Ya’ll ever used dating apps? THE GHETTO. There’s nothing worse than chatting for a while and finding out a man loves anime more than could ever love you. I suppose this is my karma for rejecting the guys that actually liked me in college and staying faithful to a crush that didn’t know we were together. If my friend that doesn’t know I like him would revive our dead convo from three months ago, I would delete these app. I’m a good catch and I have a Master’s degree but I’m currently somebody’s penpal instead of somebody’s girlfriend. It’s crazy when you think about it. I’m writing this in a coffee shop listening to Destiny’s Child so you already know I’m a main character. My friend’s and I used to watch Sex and City together in undergrad. I’m definitely not Samantha. We just knew we would grow up and life would overrun with excitement, designer shoes, and men. Now we’re in our early twenties and life looks more like an extended childhood with bills you can’t defer. I have some Steve Madden shoes I can’t walk in though. Maybe I’ll move to new city and run into a good Christian man like a Tyler Perry protagonist.
Privilege during Quarantine
“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.”
Ijeoma Oluo
This semester wasn’t easy for anyone and I want everyone to be proud of completing their classes. My friends and I brought our fairly high GPA’s up, but I had to think long and hard about how we were able to do it. I attend Howard University and live in the DMV, consequently, Zoom classes were done in my time zone and some classes even provided content on demand. I am also blessed enough to have a MacBook Pro and Wi-Fi during quarantine and free housing to study in. I also had great professors and classes that were easier than the STEM courses I took in the past. Had I been tasked with a larger load and burdened with health, food, or housing insecurities during these stressful times, I wouldn’t have done my best work. UCLA Undergraduates Student Association Council President Robert Blake Watson said in a Teen Vogue interview that “If one student chooses [pass/fail] and [another] student chooses letter grading, [graduate schools] are going to view the student with letter grading inherently more favorably than the other.” He further explicates that “[we’re] pitting students who have the ability, the means, the resources, the Wi-Fi, and the time zone to do well in their classes against the students who quite literally don’t have the privilege to work hard[er] to get letter grades.”
Even in a global pandemic, we’ve let grind culture dim our humanity. I respect hard work and I put in hard work, but please stop posting about how everyone needs to have abs and a side hustle by the time quarantine is over. If you finish this quarantine alive and still have your mental health, you were successful. My classmates have to stop having personal pity parties about boredom, material things, and dorm assignments because it’s not an even a given we’ll live to see another semester. If we have another semester in person we need to watch what to say to people because we don’t know who lost loved ones or had to quarantine in a toxic environment. If health care professionals need to stay in our dorms to keep performing a job most of us don’t wanna do, let them do so without complaint. Integrate other people into your prayers and plans for the future. Hold Graduate Schools, your friends, and/or yourself accountable for disregarding the underprivileged.
“But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”
1 John 3:17 ESV
Why Film? Homework from Spike Lee
Anyone I’ve spoken too for more than 10 minutes knows I want to be the Spike Lee of PG County, Maryland, so when my aunt sent me the link to his Masterclass I had to cop that membership. As expected of a Spike Lee joint, the class was worth every penny! As a good student, I’m completing one of the assignments of the class which was to articulate your purpose as a filmmaker among other things. My purpose as a filmmaker is to liberate minds, change the narrative about my community, and continue the legacy of black excellence in storytelling. I have to leverage the call God placed on my life to do this work of storytelling because onscreen images influence the way my people are viewed in society. The beautiful people around me inspire me to make films, films I love, and films that make me cringe inspire me to make films. True stories and untold stories inspire me to create films. Love inspires me to make films and suffering in the world inspires me to make films. An internal hunger and respect for the craft inspire me to make films.
Films show the human condition in all its jaded glory, filmmaking is sacred and vulnerable, and dropping a new project is an act of courage on behalf of the creatives that made it. Filmmaking is putting yourself out there for the world to critique because you love other people enough to want to share joy and knowledge with them. I love that filmmaking requires research and a skillset, to quote Spike Lee “there ain’t no half-stepping.” I love that watching films together bonds people and lines from a script integrate themselves into mundane conversations and pop culture. I want to tell stories that educate and uplift the marginalized, but I also hope to bond people across cultures. I know from Basketball season at Howard University that The struggles you face on set bond you with the dope creatives you’re working with and create lifelong memories. The finished product of what you create on-set, be it a movie or a Livestream of a game encourages camaraderie among laughing moviegoers or die-hard fans of a team. Movies also bond creatives with audiences that they may never meet. The bond between creatives and audiences doesn’t make them homies necessarily, but the relationship is intimate enough that creatives have a responsibility to honor their audience. Images transcend the screen and great art advances society.
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
Malcolm X
Read The Notes: Quick PSA
Imma start with a movie analogy because I like movies 🎬. When a screenwriter writes a script for a studio, the studio always comes back with notes📝.Notes aren’t necessarily bad. Notes usually have ways you can improve a script or make the story clearer. If you don’t rise to the occasion and follow the notes, your movie gets stuck in development and you can’t move on to production. A Script is a just a story our lives are just stories god already knows the plot of. We all have scripts or plans for our lives. I planned to marry Nick Jonas and do a Disney Channel intro as a child, but sometimes God writes notes on our scripts🙏🏾.
I know from experience that God’s notes aren’t always what we wanted to happen or what we felt we deserved 😒, but God’s notes always improve our scripts 💯. God’s notes always challenge us to be better and to exercise our faith. You can either submit to his will for your life or in the words of a meme “do you.” The best lives, scripts, and stories all incorporate God’s notes. The things we want like Nick Jonas that he prevents us from getting are nothing compared to the blessings he has in store🎁.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Jeremiah 29:11
In God’s Plan, Drizzy posits that “he [can’t] do it on his own.” We mess things up when we take life into our own hands and decide we know all the answers. I know y’all thought about that Kanye interview. I’ve stood in the way of my blessings and delayed God’s plan for my life by ignoring the notes. I did what I wanted to do over and over again and expected a different outcome😫. I sought the approval of people I can’t even call anymore, but I can call on him who restores my soul. I can call on him who gives me hope and a future. I can follow my notes and thank God for loving me enough to stop my plans and keeping my script in development.☺️
What if God had my destiny waiting to reveal itself at the appropriate time if I would just act on faith alone ?
Devon Franklin, Produced by Faith (2011)
In the film world, development is the stage before production (shooting the movie or whatever). In development, the filmmaker is nowhere near her finished product. There is an intense longing to jump to production and any setbacks can be discouraging enough for the writer, studio, or director to give up on the project. Projects get produced and scripts turn into movies when they are supposed to, not when we want them to 🤧. I needed to be stuck in development so the desires of my heart could change 🤷🏾♀️. I needed to turn away from wickedness to want to create content that was pleasing to God.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
Proverbs 3:5-6
There are times where I’ll ignore the notes because as I quote Kendrick Lamar, “I am a sinner.” As sinners we have a visceral response to conflict, are quick to anger, and too quick to self-righteously condemn others. 😷 Despite our shortcomings, I thank God for not loving us in the conditional way we love each other. 😍 The grace we fail to extend to others is extended to us whether we follow the notes or not. I have been able to escape vices the lotto and recover from heartache without any worldly explanation.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Psalm 23:3
I envied those the world exalted the cool kids😎 because I thought they were happy. I gained a temporary happiness from external validation or having people “gas me up” but it could easily be stripped away by anyone’s negative comment🤓. I was still without an internal joy. There’s only one true source of joy. He’s the source that pretties the sky at dusk, brightens my friend’s smiles, and writes the best songs💃🏽. Unlike man, he fills me with something that is not temporary. He not only promised me everlasting life in his kingdom, but he allows me to smile in a world that’s falling apart.
When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy.
Psalm 94:19
To follow the script and enjoy the promise, we also need to focus on serving others👀. For every personal calamity, remember someone else is less fortunate. Don’t be petty during this time and check in on those who you know have sinned against you.💅🏿 They are just as undeserving as I am of my mother who cares for me and my God who continues to forgive and restore me.🤞🏾
Last Dance: How The Movies Made Disco Mainstream
Welcome To Turner Alexander Classic Movies, we’ll be exploring how Disco was popularized through film, enjoy!
At the end of the decade of decadence, a new and exciting style of dance music emerged from black and brown communities into the mainstream. This new style of dance music was Disco. With its signature 4/4 bass line structure and flamboyant performers, Disco encouraged a culture of hedoism that pales in comparison to the self-absorbed lives we conduct on social media. The hedonism of the Disco would die along with the genre at the beginning of the conservative ’80s. Before HIV, Reaganomics, Iran-Contra, and Crack there existed a world of glamorous Disco divas, leisure suits, and powder cocaine. This world, minus the cocaine went from underground to mainstream through the popularity of films that either had plotlines related to Disco or Disco soundtracks.
In this Timeline, we’ell revisit the films that brought disco to the dominant culture and ultimately to the masees. Car Wash, Universal Studios, 1976, was helmed by Cooley High director Micheal Schultz. Initially, the young black director wanted to pass on the film, which was the brainchild of white music managers. Once Schultz revamped the script to include social commentary, the film was a hit with black audiences. This success was also mainstream, the soundtrack won a best album Grammy and a Best Music Award at Cannes. Despite characters Abdullah (Bill Duke) and Lonnie (Ivan Dixon) ending the film with musings on their exploitation, the film is saturated with slapstick and cameos from Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and The Pointer Sisters. The same year Car Wash was released, Donna Summer would perform on the previously homogeneous American Bandstand at a time when most black or Disco music was performed on rival program Soul Train. Donna Summer dancing for a majority white audience on Bandstand marked a shift in pop culture and a proliferation of Disco into the mainstream. With artists like Rolls Royce, The Commodores, and Donna Summer dominating the Billboard Hot 100, it appeared that America was ready for Disco to succeed Rock as the sound of the youth.
In 1977, Saturday Night Fever was released to critical acclaim despite featuring a white antihero who escapes a tumultuous home life and dead job by engaging in Disco debauchery. The toxic masculinity and racist tropes exhibited in the film are ignored by the many Americans that consider it the most iconic Disco film. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was even the best selling soundtrack of all time for 15 years until Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard would surpass it in 1992. Before I even saw Saturday Night Fever, I had to learn how to do CPR to the beat of “Staying Alive,” the Bee Gee’s Song that John. Travolta’s Tony Manero struts to in the film’s opening credits. Bee Gee’s manager Robert Stigwood produced the film, which immortalized his white Australian clients as disco stars, a status that many pioneers of Disco would fail to reach. Once a fictitious white disco scene was depicted, Disco fever began. Bobby Ewing even went to a Discotheque in an early episode of Dallas.
Later films include Thank God Its Friday (1978), a film famous for the Grammy-winning Donna Summer single “Last Dance”, and Disco Godfather (1979), Rudy Ray Moore’s blaxploitation inspired foray into the dark side of Disco culture. The same year Disco Godfather was released Gloria Gaynor won the first and last Best Disco Song for her signature song “I Will Survive.” Disco would be obsolete by the early 1980’s and the end of the era include Disco Demolition Day in Cominsky Park (1979) and a concern by the dominant culture that Disco and it’s majority black artists had promoted lasciviousness. From about 1976 to 1979, however, Disco dominated the charts with the help of a few movies.
Check out My Interactive Timeline and Spotify playlist below!
Gucci Mane Is A Clone Moe!
What Had Happened Was: A Brief Internet History
I had to ween myself off of Twitter to complete this post. One of my favorite pastimes is to make online shopping carts at Urban Outfitters and I spent a great deal of time wondering what 2000s era bucket hat I would shell out 20 dollars on. I looked up at the clock and realized I had spent about half of my day on the internet, that magical network of computers sharing memes and thirst traps with humanity. The conception of the internet was largely a ploy to stunt on compete with Soviet technology after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. While this sounds eerily similar to the plot of Rocky IV, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) would bolster innovation by allowing scholars from different universities to readily share information where were the HBCU’s though.
By 1971, Louis Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first email to himself, leaving an indelible mark on how the world communicates and introducing the @ to pop culture. Black twitter would later implore bitter followers to @ the people they allude to in their rants. Despite the creation of email, the internet was rarely utilized by anyone outside of academia in the 1970s and 1980s and society was robbed of the chance to follow Rick James on social media and watch him destroy Eddie Murphy’s couch on live.
After Tim Burners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989, the same year Don’t Be Cruel topped the charts, the internet was still a drab compilation of a few sites, and unorganized information that stood to benefit society but was difficult to navigate. Inspired by Burner’s Lee, University of Illinois undergrads would create Mosaic, the world’s first web browers and inadvertently start the browser war that would end with my play cousin becoming a Gates Millennium Scholar.
While the legal debauchery and ingenuity that shaped the information age is riveting, my peers and I could not help but notice our absence from the digital space in its early years. Despite the current inclusion of minorities in STEM and the defunding of the arts we still do not own the most powerful tech companies and are large consumers of e-commerce.
By and large, we are victims of the digital divide. I agree that the digital divide diminishes opportunity but we are socialized to accept less and pursue less. Having attended private schools first, public school temporarily diminished my ability to think creatively or defend myself against anyone in authority. While I may not have final cut pro or an ARRI Alexa yet, networking and finding like-minded peers have afforded me opportunities I would be too scared to ask for as a young black artist.
The young pioneers of the internet browser were not afraid to be competitive.
I Love You Nay Nay : A Gen Z Review Of Nosedive
In a dystopian society like our own where likes on social media translate to social status, notoriety supersedes everything else. Women jog around plain, monotone cul de sacs and only pretend to eat cookies. Colleagues contort themselves into socially mandated boxes and disassociated with whomever the collective chooses to ostracize. Society at large even decides to participate in groupthink by championing the communal ideas we see perpetuated in mainstream media. Relics of intimate relationships exist as a form of strategic alliance and these bonds are contrived rather than allowed to mature organically. Feeling scared yet, enter the world of 2019, the world of Nosedive. A world were through smartphones and eye implants (scary) everyone shares their every move and perfectly curates their lives to receive high ratings from strangers (We would never do anything like in real life of course.
We meet Lacie a millennial-aged woman who reeks of insecurity and desperately purses a higher rank in society. On a 5 point scale, individuals within the parallel society are judged on their interactions with others and how effectively they curate their lives on social media (again a foreign concept to me). This rating process is of course highly subjective and unfairly marginalizes the constituents of Nosedive that refuse to operate within the society’s narrow purview of politeness. It isn’t until we see Lacie outcast from society that she feigns any real happiness. As evidenced by Lacie’s former toxic friend and object of obsession Naomi, the people who make up the upper echelons of society are just as unhappy. Naomi’s decision to finally exclude Lacie from her wedding was based on her fear of embarrassing herself through her affiliation with someone of low rank rather than a genuine concern. The high ranking guest list Naomi compiled was full of people who by Lacie’s desperate admission did not fraternize with her until she amassed the level of prestige that increased her ranking.
Laci’s worship of Naomi represents how we deify a standard of beauty that casts most of us outside the purview of popularity.
@Camillionaire_16
Lacie similarly attempts to distance herself from her brother (a happier person who ranks below her) once she is unceremoniously asked to be the Maid of Honor at the disaster of a wedding and is offered the chance to speak about her unhealthy obsession with Noami. When we watch as members of the wedding party drag Lacie out of the reception we can imagine what that obsession represents. Even how we deify a standard of beauty that casts most of us outside the purview of popularity. Not unlike our society, Blackness falls outside of the purview of popularity and respectability. Around the time Nosedive first aired in 2016, several of my ninth-grade classmates berated me for cutting my straight, relaxed hair and rationalized that I must want to be masculine. Their apathetic tone suggested their statements were not malicious, but presumptuous, insisting that long, straight hair is the norm and a mark of beauty or femininity. This assumption left me deflated after each trip to the hair salon when I looked more like young Diana Ross than the stock photos on the wall. This deduction devalues blackness. As I progressed through school and different jobs, I learned that, in many cases, black people feel obligated to adhere to Eurocentric beauty standards. In an almost homogenous office environment, I was quickly grouped with the few, much older black employees who cautioned me against wearing my hair natural, citing personal experiences of success with straight hair and ostracization with their natural hair. My mother put diluted relaxers and texturizers in my hair as a child, not out of contempt for my hair texture but because she revered straight or good hair during her childhood. This is not entirely unlike the lifelong reverence Lacie had for the very blond and thin Naomi.
I don’t know whether these ratings are a reflection of cancel culture or they exist to test my nerves. It is true that we engage in groupthink and allow influencers to determine who or what we support.
@camillionaire_16
In exalting Namoi’s image those who the most unlike her is related to subservience, Lacie included. The minute role of black women and their expression of beauty in nosedive also exists in stark contrast to the prop like the addition of black men to the narrative. In the apartment sense, the black man is a desirable fixture in a dream home, a symbol of successful akin to a foreign cigar. In the office is blackman is summarily dismissed from the social sphere following a breakup with his white partner. Lacie appears to have reservations about particapating in this mercilness shunning process vut she gerslef is discared by Namoni and the colleagues she tried to appease once her rankings fall affter a bad night. It seems the greatest character arc for Lacie was being forced to ride with Susan and observing how devoid of meaning her life was.
I oNLy HAvE EyEs fOr YOu😒
Hey Goonies! Today let’s talk about how social media affects our relationships. These can be interpersonal relationships of any kind, so breathe a sigh of relief if you’re perennially single like me. It is my belief that social media is responsible for headlines like “Millennials less likely to be married than previous generations at the same age” and “Young people are having less sex” (our generation is in no shortage of meaningless hookups though🤷🏾♀️). I say this because social media presents us with a wide pool of unattainable potential intendeds.
Those considered to be exceptionally attractive (usually through a colorist lens) are promoted the most and this affects the vetting process in real life. As a college student, I know the nuances of direct messaging and making subliminal posts but I think the dating rituals of Generation Z are depressing. I can quote almost all of Sweet Home Alabama and Melanie Carmichael never received a “you up” message on Snapchat. To make sure my perspective wasn’t too warped by 2000s rom coms I, asked three DMV college students if social media adversely affected our relationships.
The first student I spoke to was Anaya the Playa, a Freshman Biology Major from Florida at The University of Maryland, College Park. She believes that social media presents us with false images of others and causes conflict within friend groups. Playa posits that this conflict arises from jealousy or a feeling that someone having a better life without you. Her response really resonated with me because I know that despite our inclinations to compare ourselves on social media, we never know the intricacies of someone’s life well enough to covet what or who they have.
After a nice chat with Playa, I returned to Howard University to see what insight Big Tex could give me on social media and relationships. The freshman Criminology Major from Texas did not disappoint. She highlighted the phenomenon of youtube couples and how we broadcast our relationships on social media. I agree the lack of privacy adds undue stress on our relationships, but I would also say it degrades intimacy. Despite Michael B. Jordan‘s unwillingness to date me, the relationship we have in my head thrives on our ability to confide in each other and cherish special moments. The current trends of ‘exposing’ someone after a petty spat and deciding that nothing is too sacred to post just don’t sit well with me.
Lil Jonni, a Freshman Nursing Major from New Jersey shared similar sentiments. She noted that people are more concerned with curating these images for social media than forming relationships and I have to agree. What we all really deserve is the chance to live out a 2000s rom com and I’ll die on that hill alone.
Social media platforms are “sites of carefully calibrated displays.” I am careful, as we all are, to promote my best pictures and experiences but the majority of our feeds lack depth. The hedonism displayed on Instagram makes the late 70’s seem tame.
@Camillionaire_1
You Made Me Dumb…So Thanks!
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might as well have viewed it as an act of war.
(National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983:1)
Critics knew as early as the McCarthy period that America’s schools were failing, but a growing number of older scholars have bestowed the title of “dumbest generation” upon generation Z. Joel Best, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Delaware has now cosigned this message. I cannot and will not let a baby boomer give my generation a shady superlative in the social sciences yearbook without some historical context so let us examine how generation z, through no fault of our own, has indeed become the dumbest generation.
Best correctly denotes that stupidity is “lacking basic knowledge and skills” and ignorance is just “what we do not know”, I want to posit that you cannot seek knowledge if you haven’t been socialized to rigorously question the status quo. Common Core curriculums and the prevalence of standardized tests under No Child Left Behind have decimated our love for learning and made K-12 about memorizing dummied down information for tests only to discard this knowledge later (as in the next class period).
The game is off balance!
Jermaine Lamarr Cole (2019)
As a member of generation z who entered adolescence in the mid-2010s, I can attest, that we have come of age in a knowledge society where new information is constantly generated (Ungar 2003).
The digital space, more specifically social media, keeps us informed about the geopolitical movements and influencers we support but the constant influx of new, often time-sensitive information can harm our ability to think critically about what we just heard or read. As a collective, Generation Z has a short attention span. We’ll be outraged over the latest racist ad campaign until the steal her man challenge goes viral. The operating systems of smartphones and the algorithms that determine our social media feeds were purposefully designed by our elders to exploit our dopamine receptors in a way that mimics heroin use. The time we spend on our phones is so destructive to our aptitude and emotional health that the creators of our most popular devices didn’t allow their own children to use them.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both baby boomers I might add. Best also correctly ascertains that “highlighting America’s ignorance has become routine.” It seems like “a basic theme of national stupidity [runs] through popular culture. The failure of many of the adult contestants to win on the hit 2007 show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-grader” is a poignant example but our reverence for stupidity has only increased. We now live in a world where mass media is oversaturated with stupidity and it is not the world that generation z created. We are simply the victims of a Common Core, meme-filled society that has exploited us from birth. Our plateaued intellectual growth continues to line the pockets of the generation that remembers Watergate and young Robert Redford.
We are not the gatekeepers of the entertainment industry and we do not greenlight sleazy reality shows. We are not the generation that has to claim the 45th president. Mic Drop.
Camille Alexander 