It’s perversely fascinating that at its root the whole “groomer” libel against LGBTQ people is a denial or a circumvention of the whole “born this way” narrative that culturally crushed anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the 2000s and 2010s. Like step one is “LGBTQ adults interacting with LGBTQ children to make them more(??) LGBTQ(??) is like pedophiles interacting with children so they can have sex with them” but step zero is “children can be influenced to be more or less queer vs it being inherent in who they are.”

I probably need to see American Fiction again but with some distance from it I am realizing that the biggest overarching question it brings up for me is whether or not our investment in a Black iteration of the interior, domestic family drama is itself misplaced. And like, again, talking about embedding the arguments of a work in its STRUCTURE, American Fiction proves it’s arguments by luring the audience in with a flashy satirical (read: about white people) premise, inside which lives a compelling Black interior domestic family drama.

50% chance Stancil got this theory from me directly, 100% chance this guy would find a different excuse to invalidate the same claim coming from me.

https://twitter.com/tyler_a_harper/status/1709316527869087791

The identity of the speaker changes the form of the dismissal, but the message itself is what makes the dismissal psychologically necessary for you.

Our popular music took over the entire world because enslaved Africans and their descendants successfully brought together European harmonic traditions with West African rhythmic traditions to create an entirely novel artistic form…

https://twitter.com/roselyddon/status/1658977908428361729

…that is one of the two largest modalities through which humans engage each others’ artistic expression on the planet today, the other being film, which also was heavily developed in the United States of America.

I saw someone talking about this without referring to the original tweet and then hours later I saw this is what they were talking about and like of course it is this dude, who wrote in an Aretha obituary that Linda Ronstadt and Kelly Clarkson were better singers than Aretha.

https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1658844467263094784

Baseballcrank is

a) the best example I know of how terrible aesthetics are not necessary or sufficient for terrible ethics but the two are found together more often than not, and

b) the reason I would outlaw blasphemy against music were I dictator of the globe.

Are the passport control people always weirdly aggressive? I thought they’d just look at my passport and send me on my merry way! The questioning about why I’m here and who I’m seeing and where I know her from like… felt racist, but maybe that’s just international travel? Pleasantly surprised by the number of Black ppl here tho. I guess that’s any major cosmopolitan city but I was all prepared to get to Europe and see way less Black people and it’s just like… moderately less Black people.

I was going to call Heathrow a flop but now that I’m actually in the terminal the food options are better than JFK so I am just out of sorts. JFK is a flop tho.

It’s me, back on a spiral of how good “fucking the Text man for Texts” is. Absolutely unsurpassed. It’s so good I still can’t paraphrase it. Like even if you had twice as many words, you can’t explain that concept as clearly as “fucking the Text man for Texts.”

Sohla El-Waylly is the best reality TV judge since Nina Garcia. Knowing Zaslav’s “you not gone have HBO bidding up the prices for MY cheap reality tv content” attitude it is probably canceled but imo that judge panel has something special a la the original Project Runway panel. Inshallah Time Warner’s next owner will be “artists who have worked with time warner.” Time Warner United Artists arc WHEN.

The Color Purple, sorta like The Lion King, is not properly a phenomenal musical, but it has gotten a lot of Black people employed in this industry and that pays dividends and dividends and dividends. (this description also applies to a lot of work by the most prolific living creator of films and television with primarily Black casts...)

It’s Friday. Time for another question about art and minds, the only things I care about!

What is an artwork you feel/felt hurt or wounded by? Do you think this was overall a good or bad aesthetic effects

H/t @PinkoStevens on this one! I got this question from when @PinkoStevens talked about feeling wounded by Beloved and feeling that was an appropriate aesthetic response, which I think is lovely and true. Trying to think of a work besides Beloved and I have to admit… what’s coming to mind is… The Wall lmao.

Lmao some of the anti-DEI people finding this “reasonable” have me scared about whether or not this framework is as productive as I think it is.

https://twitter.com/csilverandgold/status/1636274185646350338

I mean one problem I can already identify is like… this does privilege incumbents to some extent. If our team creates norms of integration before we have anybody to integrate, those norms will not serve us well if and when we do manage to diversify the team.

when I clicked the tweet and found out it was about Ashanti I---

https://twitter.com/RealFamilyCrete/status/1636165152465723392

baby there are thousands of men that would give their eye teeth to marry Ashanti she just don't want niggas in her house and if were her I WOULDN'T EITHER.

this is not news.

https://twitter.com/EdWhelanEPPC/status/1636014401516969988

as it turns out, people's friends and acquaintances are allowed to tell them they disagree with their job choices. this is not new. it is not bad. they are just mad it is hurting them.

The problem with corporate DEI “training” is that it sidesteps the real issues. Issue 1 is abt banning behavior that can get the company sued with a reasonable chance of success. Issue 2 is, within those boundaries, what norms of integration can our institution/department/team agree on, and how will we ensure those norms are generally followed?

I was seeing all these great stuff about Bobby Caldwell, I didn’t realize he’d just passed. What a legend! I would love someone to do a study on why Bobby Caldwell could vocally pass as black while like ~no other “blue-eyed-soul” types really could. Like why is Michael McDonald immediately obvious as a white man on record but Bobby Caldwell wasn’t?

This person seems to be nice, or at least mutuals with some of you all who are nice so I am not going to dunk but… what in the ever loving fuck? You cannot, cannot, CANNOT POSSIBLY be telling me you think parents are underrepresented in American culture. Cannot. Cannot. CAN. NOT.

“Based on nothing at all” you mean based on knowing absolutely anything whatsoever about the discourse around gender on the internet in the past ten years?

https://twitter.com/cathyyoung63/status/1635932316135485440

Like cmon this is basic cultural competency shit. This is HBO doing captions for Yvonne Orli that said she was speaking Nigerian when she was obviously speaking in tongues type shit.

I DON’T think that we must see our exact experiences sorted by identity and reflected back to us in the art we consume, for pleasure or on assignment; I DO think teachers and critics have a duty to bring the text and the audience as close together as possible. And like anything else in art (or honestly in life) it has to be done in ways that actually connect, not ways that “should” connect on paper.

Anyway idk the woke/anti-woke beat is getting played out. Which is good bc maybe we can spend some time actually talking about integration now! Most major American institutions—workplaces, universities, legislatures, bureaucracies, magazine covers, etc—are meaningfully more diverse than they were in the Reagan - Bush II period.

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1635825375015055361

Anyway, this is what woke means when used non-pejoratively:

https://twitter.com/csilverandgold/status/1389218680651882504