Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
I went to see The Woman King two Saturdays ago, and it was everything they marketed it to be. It was spectacular. I have to admit that I thought twice about writing this, as I know how some people are about spoilers. I have one of those kinda people in my family… she’s downright anal about not wanting to hear ANYTHING about the movie, show, or book before she’s watched or read it. Me? You cannot spoil it for me. I reason I listen to my favorite songs a hundred times in a row, or I’ve read my favorite books — I refer to them as my old friends — tens of times and it doesn’t stop me from enjoying them one bit. But out of respect for those of you with a different view on the issue, I will try my very best not to spoil your fun… because you will go to see it, right?
There has been some controversy surrounding the movie. ADOs and FBA people boycotting the film because they are just churlish haters made in the image of their MAGA sponsors. White content creators, especially on TikTok, jumping in to let us know that a movie about Africans, directed by a Black woman, starring dark-skinned Black women must by very definition be an inferior product. Most of the criticisms of the movie center on “historical inaccuracies.” Bwahahaha!! “Historical inaccuracies?! Really?! Now you are gonna criticize a Black (although written by a white woman) film because of historical inaccuracies after generations of making films about Egypt without showing Black people in any meaningful roles? After years of showing Jesus as a willowy white man with blue eyes and blond hair? After years of portraying Custer and his ilk as the heroes and Native Peoples as savages? Dang!
It offended detractors that the film didn’t show the Dahomey Kingdom as the primary villain in the transatlantic slave trade. They insist that the Dahomey were most to blame for Black people ending up as beasts of burden on plantations in the “new world.” As if it were the Dahomey who built ships for the transportation of millions of Africans packed like sardines across the Atlantic Ocean; like they were who traveled across an ocean to deposit their enslaved brethren to white slavemasters’ doorsteps. They who killed, dehumanized, and raped African men, women, and children in the millions in the mission to use their free labor to build the most enduring prosperous economies in the world. The irony — and gall! — of conservative trolls lecturing that we shouldn’t celebrate the Dahomey Kingdom because they profited from the institution of slavery. A stunning lack of self-awareness and a nauseating display of hypocrisy.
Let’s stipulate that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Dahomey were no angels...after all, we do know that angels are white, right? Yes, according to those in the know, angels are white like Sallman’s versions of Jesus, and like mermaids and Santa Claus. But the movie wasn’t really about the history of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Detractors slyly chose them as a convenient pinata. Rather, the movie is about the “elite group of female warriors” known as the Dahomey Amazons or the Agojie. The film is especially about that one army under the leadership of General Nanisca, portrayed by the phenomenal Viola Davis.
I thought for sure I’d fall asleep at some point during the 2 hours and 14 minutes of the movie, especially because I hadn’t slept a wink the night before. It didn’t happen. From the first scene to the very last, it captured my attention and refused to let up. I couldn’t take my eyes off Viola Davis. She commanded the screen. I’ve seen Ms. Davis in many movies and have seen her in every pose that she employed in The Woman King. I found it simply mind-blowing that, in The Help, for example, the same stance and stare conveying subservience and fear, in The Woman King became one of power, and confidence, and invincibility. She was the mighty general. She was simply majestic.
Gina Prince-Bythewood did a job that in a sane world would for sure get her at least a nomination for Best Director. The fight scenes were complex, artistic, physical, brutal, and reality-based. There wasn’t the over-dramatization of blood and gore of Quentin Tarantino's signature movies like the Kill Bill series and Django Unchained; nor was it the fantastical, out-of-this-world, death-defying choreography of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (nobody will ever match Ang Lee in that department, I don’t think). The Black women in The Woman King understood their assignment, and they simply killed it.
As the story unfolded, I felt a connection to the movie unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was eerie. The theater erupted in spontaneous applause at the end. It’s one of those movies that you didn’t want to end. While my daughter and I waited for the bonus scenes, we couldn’t resist the urge to move to the beats of the African drums and felt a sense of kinship when a few people followed our lead and started dancing as well. It was a spiritual experience.
Thuso Mbedu is a brilliant young actress and I wouldn’t be at all upset if she were to be nominated and then win Best Supporting Actress. She was/is that good. But for me, besides Viola, Lashana Lynch was the real badass of the movie. She was magnificent. The militant, take-no-prisoner, I-said-what-I-said John Boyega also gave a most compelling performance. He became the embodiment of the king.
During her many appearances promoting this movie, Viola Davis has stressed the importance of having this production both be critically acclaimed and also a success at the box office. Even though black men like Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Idris Elba, and Chadwick Boseman have all had phenomenal successes worldwide, Hollywood’s head honchos continue to insist that audiences — and especially international audiences (in a world where over 80 of the world’s population has at least some melanin) — do not much care for movies with Black leads, and especially not Black female leads.
A successful run at the box office for The Woman King will go some way toward chipping away at the stubborn, convenient lies that we all know are rooted in anti-Black, anti-Native, anti-Asian, racism. A successful run for The Woman King will open more doors for women and especially Black women of every hue. There are still tons of our stories yet to be told. Politics aside, this movie deserves to succeed on its own merits. It is a damn good movie. I highly recommend it.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Michelle Obama “For me, ‘The Light We Carry’ book tour will be about starting important conversations and digging deeper into the questions that all of us are grappling with as we live through uncertain times,” The Grio: Oprah Winfrey, Tracee Ellis Ross among moderators for Michelle Obama tour
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Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres are among the celebrity moderators joining former first lady Michelle Obama on tour for her upcoming book, “The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times.”
Other guests include Conan O’Brien, Tracee Ellis Ross, journalists Gayle King and Michele Norris, “Today” show host Hoda Kotb, poet Elizabeth Alexander and advocate Heather McGhee.
“For me, ‘The Light We Carry’ book tour will be about starting important conversations and digging deeper into the questions that all of us are grappling with as we live through uncertain times,” Obama said in a statement released Wednesday by her publisher, Crown, and the tour’s producer, Live Nation. “I can’t wait to get back on the road and dive into it with such a thoughtful, impressive group of moderators.”
On Wednesday, Crown and Live Nation also announced that Obama has added seven stops to her monthlong, six-city tour, which begins at Washington’s Warner Theatre on Nov. 15, the book’s publication date. Additional appearances have been scheduled in Washington, along with Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco.
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Latronia Latson said she feels like she has been neglected in the recovery efforts from Hurricane Ian.
Latson, who lives in the Dunbar neighborhood in Fort Myers, Florida, said she can’t get to a relief center to get bottled water and other necessities being distributed because she doesn’t have transportation; the bus system is not running in her neighborhood. Her stove and microwave also mysteriously stopped working after the hurricane, despite power being restored.
Latson said the more affluent, predominately White communities seem to be getting prioritized in the storm recovery.
“They need to make it convenient for those that don’t have transportation,” said Latson, who is disabled. “We just don’t get the same service (as people in other parts of town).”
Latson is among the residents and community leaders in Florida who say the poor, majority Black neighborhoods of Dunbar and River Park in Naples are forgotten as rescue and relief teams descend on the areas hit by Hurricane Ian last week.
The residents say they were among the last to get their power restored and shelters and relief centers are being set up too far away for people who don’t have access to vehicles.
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The attorney for a Black man serving a virtual life sentence for shootings he committed at 17 has asked the Washington Supreme Court to reconsider a split ruling that upheld his sentence, saying the leniency it granted white defendants in similar situations reveals racial bias.
The court last month upheld the 61-year sentence for Tonelli Anderson, 45, over forceful dissents from four justices.
The decision abandoned a precedent issued just a year earlier in which the court said — in the case of a white defendant — that such lengthy punishments for juvenile killers were unconstitutional because it left them no chance of a meaningful life outside prison.
“When this Court makes decisions reflecting racial bias, it must review and correct them,” Travis Stearns, an attorney with the Washington Appellate Project, wrote in a motion filed last week. “Because this decision reflects such a bias, this Court should reconsider its decision and provide Tonelli with the same relief white litigants who appeared before this Court received.”
On Monday, three civil rights organizations — the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law; the Juvenile Law Center, based in Philadelphia; and Huy, which supports indigenous inmates in the Pacific Northwest — filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying the decision was also wrong because it failed to account for the youthful defendant’s capacity for rehabilitation.
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The day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a representative in the Puerto Rican legislature introduced a bill punishing "the crime of abortion" with 99 years in jail.
The bill was withdrawn the same day it was introduced, but it represents renewed interest in greatly restricting abortion in Puerto Rico after the Supreme Court threw out its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights.
Abortion at any point of pregnancy is currently legal in Puerto Rico, making the island, on paper, one of the most accessible places in the Western Hemisphere for the procedure. But the fall of Roe is empowering conservative lawmakers to attempt new limits on abortion rights.
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Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour came to the Supreme Court on Tuesday with a raft of ambitious arguments — many of which would dismantle one of the key remaining prongs of the Voting Rights Act, and potentially give states broad authority to draw legislative maps that favor white voters at the expense of racial minorities.
Not long after LaCour began to lay out his case in Merrill v. Milligan, however, it appeared that many of his arguments are so fundamentally flawed that even this Supreme Court is unlikely to sign on to them.
Republican appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett both pointed out that his proposed reading of the Voting Rights Act cannot be squared with the law’s text. Even Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable partisan, acknowledged that LaCour offered some proposals that are “quite far reaching” and others that are more “basic,” and he seemed to urge LaCour to stick to his more “basic” ideas.
None of this means that Alabama is likely to lose this case. It’s fighting to keep congressional maps that allow Black Alabamans to elect their preferred candidate in only one of the state’s seven districts — or 14 percent of those districts — although Black people make up about 27 percent of the state’s population. Two different sets of plaintiffs argue those maps violate the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on race discrimination in voting.
But several of the justices, including Roberts, Barrett, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seemed to spend the morning casting about for a way to rule in Alabama’s favor without explicitly overruling nearly four decades of established voting rights law stretching back to the Court’s decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986).
That won’t be an easy task. Justice Elena Kagan said early in Tuesday’s argument that the Merrill plaintiffs’ challenge to Alabama’s maps is a “slam dunk” under Gingles and the Court’s precedents following Gingles. A lower court’s three-judge panel that included two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with Kagan, saying that the question of whether Alabama violated the law is not “a close one.”
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Erratic weather is just one problem. Many farmers can no longer keep pace with the rising cost of fuel and fertilizer (which previously has been largely imported from Ukraine). What's the solution? NPR: One of Kenya's luckier farmers tells why so many farmers there are out of luck
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Benard Mwenja is one of the luckier farmers in Kenya. He's still able to grow and harvest crops – something he's been doing for three decades to earn his livelihood in a country where agriculture is the backbone of the economy.
The majority of farmers in Kenya are smallholders, and they rely on their crops not only for income but as a source of food for their families. But it's become harder than ever to make a living, said Mwenja, who is 69.
One problem is the erratic rainfall due to the changing climate. Mwenja has reserve supplies of water saved up in reservoirs to draw upon when the rains falter.
"It took me a long time to dig up the earthen water pans on my farm," says Mwenja, referring to the pond-like craters dug in various parts of his farm to collect rainwater. "It was a lot of work because I was digging by hand."
He uses a mix of drip and sprinkler irrigation systems to water his crops. The water mainly flows with the help of gravity, although in some instances he needs to use a water pump, which he says has been expensive to purchase and maintain. "My neighbors were doubtful if all that work would pay off," he says.
But it has. His neighbor's corn plants – a staple crop – are wilted, their bean plants are drying up.
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One of Brazil’s most celebrated Black authors sat on stage and posed a vital question to a nation unaware of its past.
Why, asked Conceição Evaristo, were Brazilian schoolchildren taught about the 1835 Ragamuffin war – when separatist forces rebelled against the empire at the behest of white landowners – but not the Malê revolt, a Black Muslim slave uprising that erupted in the very same year?
For Tiago Rogero, a young Black reporter in the audience, it was a eureka moment.
“It’s true, I thought,” the journalist said of Evaristo’s question in the autumn of 2018. “I knew it was a slave revolt but that was about all … I genuinely didn’t know. So I decided to make a podcast about the stories I thought had been hidden when I was at school.”
The result was a trilogy of podcasts celebrating Black lives and Black matters – the Black people, struggles and achievements that had been airbrushed from the history of a country that is more than 50% Black.
The most recent of those podcasts – the Querino Project – calls itself a Brazilian answer to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which rethought US history through the prism of slavery and the key role Black citizens had in shaping that nation.
“It’s a story Brazil never wanted to tell but instead wanted to suppress,” said Rogero, 34, whose earlier podcasts were called Negra Voz (Black Voice) and Vidas Negras (Black Lives).
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