get one without social exile. Your mother might remember this. Your grandmother certainly does.

So when we talk about women being “dependent” on men, we’re not speaking metaphorically. We’re describing policy. Marriage was an economic infrastructure before it was anything romantic. Women provided labor, loyalty, silence, and endurance while men provided access to money, legitimacy, and safety. Society stacked the deck with religious shame, social ostracism, and financial ruin, and the scarlet letter was always pinned to the woman, never to the circumstances that trapped her.

Then the terms changed. Not overnight, not evenly, but they changed for good.

• • •

Here’s what the manosphere refuses to understand: many women did not ‘choose’ independence. They were forced into it by male absence, inaction, or instability, and then discovered they could survive. I’m talking about the woman working two jobs because her partner couldn’t hold one down, the single mother who figured out how to stretch a paycheck because no one was coming to help, the wife who realized she was already doing everything alone, so she might as well actually be alone. And then there are the women who weren’t running from anything at all. They just wanted more for themselves. Not a rescue or some sort of recovery, just a life built on their own terms. That realization changed everything.

Now women are making their own money, paying their own rent, building their own credit. When a man pulls up leading with his Lexus while she’s driving something she bought herself, the calculus is different. The wallet alone doesn’t grant admission anymore. Character does. Emotional availability does. Integrity does. The willingness to show up as a partner rather than just a provider, waving a receipt.

This is not anti-man, and this is not “women don’t need men.” Who doesn’t appreciate a good man? And yes, there are men who’ve figured this out, who’ve done the interior work without needing a podcast or a platform to prove it. But appreciation is different from desperation, and desperation was the old model’s secret ingredient.

• • •

There’s a reason women adapted faster to this new landscape, and it’s not because we’re superior. It’s because we were never given a choice. Women were historically required to read moods, make space, manage households and our temperament, maintain relationships, and absorb emotional volatility. That was the job description, and we had to develop emotional fluency because religion, culture, work, and shit, pure survival demanded it.

Men weren’t asked to do the same. When money stopped being the sole credential, some found themselves in a new economy where emotional intelligence suddenly counted and was currency. And they didn’t know how to earn it.

This is where the manosphere becomes, psychologically, a grief circle for an obsolete version of masculinity. Kevin Samuels built a brand telling women their standards were “too high” while very seldom asking men to raise theirs. Andrew Tate sells dominance as philosophy. They’re not villains so much as symptoms, men offering maps to a world that no longer exists. Selling directions to Blockbuster in the age of streaming.

When identity collapses, people cling to metrics. Money becomes the last proof of worth because everything else requires emotional labor they were never equipped to perform. A “high-value man” gets reduced to a number of zeros, a watch brand, a car model, anything that can be measured without having to be felt. Funny how “high value” never seems to include therapy receipts.

• • •

Here’s where personal loss curdles into political retaliation.

When men feel displaced, unnecessary, and unchosen, and when they lack the tools for introspection, they don’t look inward for answers. They look for external systems that can restore the power they feel slipping away, and the personal grievance becomes a legislative agenda.

Look at the pattern. Roe v. Wade overturned. State legislators are proposing to make divorce harder, to eliminate no-fault divorce entirely. They frame it as “protecting families,” but the practical effect is limiting women’s ability to exit relationships. Then there are the attacks on contraception access and the rhetoric about “traditional values” that always seems to mean women having fewer options. The women who can least afford to leave will be trapped first. They always are.

This is not a coincidence. When women no longer need men to survive, some men reach for institutions that can still compel dependence. Control gets framed as morality; restriction gets dressed up as protection. Societies that cannot renegotiate power peacefully always attempt to enforce it.

The manosphere is the support group. The policies are the action plan. Those TikTok debates about why men are single are soft entry points into a political project that wants to roll back the clock to when women couldn’t leave, couldn’t earn, couldn’t choose.

• • •

We need to name this clearly: the backlash is loudest from white men. This isn’t about demonizing anyone but about understanding the math. White masculinity historically sat at the intersection of gender privilege, racial dominance, and economic access, and when that trifecta erodes, the sense of displacement compounds. The entitlement runs deeper because the guarantee felt more absolute.

Black men are not exempt from manosphere influence, but the entry point is often different. For some, it’s proximity to whiteness, proximity to a version of power they were historically told they couldn’t have. Black men have been systematically emasculated by white supremacy for generations, told they weren’t providers, weren’t protectors, weren’t men. Some are now reaching for the same toxic patriarchy that was never designed to include them, mistaking domination for dignity. Kevin Samuels was Black, and his audience was largely Black men. The political machinery driving legislative rollbacks is still concentrated in spaces where white male grievance has the most institutional power, but the ideology recruits everywhere and anyone.

Now contrast that with Black women. We are the most educated demographic in the United States, and we have been historically denied protection and provision, socialized to survive without guarantees. We built networks of care because no one was coming to save us, and we learned to thrive in the margins because the center was never offered.

That context explains why Black women are often less nostalgic for a past that never protected us in the first place. We’re not mourning the old arrangement because we’re clear-eyed about what it cost.

• • •

Let me be explicit about what this is not. This is not a dismissal of love, partnership, or masculinity. The goal isn’t to replace patriarchy with contempt. The goal is growth.

Think about it this way: we went from iPhone 1 to iPhone 16. We upgraded our technology, our expectations, our possibilities. But some men are still running the original software in a world that’s moved on, and instead of updating, they’re trying to roll back the operating system for everyone else. Nobody’s out here demanding we go back to flip phones, but somehow rolling back women’s rights is “tradition.”

Refusing to update doesn’t make you principled. It just makes you incompatible.

Women have done our own evolving, and we’re not finished because we still have our own growth to do. But we’ve expanded what we value. Some of us have learned to see beyond the wallet to the character beneath, and we’ve redefined what “high value” means to include integrity, emotional presence, and the willingness to be a partner rather than a toxic patriarch.

• • •

What does evolution actually look like? It looks like a man who can sit with discomfort instead of deflecting it, who can listen without already formulating a rebuttal, who understands that vulnerability is the foundation of real connection rather than a weakness to be hidden.

These men exist. I know them, and you probably do too. They don’t podcast their healing. They don’t monetize their vulnerability. They don’t sell courses on being “alpha.” They’re too busy being functional adults. They do the work quietly because they understand that the old model was killing them too, demanding a hollow performance of “provider” while denying them the depth of actual personhood.

The manosphere offers a comfortable lie: that the world is wrong, that women are the problem, that stagnation is safety. But the world isn’t going backward, no matter how many laws they pass or rights they strip. Women who have tasted independence don’t forget it, and policies can make things harder, but they can’t unmake what we now know about ourselves.

So the question isn’t whether men are still needed because they are. The question is whether they are willing to become who this moment requires, to trade the isolation of a patriarch for the true intimacy of a partner. The invitation is open, but no one can walk through it for them.

The women they want aren’t waiting. We’re already down the road with that iPhone 16.

A Ryan Murphy legal drama starring Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, and Niecy Nash-Betts should be a masterclass in complex female characters. Instead, All’s Fair is a glossy prison of perfection, where even tears are afraid to make a mess.

The show promises a story about powerful women fighting for other women — an all-female law firm taking on Los Angeles divorce cases with wit, grit, and solidarity. With a cast this stacked, it should work. But three episodes in, it’s clear the show’s fatal flaw isn’t its premise. It’s what happens when you cast someone who’s never willing to crack the perfect facade, and when a director known for pushing boundaries decides to protect that image instead of challenging it.

The Problem with Perfection

The problem isn’t just that Kim Kardashian can’t act, though let’s be honest, she can’t. It’s that every frame of this show feels like we’re still watching Kim Kardashian, not Allura Grant. Every hair strand is in place. The skin looks like porcelain. The Birkin bags are immaculate. Even when she cries, her face doesn’t move. The tears fall, but nothing creases. It’s like she’s afraid to spoil the makeup, to wrinkle the face, to mess up the image, so she cries with a straight face.

This is a perpetuation of a brand, and it stands in direct opposition to what great acting requires.

The Art of Deconstruction: What Kim Refuses to Do

Great acting is an act of deconstruction. It requires an actor to risk their public image to find a character’s emotional truth.

Remember when Charlize Theron gained thirty pounds, shaved her eyebrows, and wore prosthetic teeth to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster? She won an Oscar not because she was beautiful, but because she was willing to be ugly. Financiers literally told her she looked too ugly and tried to stop the film. She did it anyway.

That’s range.

That’s risk.

That’s acting.

We see it in Halle Berry, stripped down emotionally and physically for Monster’s Ball; in Mariah Carey, subdued and unrecognizable in Precious; in Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie Lyon, all rough edges and survival instinct. These women understood a fundamental truth: to be taken seriously as an actress, you have to be willing to let go of the image. You have to be willing to ugly cry—face contorted, makeup running, snot and all.

Kim Kardashian wants to be taken seriously, but she won’t crack. She is trapped in the conflict between Kim Kardashian, the brand—which is untouchable, flawless, and aspirational—and Kim Kardashian, the actress—who needs to be vulnerable, undone, and human. The brand is winning, and the performance is losing. As one critic noted, “Her very presence…feels fitting for a show that seems to want not to be watched so much as mined for viral bits and pieces.”

But the responsibility for this failure cannot rest on Kim alone. The director who cast her is complicit.

Ryan Murphy’s Betrayal of His Own Legacy

This is why I’m not just mad at Kim; I’m disappointed in Ryan Murphy. This is the man who built his career on shows that weren’t afraid to get messy.

He gave us Pose, which centered Black and Latino trans women with full humanity—their struggles with HIV and homelessness, but also their joy and dreams. He gave us Feud: Bette and Joan, which explicitly examined Hollywood’s cruel ageism and sexism. He turned American Horror Story into a showcase for actresses like Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson to do fearless, transformative work.

So why does All’s Fair feel so shallow? Why does it treat these incredible actresses like mannequins in a luxury showroom?

The show is about divorce lawyers, a profession inherently mired in messy, emotional, intimate battles. But Murphy’s direction gives us a fantasy of success completely detached from reality. There’s no 2 a.m. panic attacks, no courtroom defeats that shake their confidence. Just perfection.

When Murphy created Pose, he didn’t ask, “How can we make trans women aspirational?” He asked, “How can we make them human?” All’s Fair doesn’t feel human. It feels like an ad for a lifestyle that 99% of women will never have, or may not even want.

This cult of perfection sells a dangerous and narrow fantasy of female success.

The “Empowerment” Lie: When Success is Another Cage

Here’s what frustrates me most: Yes, successful women can have nice things. But is that the only version of success we’re selling?

I think about the average woman watching this show. She’s juggling work, kids, and bills. She’s fighting for promotions while dealing with imposter syndrome. She’s making partner while wondering if she’s a good enough mother. She deserves to see that woman on screen.

Real success for women includes disruption, uncertainty, and rebuilding. It means showing up even when you’re falling apart. It means the ugly cry because that’s what real emotion looks like. It means arriving at court with a wrinkled shirt because you were up all night preparing.

By contrast, All’s Fair’s aesthetic is wrapped in preservation. Don’t wrinkle. Don’t disturb the makeup. For many women watching, the visual message is exhausting: You must succeed and look perfect while doing it. That’s not inspiration; that’s an impossible standard. It’s the same patriarchal bullshit we’ve been fighting against, just wrapped in a feminist bow.

When we make female success synonymous only with Birkin bags and flawless skin, we narrow rather than widen possibilities. We tell women: you can have power, but only if you maintain the aesthetic. You can cry, but don’t let it mess up your makeup.

That’s just another cage.

The Verdict

Ryan Murphy, you can do better. You have done better. This cast, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts, are powerhouses who could’ve given us something real if the show had asked them to. And the women watching, trying to see themselves reflected in stories about success and power, they deserve better, too.

Kim Kardashian will never be a great actress until she’s willing to be something other than Kim Kardashian. She needs to risk the brand to find the artist. And All’s Fair will never be a great show until it’s willing to show us that success doesn’t require perfection, that sometimes the most powerful thing a woman can do is let her face move when she cries.

All’s Fair could’ve been a show about women reclaiming their power. Instead, it’s a show about women who already have so much power that the rest of us can’t relate. It’s aspiration porn masquerading as empowerment, and it’s exhausting.

We don’t need another show telling us what we should want to be. We need one that shows us who we actually are.

We need shows that reflect who we actually are: flawed, fighting, and still fucking powerful.

A few weeks ago, during a conversation about race in American schools, someone looked me straight in the face and insisted racism didn’t exist in education. They said it with conviction, eyebrows raised, tone firm, as if reciting a universal truth that required no proof. And because they felt the word “racism” was too sharp, too charged, too indicting, they tried out every synonym they could find.

“Bias.”

“Miscommunication.”

“Cultural mismatch.”

“Bad experiences.”

“Misunderstanding.”

Anything but the word they were avoiding.

That moment stayed with me because it was so familiar. That same evasive maneuver appears in every institution: policing, housing, healthcare, hiring, the military, you name it. Each one insists racism doesn’t live there. They don’t tolerate it. They have zero-tolerance policies. They’ve “moved past all that.” They would never.

And yet the disparities, the consequences, remain as visible as an oil stain on a white shirt.

It’s a national game of “Where’s Waldo?” except Waldo is six feet tall, dead center, and waving. The people who benefit from not seeing him keep peering into the corner, insisting, “Nope, don’t see him.” Spoiler: he’s never been hiding. He’s been on the payroll for centuries.

This is no innocent game of hide-and-seek. It’s a deliberate performance.

PEEKABOO POLITICS

There’s a game parents play with infants: peekaboo. Cover your eyes, and the child believes you’ve disappeared. To the baby, whatever isn’t seen must not exist.

This is how America treats racism.

Close your eyes, and the inequalities vanish. Cover your face, and the data disappears. Call it a different name, and you avoid accountability. Deny what is visible, and you avoid confronting the institution that benefits from it.

Peekaboo politics is a convenient performance for the people least harmed by racism. What a gift it is to live inside a system that protects you from the consequences of your own denial. But for the people on the other side of that denial, peekaboo is suffocating — a game that leaves them shouting into institutions that keep their hands over their eyes like toddlers refusing the truth.

And to maintain the illusion, we’ve become gold medalists in linguistic gymnastics.

THE EUPHEMISM OLYMPICS

Americans will twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels before they’ll name the thing directly.

We say “achievement gap” instead of racism. (The students aren’t achieving what, exactly? And who decided that benchmark?)

We say “officer-involved shooting” instead of racism. (Passive voice doing some HEAVY lifting there.)

We say “tough on crime” instead of racism. (Tough on which criminals, in which neighborhoods?)

We say “economic anxiety” instead of racism. (But only for certain anxious people.)

We say “implicit bias” instead of racism. (Because if it’s unconscious, no one has to take responsibility.)

I’ve spent 18 years in education equity, sitting in rooms where we discuss racially disparate outcomes using every word except the one that actually applies. We’ll commission a $50,000 study to explain why Black boys keep getting suspended at three times the rate of white boys, then ignore every recommendation that would require examining our own practices. It’s like hiring a nutritionist, listening to them explain you’re eating poison, then asking if they have any recipes that let you keep eating poison.

Of course, the language alone wouldn’t work without a system. We’ve industrialized the excuse-making process.

THE DENIAL PLAYBOOK

When the receipts for racial inequity pile up — and they always do — we follow a well-worn script.

Step 1: Acknowledge the disparity exists. (Very important — you have to seem reasonable.)

Step 2: List 47 possible explanations that have nothing to do with racism. Culture. Choices. Work ethic. Family structure. Personal responsibility. Bad luck. Mercury is in retrograde. Anything but the thing.

Step 3: Conclude that it’s “complicated” and “we need more research.” (This buys you another decade, minimum.)

Bonus Step: If anyone keeps pressing, accuse them of “playing the race card” or “being divisive.” Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than making the person pointing out racism the problem.

This playbook is applied universally because the employee in question has a flawless, if unacknowledged, record.

THE BEST RÉSUMÉ IN AMERICA

If racism were a person, I imagine him as America’s most successful freelancer. Under “Skills,” he lists: wealth extraction, policy distortion, narrative control, and an uncanny ability to make his presence felt while remaining off the company directory. Under “Work History,” he’s got 400 years of continuous employment across every sector. Under “References,” he writes “Available upon request,” but when you call, everyone says they’ve never worked with him.

He’s the consultant whose edits appear in every memo, though he doesn’t have an office. He’s the contractor who built the foundation of every institution, but whose name never makes it onto the paperwork.

And his work product is impeccable, if you know where to look. The receipts are published, debated, and ignored.

THE RECEIPTS KEEP PILING UP

The absurdity is that America produces endless evidence of racial inequity. Year after year, report after report, crisis after crisis. Yet no one claims authorship.

The Pentagon says racism doesn’t exist there. Yet in 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to axe DEI programs and boasted of scrapping Women, Peace & Security — rebranding it as “woke,” despite its 2017 bipartisan roots. Leadership pipelines remain overwhelmingly white and male. Promotions stall for Black officers. But racism? “Not in this building.”

Schools insist racism is not in their DNA. Yet according to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2020–21 data, Black boys are 8% of enrollment but 18% of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. Gifted programs are stratified. Teachers of color are underrepresented. But racism? “No, that’s not what’s happening. It’s more… complicated.”

Hospitals reject the idea of racism. Yet in 2023, Black women died in childbirth at 50.3 per 100,000 live births — over three times the rate for white women at 14.5, according to the CDC. Providers call this “cultural competency gaps,” as if Black patients just aren’t explaining their impending death clearly enough. But racism? “Impossible. We treat everyone the same.”

The economy provides the most blatant proof. Florida’s 2023 immigration law (SB 1718) was predicted to cost the state $12.6 billion in year one. By mid-2024, businesses were begging for relief as crops rotted and restaurants sat empty. We evict the chef, then call 911 because dinner isn’t ready. The direct line from racist policy to your grocery bill is bright as neon, but we’re still calling it a “supply chain issue.”

Now, you might be wondering how this keeps happening. The answer is: on purpose.

Maintaining this level of denial costs us everything. This employee is bankrupting us.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE CONTRACTOR IN AMERICA

Racism is astronomically expensive.

He’s the only contractor who consistently delivers over budget and behind schedule, yet keeps getting rehired. His “War on Drugs” promised safety and delivered mass incarceration and a trillion-dollar price tag. His immigration policies were supposed to “protect jobs,” and now farms and kitchens are understaffed.

We pay for him in hospital bills when untreated chronic conditions become ER visits. We pay for him in lost GDP when education systems fail entire demographics. We pay for him at the grocery store when we criminalize agricultural labor.

The effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act? That’s racism with a price tag — targeting the healthcare access of millions of Black, Latino, and low-income Americans while raising costs for everyone. The mass deportations? Racism, itemized on your receipt.

But denial? Denial is priceless. It costs nothing to pretend nothing is wrong. The American brand: we don’t fix what we can rename.

So after 400 years, where do we find this elusive employee?

SO WHERE IS RACISM?

The same place he’s always been, everywhere we’ve decided not to look. In the policy no one reads. In the hiring decision no one questions. In the discipline statistics no one investigates. In the pain, no one believes.

The truth is that racism is not elusive. We are. We are elusive in our responsibility. We are elusive in our honesty.

Racism isn’t hiding. He’s sitting at the table, feet up, eating off your plate. He’s been here so long, his ass print is forever indented into the chair. And every time someone finally points at him and says his name, twenty people jump up to say, “Who? I don’t see anyone. You must be imagining things.”

Peekaboo only works on babies. And America is a grown-ass adult long overdue to open its eyes.

This country has spent 400 years perfecting the art of benefiting from racism while denying its existence. That’s not ignorance — that’s strategy. You can’t accidentally avoid seeing something that big, that loud, that expensive. That takes work. That takes commitment.

You cannot fix what you refuse to name. The game is over. The mess is everywhere.

The nomad everyone swears they never let in has been getting a paycheck for 400 years.

Stop pretending you don’t see him.

We see you, racism. We know exactly where you work, and it’s long past time to fire you.

A few weeks ago, twenty Black conservatives surrounded one Black woman with a master’s degree. They weren’t debating policy or economics. The argument? Whether racism still exists. In 2025. On camera. For entertainment.

The Jubilee episode “1 Black Radical vs 20 Black Conservatives” should have been satire. Instead, it became a masterclass in what happens when willful ignorance metastasizes into self-hatred. Watch Amanda Seales, armed with facts, statistics, and lived experience, try to explain systemic oppression to people who have decided that denying it makes them special. Watch them dismiss data as “victim mentality.” Watch them confuse contrarianism with critical thinking.

One participant declared, with conviction, that Black people’s problems are “cultural, not systemic.” The last time this argument gained mainstream traction about Black Americans, those making it owned them.

This represents something beyond simple ignorance. This is intellectual surrender packaged as enlightenment. Anti-intellectualism with a podcast. The nightmares of ancestors streaming in 4K.

In 1833, teaching a Black person to read in Alabama was punishable by fines and imprisonment. In 1865, formerly enslaved people built schools before they built homes. In 1960, Ruby Bridges needed armed guards to attend elementary school. In 2025, Black people on social media boast about how they “don’t read all that” as if illiteracy were a personality trait.

The journey from illegal literacy to voluntary intellectual abandonment should have taken centuries. Some have completed it in two generations.

From Freedom Schools to TikTok

After emancipation, Black literacy rates rose from under 10 percent in 1865 to over 50 percent by 1900. That transformation was not assimilation. It was resistance.

Between 1865 and 1900, formerly enslaved people and their children built over 90 institutions of higher learning. According to recent educational data, HBCUs produce 40 percent of all Black engineers, 50 percent of all Black teachers, 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists, and 80 percent of Black judges, despite comprising only 3 percent of the nation’s colleges.

George Washington Carver, born enslaved, became one of the most prominent scientists of the early 20th century, developing more than 300 products from peanuts. Katherine Johnson’s calculations as a NASA mathematician were critical to America’s space program. When John Glenn was about to become the first American to orbit Earth, he specifically requested that Johnson verify the computer’s calculations. “If she says they’re good,” Glenn said, “then I’m ready to go.”

The Harlem Renaissance was not merely poetry and jazz; it was a declaration that intellect and creativity were Black birthrights.

This is the legacy. How did the culture shift from W.E.B. Du Bois debating the Talented Tenth to online debates about whether the moon landing was staged?

The Anatomy of Anti-Intellectualism

1. The Proximity to Whiteness Paradox

Intellectualism became coded as “white” in America, and too many have accepted this false premise. Speaking with standard grammar becomes “talking white.” Reading books becomes “acting like them.” Possessing a vocabulary beyond colloquialisms means someone has “forgotten where they came from.”

The tragic irony should be obvious. The same white supremacists who once criminalized Black literacy now watch as some Black Americans voluntarily reject education. Literacy laws are no longer necessary when some enforce intellectual boycotts independently.

Sociologist John McWhorter identified this as one of three “defeatist thought patterns” that have become foundational to certain aspects of Black identity: victimization, separatism, and anti-intellectualism. Once understandable as survival tactics, these patterns now, he argues, make their adherents appear “paranoid, parochial, and dumb.”

Consider the reversal: the master’s tools have been repackaged as liberation theology. Intellectual curiosity gets labeled “white supremacy” while actual white supremacists celebrate every dropout, every disengaged student, every brilliant mind that dims itself to fit in.

2. The Legitimate Mistrust Problem

Historical grievances run deep, and justifiably so. The Tuskegee experiments turned Black

 men into unwitting test subjects. Henrietta Lacks’s cells were taken without consent. J. Marion Sims perfected surgical procedures by experimenting on enslaved women without anesthesia. Add chronically underfunded schools, redlined neighborhoods, and medical apartheid.

Economic data compounds the problem. Black college graduates carry an average of $25,000 more in debt than their white peers. Four years after graduation, nearly half owe more than they initially borrowed.

The fatal error lies in the response: instead of becoming more informed for self-protection, too many reject information entirely. Instead of learning to analyze medical studies to identify exploitation, they reject medicine wholesale. Instead of mastering legal frameworks to fight injustice, they declare education itself the enemy.

This is equivalent to discovering contaminated water and choosing to die of thirst. Yes, institutions have failed Black communities. But rejecting knowledge doesn’t punish institutions; it punishes those who need that knowledge most.

3. The Crisis of Black Male Educational Attainment

According to HBCU enrollment data, Black men now comprise only 26 percent of students at historically Black colleges and universities, down from 38 percent in 1976. At institutions built specifically for Black excellence, young Black women outnumber men by nearly three to one.

This educational gender gap intersects dangerously with digital indoctrination. College enrollment among young Black men declines while subscriptions to what is known as the “manosphere” — that loose network of podcasts, YouTube channels, and forums promoting male grievance narratives — surge. These young men haven’t abandoned education; they’ve simply chosen problematic educators.

The recruitment formula follows a predictable pattern: Target young men already feeling academically inadequate, economically insecure, and socially rejected. Feed them a worldview that locates their problems not in systemic racism but in feminism. Not in capitalism but in women’s standards. Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer who famously called reading books “for broke people,” becomes a prophet. Joe Rogan becomes a professor. The Fresh & Fit podcast, known for its misogynistic content, including calling educated women “damaged goods,” becomes curriculum.

Why read bell hooks when a podcaster will explain women in ten minutes? Why study systemic oppression when Kevin Samuels, the late YouTuber who built a following critiquing Black women’s marriageability, declares you are simply not “high value”?

Educational research confirms that teachers often fail to recognize Black boys’ academic potential even when they excel, leaving them vulnerable to these digital father figures who offer validation without effort. These influencers train their followers in selective skepticism: Question vaccines, not billionaires. Doubt professors, not podcasters. Distrust Black women with advanced degrees, not the system that marginalizes you.

The result is a cohort of young Black men who can quote Jordan Peterson but not James Baldwin, who understand “sexual marketplace value” better than systemic racism, who have traded solidarity with Black women for alignment with their own oppression.

4. When Algorithms Become Overseers

If the manosphere provides the curriculum, social media supplies the campus, with algorithms serving as admissions officers.

According to Pew Research Center data, 43 percent of adults under 30 now receive their news from TikTok, a dramatic increase from just 9 percent in 2020. For Black teenagers, 79 percent of whom actively use the platform, TikTok can deliver an entire worldview through dopamine-triggering video clips.

These algorithms are not optimized for truth; they are optimized for engagement. They serve a steady diet of rage bait, conspiracy theories, and content that normalizes intellectual apathy as entertainment.

The radicalization pipeline operates with ruthless efficiency: It begins with seemingly benign “self-improvement” content, slides into misogynistic talking points, and can culminate in users parroting white supremacist rhetoric, often delivered in Black voices. A young man searching for explanations for his struggles doesn’t encounter Cornel West or Ta-Nehisi Coates in his feed. The algorithm instead serves him courses on “escaping the matrix” for $50.

The podcast influencers didn’t create anti-intellectualism in Black communities. They weaponized existing vulnerabilities. They found young men already primed to distrust formal education and offered them an alternative gospel: Why read books when Rogan hosts “conversations”? Why study history when Tate shares “experience”? Why listen to Black women with doctorates when Black men with microphones “keep it real”?

When Ignorance Becomes Policy

Anti-intellectualism has evolved from a cultural phenomenon to a political strategy. Mock the experts. Ban the books. Dismantle diversity programs. Render the word “woke” meaningless through overuse. Schools face funding cuts for teaching what legislators deem “discriminatory equity ideology,” while HBCUs watch federal grants freeze despite operating on already constrained budgets.

The cruel irony: Some Black Americans actively support these measures. They celebrate the removal of their own history from curricula. They co-sign the destruction of programs their grandparents died to create.

The message has been successfully sold: Learning history constitutes indoctrination, while forgetting it represents freedom. And some have bought this narrative wholesale.

The Counter-Movement

Despite this troubling trend, a quiet intellectual renaissance is building momentum among those who refuse to surrender.

Howard University recently became the first HBCU to achieve Research One (R1) Carnegie Classification in 2025. While some debate whether racism exists, Howard conducts cutting-edge research that will shape the future. Spelman College and Morehouse College report application surges. Young Black Americans who recognize what is at stake are doubling down on excellence.

The fact that Amanda Seales’s confrontation with twenty conservatives went viral reveals something important: Not everyone accepts this new anti-intellectual orthodoxy. Comment sections have become battlegrounds where young Black people deploy citations, fact-check claims, and refuse to let willful ignorance go unchallenged.

The same platforms used to spread anti-intellectualism also host its antidote. Black academics on TikTok smuggle knowledge past algorithms, making James Baldwin trend between dance videos. Dr. Karen Hunter’s free YouTube courses offer more intellectual substance than many paid “masterclasses.” Even on the depleted platform formerly known as Twitter, Black users fact-check more rigorously than many newsrooms.

What anti-intellectualism’s proponents failed to anticipate: Black excellence proves addictive. Once experienced, voluntary ignorance becomes unpalatable. Some young men who fell into manosphere ideology are emerging, armed with bell hooks and therapy. Students who once believed reading was “acting white” are discovering Octavia Butler and recognizing imagination as a superpower.

Every significant Black cultural movement has emerged from periods of darkness. The Harlem Renaissance followed the Red Summer of 1919. The Black Arts Movement followed political assassinations. Hip-hop emerged from urban decay. What follows this era of intellectual retreat? Call it Neo-intellectualism. Call it Renaissance 2.0. But this time, participants are keeping receipts, screenshot evidence, and making “I don’t read” as socially unacceptable as it should always have been.

This new generation of Black intellectuals writes its own theories, builds its own frameworks, remixes the canon on its own terms. The audience has shifted. Performance for white validation has ended. This generation builds an intellectual community for itself, by itself.

The Stakes

Our descendants didn’t brag about not reading. They built schools before homes because they knew: without knowledge, freedom is just a rumor.

Black Americans descend from people who built pyramids, created mathematical systems, developed complex languages, and, when enslaved, preserved and transmitted knowledge despite unimaginable oppression. They built Tuskegee, Hampton, and Howard. Their calculations sent rockets to space. Their innovations fed nations.

The current wave of anti-intellectualism betrays everyone who bled for the right to learn. Boasting about ignorance doesn’t resist the system — it surrenders to it.

The ancestors understood literacy as liberation. They recognized education as a revolution’s tool, not assimilation’s trap. They knew that oppression cannot be dismantled by those unable to articulate, document, and strategize against it.

The plantation had overseers. The algorithm has influencers. Same function, different century.

The homework isn’t just to “read more.” We’re already scrolling endlessly. The task is to read better. To seek out the work that sharpens us instead of numbs us. Read Baldwin, Morrison, hooks, and Butler. Read the scholars, the journalists, the thinkers who treat our intellect as an inheritance, not an accident. Then do more than post a quote, build with it. Debate it. Teach it to your children. Use it to strengthen the muscles that ignorance keeps trying to atrophy.

Because “staying woke” means nothing if all you’re doing is sleepwalking through conspiracy videos.

Our ancestors didn’t risk lashes and death for literacy so their desc

So here’s the real assignment: curate your mind like you curate your feed. Guard your intellect the way you guard your money. Make critical thinking the standard, not the exception.

Your ancestors are watching. What will you show them that you repeated memes, or that you carried their brilliance forward?

Class dismissed. Not to the algorithm. To the library, the book club, the classroom, the kitchen table debate.

Because ignorance was never the revolution.

It was never the flex.

Knowledge, sharpened and shared, always was.

When outrage is everywhere, survival means compartmentalizing politics and centering joy from barbershops to billion-dollar festivals.

As this summer winds down, I keep thinking about how Black folks showed up for joy this year. We were outside, and I mean really outside. Brooklyn, Harlem, D.C., every block party became a safe space, every street corner a sanctuary. Walk through any of these neighborhoods on a Saturday and you’d see it: hydrants cracked open by noon, music spilling from speakers (that definitely “aren’t that loud”), kids running barefoot through the spray. From Bed-Stuy to 125th Street to U Street, we turned asphalt into dance floors. The barbershop stayed packed with men who didn’t really need haircuts; they needed the conversation that comes free with the fade. Meanwhile, a muralist spent the season painting a little Black girl on a brownstone wall, her blue dress getting brighter with each weekend, as permanent as the building itself.

This is Black joy. Everyday. Unapologetic. And far more complicated than America ever wants to admit.

Now glance at the headlines: another book ban, another congressional hearing, another politician rehearsing outrage for the cameras. The firestorm is real, but here’s what’s striking. It isn’t scorching us the way some imagined it would. Plenty of Black folks have stepped back from the political noise, not out of apathy but out of memory. We’ve seen this America before. Our parents and grandparents lived through earlier versions of the same performance. We know how the flames work.

So instead of letting outrage devour every part of our lives, we’ve learned to compartmentalize it. We carry awareness, but we don’t let it eat us whole. The proof is in the comment sections: while the world debates its collapse, the top replies in Black spaces are things like, “What’s for dinner?” or “I’m running to BJ’s, you need anything?” Call it what you want, but indifference doesn’t look like this. This is something else, call it balance, or just knowing where to spend yourself. One foot in, one foot out of the mainstream chaos. We stay tuned in, maybe even throw a line or two into a work conversation, then turn our energy back to the places that actually feed us.

The same energy that used to go into organizing marches now goes into organizing festivals. The feet that would’ve been on Pennsylvania Avenue are at the block party. Especially after November, when we watched our warnings ignored and our votes suppressed — again — we’ve decided that joy is a better investment than another march that ends up as a hashtag.

A Long Memory for Firestorms

If you’re Black in America, you don’t need to be convinced that the flames are real. You inherit the fire drill. Our grandparents told us about sundown towns and redlining. Our parents talked about the crack epidemic, about stop-and-frisk, about schools starved of resources. We’ve lived through enough “new” crises to know they’re recycled.

There’s an old saying: when America catches a cold, Black people get the flu. You see it in education, where Black college graduates leave school owing $25,000 more than their white peers. Among Black women, 43.3% carry student debt, nearly double white women, triple that of white men. Four years out, almost half of Black borrowers owe more than they started with.

Add in blocked universal healthcare, knowing inequality has a body count. Add resistance to loan forgiveness, knowing Black women carry the highest burdens despite being the most educated demographic. The system doesn’t fail us by accident. It works exactly as designed.

And yet, alongside all of that, there has always been music, food, laughter, and art. We’ve always known how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. Take oxtail, what enslaved people were given as scraps, the parts nobody wanted. Now it’s $20 a pound at the butcher, a delicacy on high-end menus. Chitlins, pig feet, collard greens, we took what was meant to be nothing and made it cuisine. Enslaved people braided escape routes into cornrows. Harlem Renaissance writers threw rent parties that funded entire revolutions in art. In the same years that civil rights leaders were being beaten in the streets, Motown Records topped the charts.

What history shows, again and again, is that attempts to smother us end up fueling the culture that keeps us alive.

The Festival Circuit: Joy at Scale

If you want proof of how joy can grow into something organized and undeniable, look at the festival circuit. It has never been Blacker or more vibrant.

The Caribbean knows this dance well. Take Barbados’s Crop Over, which started as enslaved people being allowed to celebrate when the sugar cane harvest ended. The plantation owners thought they were giving permission for a day off. What they gave, unintentionally, was the blueprint for resistance through celebration. Today, Crop Over brings millions in tourism dollars to Barbados, with Rihanna herself headlining the revelry. Trinidad’s Carnival grew from enslaved Africans mocking their enslavers’ masquerade balls, turning the master’s costume party into the Caribbean’s most powerful cultural export. From Jamaica’s Reggae Sumfest to every island’s festival, what began as stolen moments of joy in the shadow of brutality became the economic engines of entire nations.

Stateside, Rhiannon Giddens’ new Biscuits and Banjos festival is a deliberate reclaiming of folk, country, and blues through a Black Southern lens. What was once stripped of its origins and labeled simply “American music” is being returned to the communities that created it, center stage.

Raleigh’s African American Cultural Festival has been running for fifteen years, filling streets with food, art, and history that feeds both body and spirit. Denver’s Colorado Black Arts Festival, approaching its fortieth anniversary, has become one of the largest and longest-standing Black arts gatherings in the country. These events aren’t just cultural showcases. They’re economic engines. The National Endowment for the Arts estimates that Black cultural festivals generate millions annually in local revenue. Last year alone, the top 25 Black cultural festivals drew an estimated 3.2 million attendees and generated over $280 million in economic impact, numbers that mainstream media rarely mentions when discussing Black communities and economics.

The 2025 music festival season is saturated with unapologetically Black programming: Afrofuturist lineups, jazz collectives, trap symphonies, and crossover acts that refuse to fit inside one genre. These festivals aren’t hiding places. They’re declarations. We take the chaos they hand us and make it music, put our names in lights, pack the venues.

Compartmentalized Outrage, Centered Joy

This doesn’t mean life is easy, or that flames aren’t still burning. Police brutality, voter suppression, and economic inequities remain part of our daily reality. No one is fooled into thinking otherwise.

But we aren’t shocked. We’ve seen this country play out these same scripts before, and we’ve decided to protect ourselves differently this time. We just stopped showing up to perform our pain for audiences that never intended to help anyway.

White wellness influencers discovered “boundaries” and “self-care” and turned them into billion-dollar industries. We’ve been doing this work for centuries; we just called it “minding our business” and “keeping our peace.” Now they’re selling our survival strategies to each other for $200 masterclasses. The audacity is almost impressive.

That’s why so many of us keep one foot in and one foot out of the political circus. We track what’s happening, poke our heads up when needed, maybe drop a line or two in the office conversation, then pivot back to what actually matters: our families laughing at dinner, the barbershop debates, Sunday service, the bookstore’s quiet corners, the festival stage where we’re the headlines. We haven’t checked out (completely).

Choosing joy doesn’t mean we’ve stopped paying attention. We’ve gotten better at knowing which battles are worth the energy and which ones are designed to exhaust us. It’s refusing to bankrupt ourselves on outrage while knowing the system was built to drain us.

The Real Story

Black joy has always been heavy with meaning. Power never gave it permission to exist, which is exactly why it matters; every laugh, every song, every celebration is proof of what couldn’t be killed.

We learned from our ancestors how to find sweetness in the bitter. How to take scraps and make feasts. How to turn the very instruments of our oppression into the tools of our liberation. The banjo, brought from Africa, became bluegrass. The work songs became the blues. The church where we were told to be docile became the headquarters of the civil rights movement.

So next time someone asks why we’re not marching in the streets, tell them we’re busy drinking water and minding our business. Building generational wealth one festival at a time. Teaching our kids to braid both hair and resistance. Making oxtail so good, gentrifiers will pay $30 a plate for it.

We’re not avoiding the revolution. We’re funding it with joy. And yes, we’re charging admission.

When America asks why we’re not perpetually outraged, why we’re not marching every second the headlines demand it, the answer is simple: We didn’t stop caring. We just started choosing when to care. We know how this country works. We’ll show up when it matters, on our time, not on America’s schedule.

America may still be on fire. But in Brooklyn on a Saturday, in Raleigh in September, in Denver in July, at Barbados’s Crop Over, you’ll find us dancing, eating, painting, singing. Not because the storm isn’t real, but because we already know it is. And until the world serves something better, our answer will stay the same.

What’s for dinner? Joy.

Tell us: What’s keeping you grounded while the world spins?

Where do you find your light?

HBO’s new reality show, Back to the Frontier, wants to be a social experiment. It aims to teach us something about grit, survival, and the American spirit by dropping three families into a reenactment of 1880 frontier life, with no Wi-Fi, no running water, just raw land and period clothing.

But one thing becomes clear almost immediately: this is a frontier missing its ghosts.

In the series, three families are transported “back in time” to live as homesteaders in a simulated version of the American West. The Halls from Florida, a white-presenting family with three children; the Lopers from Alabama, a Black family with two sons and a grandmother; and the Hanna-Riggs, a gay white couple from Texas with twin boys. They’re each tasked with surviving the social, political, and environmental conditions of the 1880s.

The cast is diverse. The terrain is challenging. The premise is ambitious.
And yet, watching the first episode, I couldn’t shake the questions:
Whose version of the frontier are we telling? And who’s been left out of the story?

The Wrong “But”

The most revealing moment in the pilot unfolds at the Land Office, where the families arrive in full 1880s attire to register for their homesteads. A posted sign outlines the land application process and includes a pointed restriction: married women cannot buy land.

After reading it aloud, Mrs. Loper, the African American mother, turns to her sons and explains, with quiet conviction, that women in 1880 had very few rights. She reminds them that women’s suffrage came much later, offering a brief but meaningful lesson in historical injustice.

Jason Hanna, one of the gay fathers, offers his own reflection in a solo interview:

“Coming back to the 1880s, there were no two-dad families.”

These moments are framed as teachable. Enlightening, even. And they are.
Women’s rights. LGBTQ+ visibility. Acknowledged, uplifted.

So when the three men are invited into the Land Office, Mrs. Loper excluded, they’re greeted by homestead history expert Dr. Jacob K. Friefeld, who begins with reverence:

“The Homestead Act of 1862 was one of the most important social policies in American history. It gave Americans access to their own little piece of the American Dream. Today, there are nearly 93 million ( yes, million) descendants of homesteaders.”

He continues: Abraham Lincoln signed the act. Americans were given land.

Then he says it —
“But…”

I lean forward.

Here it comes, I think. The moment of honesty. The part where we acknowledge that in the real 1880s, the Black man standing in front of him wouldn’t have been allowed in that room. That by law, by violence, by design, Black families were systematically excluded from the promise of land and legacy.

But instead, Dr. Friefeld says:

“It wasn’t free, because homesteaders had to earn their homes by working hard and farming the land.”

That was his “but.”

Really?

So let’s tally it up, HBO.
You gave us a teachable moment about women’s rights.
A nod to gay rights.
And when it came to Black Americans?
Not a word.

Two out of three, I guess, is good enough for a show looking to seem inclusive without telling the whole truth.

And then you doubled down by implying that all it took to be a homesteader was hard work. As if violence, policy, and racism weren’t the true barriers. As if Black families were denied not because of their skin, but because they didn’t farm hard enough.

No one mentioned that the Homestead Act was weaponized against Black people. No one mentioned that in 1880, the American frontier was a place from which we were actively barred. Not a word about Jim Crow, sharecropping, racial terror, or land theft.

And in that deliberate silence, Back to the Frontier made a familiar American choice:

To whitewash the past for the sake of comfort.
To smooth out the truth for palatability.
To teach history, but only the parts that won’t upset the wrong people.

Erasure by Omission

In that moment, when the white land agent says “93 million Americans” benefited from the Homestead Act, we get a glimpse into the core problem of Back to the Frontier. It wants to teach, but only enough to feel educational without making anyone uncomfortable.

Gay rights? Check. Women’s suffrage? Check.

But Black pain? Black exclusion? Black trauma?

Silence.

And that silence isn’t neutral. It’s violent. It’s a form of cultural gaslighting, the kind that makes it easier to pretend the past was hard but fair, challenging but equal. It feeds into the lie that everyone had the same chances and that hard work was the only barrier.

But hard work didn’t stop Black homesteaders. Laws did. Violence did. Policy did.

If you can’t say that, then don’t say anything at all.

The History They Didn’t Tell

Let’s be clear: the Homestead Act of 1862 did open up millions of acres for settlement. But access to that land was not equal. While technically race-neutral on paper, in practice, Black families were systematically denied the resources, protections, and safety required to stake and keep a claim. White settlers often terrorized or ousted Black homesteaders. Government agents ignored their applications. The land itself was sometimes granted, only to be taken through intimidation or fraud.

By 1880, Reconstruction was unraveling. The Supreme Court had already begun dismantling the protections of the Reconstruction Amendments. Black Codes were being replaced by more formalized Jim Crow laws. Racial violence was not an occasional event; it was policy, practice, and precedent.

For many Black families, “back to the frontier” wasn’t an option; it was a fantasy. Or worse, a lie.

Yet Back to the Frontier found time in its pilot episode to gently nod toward the historical oppression of women and queer people, while somehow skipping over the brutal erasure of Black freedom and land access in the exact same era.

Where You Film Matters: History Without the Soil

It’s also worth noting that the show isn’t filmed in America at all. It was shot in the open plains of rural western Canada, about an hour outside of Calgary. It’s beautiful, with sweeping grasslands and mountain views. But it’s also convenient.

Because if you’re going to recreate the illusion of a shared American past, one where three very different families “start from scratch” on equal footing, Canada is the perfect place to pretend none of it happened. It’s literally and symbolically a safe distance from the soil where American racial injustice was written in blood.

You can’t recreate the past if you avoid its geography.

You can’t honor the truth if you dodge the land that holds it.

This physical displacement mirrors the narrative displacement at the heart of the show. It’s not just the land that’s been whitened. It’s the entire framing of who suffered, who was silenced, and who gets to be nostalgic for the past.

The Weight of Generational Exclusion

The effects of that erasure didn’t stay buried in the past.

Early in the show, host Melissa K. Norris proudly shares that she is a fifth-generation homesteader, living on 55 acres of land. It’s a beautiful legacy, one she inherited through land access that, historically, so many others were denied. This isn’t a critique of her success. Melissa comes across as kind, hardworking, and sincere. But her story is also a living illustration of what it means to benefit from a system built to uplift some and exclude others.

Her family was handed a ladder generations ago. They climbed it, built on it, passed it down. Their starting line came with acreage. Stability. Possibility.

What a blessing.

Now contrast that with Mrs. Loper, the Black mother on the show, who breaks down in tears over dinner, spooning canned ham and baked beans onto her plate. Through tears, she shares that she grew up in poverty and that she’s spent her adult life working tirelessly to ensure her children never have to know that same struggle.

And yet here she is, “back in 1880,” reliving that same struggle under the guise of a reenactment.

Watching her, I couldn’t help but feel that what unfolded wasn’t just about missing modern comforts. For me, it represented something much heavier: doors being closed, generation after generation.

Even though Mrs. Loper is successful in her own right, she doesn’t have the luxury of tracing landownership back five generations.

As she fought back tears, the moment struck me. It wasn’t about the beans or the canned pork. It was about what the scene stirred in me: the quiet ache of generational injustice. The grief of watching others inherit land, wealth, and stability, while knowing that so many of our families were locked out, burned out, pushed aside.

It hit me like a truth I already knew but still hated to feel:

The American Dream was never built with us in mind.

On one side, a family standing five generations tall on 55 acres.

On the other side, a family representing millions who never got the chance, because their lineage was deliberately severed five generations ago.

And the most insidious part?

We’re still being cut out.

Just more subtly now.

With redlines instead of ropes.

With zoning laws instead of shackles.

With policy language that smiles while it says “no.”

We don’t need a time machine to see the impact of that exclusion. We have the data.

In early 2025, Q1 data show Non-Hispanic White households own homes at a rate of 74.2%, compared to 44.7% for Black households. That disparity hasn’t narrowed in a century; in fact, it’s remained stubbornly wide. Since 1900, the Black–White homeownership gap has hovered around 25–30 points, peaking at nearly 30 points in 2020.

It’s as if the Homestead Act planted a tree in 1862 and said, “Eat.” But only some families got the fruit. Others were kept out of the orchard, generation after generation.

That fruit? It became houses, wealth, and tradition. It became stability, inheritance, the ability to say, “We’ve always had this.” The denial of it became hunger, renting, struggle, shame, and the emotional break we watched in real time as one mother scooped beans out of a large mason jar and said, “I never wanted my children to know this.”

That’s the legacy this show tiptoes around.

That’s the truth hiding beneath the staged cabins and prairie dresses.

And that’s what makes the entire premise dishonest: it asks us to pretend everyone is starting from the same place.

But we’re not.

We never were.

The Grandmother Who Said Nothing

One of the show’s most poignant elements is the Loper family’s grandmother. A 72-year-old Black woman from Alabama, soft-spoken, poised, watchful.

It is announced early in the show that she won’t stay the entire season.

We aren’t told why she is going to leave. Maybe it was health. Maybe it was discomfort. But if she looked around and realized, This wasn’t made for us, I wouldn’t blame her.

Because to see your history softened, distorted, or skipped over, while being asked to perform labor inside of it, is exhausting.

She shouldn’t have had to stay.
Not to be silent. Not to be background. Not to be erased again for someone else’s lesson.

And we shouldn’t have to stay quiet while it happens.

Hope for What Comes Next

To be fair, this is only the first episode. Maybe future episodes will course-correct. Maybe the Black family will have a chance to speak truthfully about what this experience represents. Maybe the show will confront the systems that made the “American Dream” impossible for so many.

But they didn’t start well. And in storytelling, the beginning matters.

You don’t need to turn every show into 12 Years a Slave. But you do need to tell the truth. You gave ten seconds each to women’s rights and gay rights.
Black Americans deserve their ten seconds, too.

Because Black history isn’t optional, it isn’t extra.
It is American history.

We were there. We tried to build.
We planted. We prayed. We persevered.
Then we were burned out. Run off. Lynched. Erased.

But we are not ghosts.

We are the blood in that soil.
We are the deeds unclaimed.
We are the memory your narrative keeps skipping.

So if you’re going Back to the Frontier, HBO —

Take us with you.
Or stop calling it history.

https://medium.com/@yardenicole/back-to-whose-frontier-how-hbo-rewrote-black-history-in-plain-sight-07ba164137f8

Yet the danger is far more profound than merely removing books from shelves or whitewashing our history. While these are undeniably grievous offenses – and to be clear, very unconscionable – what strikes deeper at the heart is the historical erasure unfolding yet again before our eyes. The deliberate fading of our stories mirrors a systematic attempt to diminish our very existence. Societies are etched in memory by the marks they leave behind. We’ve unearthed tales of dinosaurs from fossilized remnants, deciphered ancient Egyptian lives from hieroglyphs, and glimpsed the horrors of the Holocaust through the penned words of a young girl in hiding. Yet, alarmingly, it’s the narratives of Black people that face the risk of intentional obliteration.

To annihilate a culture, one begins by erasing its past. This is the covert warfare waged against us today, a battle we must confront head-on. I, for one, refuse to stand idly by. Will you join the fight?

Against this setting, endeavors like “Black Rewrite” emerge as a platform that is ready to empower Black writers to elevate their voices, share their stories, and honor the invaluable legacies of icons like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Each story adds to the undeniable history of the Black experience and worldview.

Everyone has the capability to effect change. By fostering an environment of reading, writing, and amplification, we can strengthen these voices and amplify their reach. Encouraging Black authors to pen their stories is not just about diversifying literature; it’s a staunch commitment to reclaiming history, affirming identities, and shaping the narrative of future generations.

Remember this: power isn’t just in physical strength, but in the potency of words. As Black writers document and share their stories, they challenge dominant narratives, break barriers, and spark meaningful change. This is more than a stand against historical erasure; it’s the creation of a lasting legacy.