I was listening to the podcast Blacking It Up yesterday and documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt was there discussing his new film, Soul Food Junkies. Lolis Eric Elie, who came to my college Baruch in September to discuss the show Treme, is in this film, too. Not only is he a jazz journalist, but he is […]
Read More Thoughts for Food…I have mentioned mambo a few times on this blog and this will be another one. Did you know that the word for the high priestess in Haitian Voodoo is mambo? Mambo, which means “important words, matters, etc” or “conversation with the gods,” in the Central African language of Kikongo, is also used for the […]
Read More The MambosNegro: A Docu-Series about Latino Identity Created by Dash Harris, this docu-series explores Latino identity throughout the world and issues of racism, colorism and social consequences of a color complex throughout the community. This is the first part of the series and it focuses on the stereotypes of Latinos. If you have seen Henry Louis Gates’ […]
Read More Negro (and say it with a Spanish accent!)“The Starlite Project is a feature-length documentary film titled Starlite and an interactive website based on the making and the taking of the historic Starlite Lounge- the oldest black-owned gay bar in Brooklyn. The goals of the Project are to preserve the historic memory of the Starlite and to counteract the forces which contributed to its closing. See […]
Read More Starlite,Star bright, Support This with All Your Might…“Ancestral Voices: Esoteric African Knowledge A educational documentary, spanning two continents, opening up a much-needed debate about traditional African spiritual systems; their cosmologies, ideologies and underlying ethical principles. Modern science no longer refutes the origins of mankind being in Africa and similarities in the cosmological ideologies of African esoteric systems with those found many established world […]
Read More Spirituality in Africa…Yesterday I watched this BBC documentary on racism. It included information on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperialism, Colonialism, Scientific racism, Social Dawinism, Eugenics, genocides (as one of the speakers called it, “bureaucratization of killing”), racist experiments (ex. mass sterilization), fear of immigration, different ethnicities and lower classes, and economic, cultural and political disenfranchisement, and how […]
Read More History of RacismWhen many people think of slavery, they tend to focus mostly on the United States, which is a given since the United States has been a huge power over the rest of the world. However, we tend to forget that the entire world was affected by the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One of the places where […]
Read More Slavery in Canada?!In honor of the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cythia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, who were murdered in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, here is Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls.”
Read More Four Little GirlsDon Letts‘, the well-known British music documentarian and DJ, 2005 BBC documentary on the “out-of-this-world” jazz musician, composer, and bandleader, Sun Ra. Born Herman Blount, in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra later claimed to be from Saturn and his music definitely sounded like it came from there. Using interviews from members of his “Arkestra” and […]
Read More Sun Ra and George Clinton, Brothers From Another PlanetLast Friday, I went to see the Black Power Mixtape and I must say it is a very powerful film. It gives a fresh perspective on the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975, especially because it is through the eyes of Swedish journalists, who are somewhat removed from the events happening in the United States […]
Read More Black Power Mixtape Vol. 2
Sherese Francis 