Did I watch The Color Purple (1985) this week? I sure did. Do I have the movie memorized? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I do. Did I cry the way you do when you’re trying to keep your neck from wobbling, so it looks like you’re having some sort of episode? You betcha.
I need Fantasia to have her Jennifer Hudson moment. I need The Color Purple (the new film, drawing from the broadway show) to be this year’s Dreamgirls.
Prayer hands, babies.
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It’s simply not enough to touch grass, friends. You must touch water. You must lay flat on a board and close your eyes, entrusting yourself to the whims of the breeze and the lake.
I like to make my behavior prescriptive. It’s so unhinged in a Chronically Online way.
Recently tagged in a review, which is always unnecessary but sometimes also ridiculous. In this latest one, for So Many Beginnings, the reviewer talks about their lifelong love of Alcott’s Little Women before mentioning my “agenda”. This is a very familiar and (should be) embarrassing admission of one’s resistance to actual historical reality. First things first, the “agenda” you recognize is usually the one you disagree with. So there was no reflecting on the agenda of Alcott, herself, for writing a fantastically white Civil War era novel that lionized Northern whites without expecting them to do much of anything to prove their good character. I did (half-heartedly) search my own archives for one of the many interviews in which I talk about the excluder having need of an agenda, not the includer. As in, the person with the agenda (you should be concerned with) is the one who carves reality out of something, not the person who rectifies it. But, as I think I talked about in my Mansfield Lecture (Roosevelt University, 2021), we’ve been socialized to find fault with the cries of the oppressed, not the crimes of the oppressor.
Which brings me to the fact that methinks some of y’all dropped the ball on your Anti-Racist training. I know, I know, it was a New Years gym promise, but see the way my lack of patience for trifling is set up, Imma g’head and drop this absolutely phenomenal seminar right here. If it were up to me, it’d play on repeat across the sky. One day. I did this seminar with Dr. Crystal M. Fleming and Aminah Mae Safi, moderated by Julia Torres.
And so I leave you with: everybody, do better.
