podcasts
EVENTS from Page 19
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” — James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 1963. Here are a few podcasts to continue your education and deepen your examination.
‘UNLOCKING US WITH BRENÉ BROWN’ — IBRAM S. KENDI ON HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST.
IBRAM X. KENDI, the bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, and the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, discusses racial disparities and the policies that have enshrined these disparities since Reconstruction. “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy,” Kendi writes in his book. “It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.” It’s inadequate to merely not be racist, Kendi says: we must be anti-racist, willing to confront our inherent biases and dismantle racial inequality from within and without. — CR
‘GOOD ANCESTOR,’ EP. 023 — KIMBERLEY SEALS ALLERS ON BIRTH WITHOUT BIAS.
THE HOST OF THE Good Ancestor podcast, Layla F. Saad, is an East African, Arab, British, black, Muslim woman who was born and grew up in the West, and lives in the Middle East. The intersectionality of her identities has driven Saad to explore “one burning question: How can I become a good ancestor? How can I create a legacy of healing and liberation for those who are here in this lifetime and those who will come after I’m gone?” Saad’s podcast gives voice to change-makers and culture-shapers who are exploring anti-racism, personal transformation and social justice. In this episode, Saad speaks with journalist Kimberley Seals Allers, who has researched — and experienced first-hand — the socio-cultural and racial disparities of birth, breastfeeding and motherhood in America. — CR
‘THE DAILY’ — THE SUNDAY READ (JUNE 7, 2020): ‘THE CONDITION OF BLACK LIFE IS ONE OF MOURNING.’
CLAUDIA RANKINE IS A Jamaican-born American poet, playwright, educator and multimedia artist. In this essay for the New York Times, Rankine reflects on the reality of repetition in the systems of institutionalized racism, from Emmett Till to Michael Brown, from those who died in the hulls of slave ships to those who died at the hands of law enforcement: “The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness,” Rankin writes. “Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.” — CR 18
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JUNE 11, 2020
Home viewing Spike Lee
by Michael J. Casey
S
pike Lee’s latest film, Da 5 Bloods, will be available to all with a Netflix login on June 12. Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Clarke Peters and Norm Lewis are four aging Vietnam vets who head back to the jungle to reclaim the remains of their squad leader (played in the flashbacks by Chadwick Boseman) and the crate full of gold they found and buried for safekeeping. Despite the music featured in the trailer, nothing about Da 5 Bloods appears to be a cut-and-dried story of ’Nam. Lee isn’t that kind of director. He’s challenging, inventive, brash and electric — a true titan of the American independent scene decked in tortoiseshell glasses and Knickerbocker-coded blue and orange threads. A cinema without Lee is no cinema indeed; here are four more to celebrate the iconoclast from Brooklyn.
‘CHI-RAQ’ How do you get men to stop fighting, killing and
blowing each other up? How about withholding sex until peace is achieved? Adapting Aristophanes’ comedic play, Lysistrata, ChiRaq is a cinematic smorgasbord: Colorful, playful, kaleidoscopic, zany and moving. The movie is most entertaining when Samuel L. Jackson holds the stage, but Lee makes sure to ground entertainment in reality and loss. These deaths aren’t just another gangbanger gunned down in the street, or just one more coffin in the ground: It’s another empty chair at Christmas time, one more incomplete family photo at Mom’s birthday. Streaming on Amazon Prime.
‘BLACKKKLANSMAN’ Ron Stallworth (John David Washington)
is Colorado Springs’ first black police officer, and he’s a cardcarrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. How Stallworth came to be a KKK member is a laugh — most of BlackKklansman is — but the laughter isn’t without teeth. Stallworth is in real danger, and not because he’s an undercover cop, but because he’s black. The rest of the world is drunk on images of white superiority, and Lee knows it. One of the greatest tricks Lee pulls off in BlackKklansman is how he weaves the images of old Hollywood through contemporary conflict. Second verse same as the first. Streaming on DirecTV and HBO Max.
‘MALCOLM X’ If Denzel Washington only acted in one movie, and
that movie was Malcolm X, then Washington would still be one of the greatest actors of his generation. Washington fills every inch of the frame with explosive fury and words that cut like daggers. His “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us” is one of the rare times where the movie improves upon reality. Lee’s massive bio-pic runs nearly three and a half hours, and it flies. Streaming on Netflix.
‘DO THE RIGHT THING’ It’s a brief exchange, but it’s a big one: Da
Mayor: “Always do the right thing.” Mookie: “That’s it?” Da Mayor: “That’s it.” Mookie: “I got it; I’m gone.” Ninety minutes later, Radio Raheem is dead on the ground, choked to death by a racist cop, and Mookie throws a trashcan through Sal’s Pizzeria. Pandemonium breaks loose, and long-festering hate boils to the surface in Bed-Stuy. If Lee made the movie today, it would be too on the nose, too ripped from the headlines. But at 30 years old, the film feels more like a prophecy. It’s not. The violence, hatred and intolerance in Do the Right Thing is a tale as old as time, one that will never go out of style. For rent on all major platforms.
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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
