Them on Amazon is a very violent series, but you should stream it

The show uses the horror genre to cover an awful and unspoken truth about White supremacy. I remember former Last Poets member Felipe Luciano telling an audience that art is useless if it doesn’t slap the shit out of you, or make you wanna slap the shit out of someone else. My guess is that […]

Alt-right still mad that Black Panther movie isn’t all-White

File under #Trifling. HuffPost reports that the alt-right — in the form of a group named Down with Disney — plans to destroy Marvel Black superhero movie Black Panther’s Rotten Tomatoes critics score, possibly through the bots used by the same group to attack The Last Jedi film. While we’re only talking about a movie […]

Whose Streets? Film and the New Black Leadership

Although I plan to see the Ferguson, Missouri uprising documentary Whose Streets? in a theater this week, I’ve declined to write about the film up to this point because mentalunrest’s editorial policy typically forbids me from writing about media I’ve neither seen nor experienced, but I have to share some thoughts about the recent and […]

MY LAST WORD ABOUT THE 2016 OSCARS

This post addresses African descendants — well, the ones who watched last night’s Academy Awards ceremony and received confirmation that the impending Black shutout was really real — but are still looking for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize your people’s ability to earn one of those gold statues. Peeps, […]

ABOUT THIS OSCARS BOYCOTT

“A two hour Laura Ashley commercial.” That comment from Variety magazine explains why — in my world, at least — Jada Pinkett-Smith and or others who want to boycott the 2016 Oscars for its absence of color in the nominations are a bit late. But welcome anyway. I’ll get to Laura Ashley […]

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON MOVIE THOUGHTS, PART TWO

Part Two: This Movie and Planet Earth Now that I’ve discussed the social backdrop for the Straight Outta Compton movie in my previous post, I want to start this post by giving props to film director F. Gary Gray because Compton was shot and edited well. But of course I have some feedback about the storyline. […]

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON MOVIE THOUGHTS, PART ONE

Part One: Plantation Cultivation and the American Dream Straight out of the 1980s–90s plantation known as Compton, California, and powered in part by President Ronald Reagan’s Narcotics Entrepreneurship and Small Arms Specialist Training Program, better known to the rest you as the Iran-Contra scandal, five young men pushed their way to entertainment stardom and out […]