The blog of the one formerly known as The Uppity Negro
SPOILER ALERT! Ryan Coogler’s Sinners starring Michael B. Jordan is a cinematic ode to Black folks in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta. The cinematography of this movie conjures up Black classic films such as The Color Purple (1985) and even tragicomedy of Life (2000). Unlike these predecessors, Sinners uses magic realism to tell the stories of […]
SPOILER ALERTS WITHIN! If you’re looking for a movie that has a simple and easy to spot narrative and plot, then Jeymes Samuel’s The Book of Clarence is not the movie for you. If higher education’s catchphrase of “interdisciplinarity” could be applied to cinema, this film would be a textbook study of what that looks […]
The American essay is now dead. What's next?
I’ve celebrated Resurrection Sunday my whole life. I’ve been fully familiar with Black liberation theology’s commentary that Jesus was a brown-skinned Jew who was killed by the state; most of my life I understood Jesus’ death on a cross as a political death. However, the end result of a lot of schooling and mulling over […]
“The [B]lack community, maybe more than any other, is affectively linked to churches and their pastors to the degree that criticism of either (no matter how rational) is often viewed as nothing short of an attack on God…. Unfortunately, [B]lack ministers (be they emancipators or collaborators in oppression) are often protected from secular intellectual confrontation […]
As the nation has watched cultural upheaval around the matters of race, politics and religion, it is clear that Western civilization is in the midst of a turning point. A turning away from some of the traditional modalities that went accepted for decades, even centuries, around beliefs, behaviors and practices. A speech on race shortly […]
In the post-Trump vacuum, Black pop-culture was on a roller-coaster of events. First was the profanity-laced voicemail left by Kirk Franklin to his son, the next week was self-proclaimed relationship guru Derrick Jaxn’s fall from grace after it was revealed that he cheated on his spouse. Perhaps less so, the stories of Quavo and Saweetie’s […]
While watching Pastor Mike Todd stand soaking wet on a stage with falling water made to simulate rain, words escaped me as I found myself trying to make sense of what I was watching. Perhaps to the chagrin of some mainline homileticians (those who study preaching), my reflections on preaching, particularly preaching done by African […]
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. The current Error of Trump closed like it began […]
Overshadowed by the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol was the dual election of Democratic U.S. Senators from the state of Georgia. While the identities of Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff—a Black American and a Jewish American—have often stolen the headlines, the modest political beginnings of Warnock married with his public life as an ordained […]