2017

Sam Wilson being promoted to Captain America will likely be one of my favorite things to ever happen in comics. With that, I’d like to think I’ve been fair as I reviewed each of the two titles, Sam Wilson: Captain America and All-New Captain America, that highlight Wilson’s experiences through this unexpected journey. I’ve handed out plenty of praise and the occasional raised eyebrow of a cautious onlooker. Finding out that Sam’s time as Captain America will officially come to an end sent me into a rage: First I was shocked, then embarrassed as I heard the “I told you so’s” ring in my mind. In hindsight, I’m glad I waited and didn’t write up the first 1,000 words of pure, unhindered bars I had planned to come at Marvel with for this move. I spent my July 4th weekend re-reading some of my favorite moments of the run and accepted that it was never meant to last for long.

Should/could it have? Hell yeah. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But I’ve read enough comics and had enough conversations about comics to know there’s an unspoken trend of short-lived greatness in comics that are too far outside of the status quo. I’m still pissed off. I’ve just contained that emotion and turned it into monitored thoughts. By now, all I can do is throw on a stale face for the ages and move on. But not until after I speak my piece on the premature demotion of Sam Wilson.

When it was first announced that Sam Wilson would be next in line to take up the shield once Steve Rogers was out of commission, I was one of many caught by surprise. A black man is really America’s hero, is what I constantly found myself muttering. That quickly changed to My Captain America can fly. [Considering making a t-shirt out of that, by the way. Leave your size in the comments.] However, I’ve been around long enough to know that nothing in comics sticks for long besides the deaths of Bucky, Batman’s parents and Uncle Ben Parker.
My Captain America can fly.

Was Sam-Cap a publicity stunt? Short answer, probably. Long answer, it was one of many moving parts of Marvel’s attempt to diversify its lineup with more people of color and fewer straight white dudes named Steve and Tony. Sadly, because of years of a lack of representation and a sudden aha! moment, Marvel’s attempt at true representation boiled down to a knee-jerk reaction that a lot of fans didn’t respond well to. While I personally loved the efforts of introducing Sam Wilson as Captain America, Riri Williams as Tony Stark’s protege, Jane Foster as Thor and expanding Wakanda’s significance, I also acknowledge that a lot of comic book fans hate change the same way that your great-grandparents refused to let women wear pants. [I’m sure they’d deny it now, but they did.] Neither of these hills are worth dying on, yet they’re both covered in bodies draped in #AllLivesMatter t-shirts.

Despite the writing on the wall, I chose to enjoy as much of Sam Wilson carrying the shield as possible. Steve Rogers is long known for being the Boy Scout who’s the living embodiment of picking oneself up by their bootstraps. Sam more closely represented people like me. Not just because he was a Black man, either, although it definitely helps. His experiences reflected the struggle many people often feel living in the United States. I may love my country and what it offers me, in theory, but I’m much too familiar with what it forces me to actually live through to blindly follow a set of hopeful ideals first introduced more than two centuries ago.

Sam Wilson could fly down 79th street of my native Chicago to save a family from a burning building…
Outside of a few cringeworthy moments that screamed “Get off my lawn you rambunctious, millennial punks!,” I think Sam Wilson’s run as Captain America should be far more respected than it is. He became the symbol of everyday people in America, not just middle America — what some choose to inaccurately refer to as fringe America. Sam Wilson could fly down 79th street of my native Chicago to save a family from a burning building but also stop a kidnapping in Evanston. On the other hand, I imagine Steve Rogers never coming south of 35th street or east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. And that means a lot to readers like me.

One of the most disappointing parts of Sam Wilson returning to the fold as Falcon is this: We already have a new Falcon. And he’s great! What the hell are we supposed to do with Joaquin Torres now?!?! My mans has actual falcon wings coming out of his body. He has falcon eyes. Might as well have a beak. There isn’t much else left for him to do in the superhero world. What’s next for him? Is he gonna be Lil’ Falcon? Falcon B? Birdboy? What’s going on here, man?

It’s a story as old as this thing we call society. Once someone gets pushed down, everyone under them gets shuffled around too, often for the worse.

Despite this, the most disappointing thing about Sam Wilson’s demotion – because, no matter how they try to spin it, that’s exactly what it is – is how it’s wrapping up. One of the most consistent struggles Sam faced as Captain America was hate, both from citizens and readers. He regularly mentioned how he took on much more than his fair share and the toll it took on him. But that doesn’t mean he gets to quit and not give it another shot. Last we saw of him with the shield, Sam left it back in his New York apartment because the system literally tried to kill Rage and Steve Rogers made him think he let a senator get killed. If he doesn’t get a chance to redeem himself as Captain America, I’ll risk sounding hyperbolic and say everything up until now has been a waste.

Look, I don’t expect Sam to defeat white supremacy within a couple volumes of a comic book series. I don’t even know what the hell that would look like if I’m being totally honest. But couldn’t he at least put a stop to the Americops? They played such a major role in Sam’s storyline that no one else has any right to end the living extensions of police violence. And there’s no way I’ll ever accept them just being a consistent part of the Marvel Universe going forward. Black people being targeted by police in the streets is enough to give me an ulcer, but in my comics too? Nah, bruh.

If Sam would’ve become Captain America, stepped away while on top, and at least made a lateral move, this would be understandable. But no. As far as we know now, he’s heading back to the old guard. Even though it was brief, Sam Wilson will be my personal favorite Captain America for a long, long time.

Read more about Captain America: Sam Wilson, our comics reviews and our commentary.

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Seriously, we’ve all been there. We’ve had a show that started out near and dear to our hearts. The show whose purpose surpassed mere entertainment value and led us to enlightenment or an awakening. A show with meat and heart, characters that you fall in love with. Then that show goes left of center and then south and then left again, but never truly back to where it started. You try your best to stay with it, but at some point you realize that it isn’t the show you thought it was. Maybe you’ve changed, maybe the show changed. Either way, it’s not a healthy relationship and the loyal completest inside you has finally decided that this needs to come to an end. So, you break up.

That’s me. I finally did it. After most of my friends had done the same. I finally broke up with Orange Is The New Black. I’m going to spare you the fifth season spoilers, because honestly, I don’t feel like reliving those hours. Even if I break them up into minutes and seconds. I don’t want to go back. The trailer made me do it. I was worried about Taystee and wanted to know who was taking care of Suzanne. I was sad for Soso and I wanted any glimpse of Poussey smiling and laughing that I could get. The only thing I was left with was frustration, anger and hours of time that I can never get back.

I started to question why I began watching OITNB to begin with. When I thought about it, I realized that I started the show for equal parts entertainment and awareness. I wanted to know more about the penal system. I also fell instantly in love with Taystee, Crazy Eyes (Suzanne) and Poussey. What I realized after some time, was that the show was incredibly horrible at keeping a sense of actually realizing the prison system, the brutality that comes along with it and what happens when you privatize such a system and strip it down to the bare bones of any kind of organization.

So, I went looking for what I couldn’t get with OITNB; a sense of realness sans Black and Brown body exploitation for means of entertainment. I found a few movies that shed light on the corporatized prison system and the psychology that comes with it. These movies aren’t necessarily easy to watch, but not in the “lemme exploit the pain and suffering of people of color and call it woke t.v.” kind of pain. Nah, this is some real shit. If you’re looking for pure entertainment, these aren’t your movies. However, if you need to see and understand what can possibly be happening to folks that we know or know of who are enduring the penal system, then I encourage you to watch these movies.

The Stanford Experiment (2015)

Based on a true story, The Stanford Experiment follow 12 men who were selected to be a part of a simulation study on the psychology of imprisonment in 1971. The results of this experiment are eerily painful and I had a very hard time watching this without pauses. It’s unbelievable that the results are so relevant today, in the sense that – nothing has changed. People are degraded and stripped of any evidence of their individuality and instead of this study extinguishing these practices (practices endured by white male Stanford students), we can see the prevalence of those actions in detained individuals today. The actors include the beloved and late Nelsan Ellis, who portrayed Jesse Fletcher, a consultant to the experiment who had spent 17 years in the San Quentin State Prison and was brought in to help enforce and legitimize the experiment.

Civil Brand (2002)

Civil Brand stars almost every Black actor known to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. You have N’Bushe Wright, LisaRaye, Da Brat, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Monica Calhoun, Clifton Powell, Lark Vorhees, Tichina Arnold and MC Lyte. Listen, Civil Brand isn’t filled with Oscar worthy performances, if you’re using the Oscars as any kind of measurement. It’s a low-lower budget flick, Da Brat is the narrator and I will still watch this movie a hundred more times before viewing another season of OITNB. The movie is set in Whitehead Correctional Institute, a women’s penitentiary and it follows the experience of several of the inmates. The movie aims to shed light on the prison industrial complex’s use of prisoners for profit versus rehabilitation & release, and the mental and physical abuse of female inmates by guards. Say what you want about the acting/overacting or even the way the movie veers off the main topic (exploitation of prisoners), it doesn’t go about making it’s point by exploiting the bodies of women for ratings.

It’s worth saying that neither one of these movies are Shawshank Redemption, but there can only ever be one Shawshank and that’s that. At the same time, I think it’s good to note that these movies are also not Orange Is The New Black and that’s what I needed. I needed to back away from the hype of an overly privileged white woman retelling the stories of imprisoned Black and Brown women when she only spent thirteen months in a Connecticut minimum security prison and is now making money off of it. /endrant.

Issa break up, so my movies may not be perfect (sorry/not sorry)… let me know in the comments what to add to my list to help me get over my ex-favorite show.

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  BGN’s DaVette See caught up with “Girls Trip” Director Malcolm D. Lee and Producer Will Packer in New Orleans on a warm summer afternoon on the eve of Essence Festival 2017, to chat about the soon-to-be-released comedy. Producer Will Packer (Ride Along and Think Like a Man franchises, Almost Christmas) presents Girls Trip, a new comedy from director/producer Malcolm [...]

The post BGN Chats with “Girls Trip” Director Malcolm D. Lee and Producer Will Packer appeared first on Black Girl Nerds.

Since releasing his introspective new album 4:44 earlier this month, there has been a lot of chatter about the topics behind Jay Z’s different songs, from racism and hip-hop culture, to turning to financial literacy to uplift the community and, of course, love. The latter topic was spoken about in depth by not just Jay Z, but a myriad of other famous men in “Footnotes for 4:44,” a clip that accompanies the short film for the album’s title track and explains the story behind it. We know “4:44” is an apology letter of sorts to Beyoncé for not just past infidelity but also Jay Z’s missteps with love in general over the many years they’ve been together. But in “Footnotes,” the celebrity men get real about their relationships, past, present and future, and how their upbringing impacted how they view and show love. The men in question include Will Smith, Chris Rock, Michael B. Jordan, Kendrick Lamar, Chris Paul, Anthony Anderson, Mahershala Ali, Meek Mill, Aziz Ansari and many more. One person’s reflections in particular in the video have people talking and that’s actor Jesse Williams.

For the first time he opens about his divorce from Aryn Drake-Lee in the 11-minute clip, addressing rumors that his marriage ended because he chose to step out with actress Minka Kelly, whom he collaborated with on a video game/movie project recently and also worked with on Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

“I was in a relationship for 13 years,” he said in the video. “Thirteen real years. Not five years, not seven years — 13 years. And all of a sudden motherf–kers are writing like think pieces that I somehow threw a 13-year relationship — like, the most painful experience I’ve had in my life with a person I loved with all of my heart — that I threw a person and my family in the trash because a girl I worked with was cute.”

Mind you, his statements don’t say outright that such rumors are or are not true, but they do make it clear that there is a lot more to the dismantling of a more than decade’s long relationship than people will ever understand.

And as Jay Z shared in his own comments in the video, there is a lot more to trying to reassemble one as well, which he and Beyoncé had to do when their marriage started to fall apart. His struggles with knowing how to love, and doing so in a healthy way, is what he remarked on most in the clip.

“What I thought when I met my dad was, ‘Oh, I’m free to love now. Ok, yeah, but how are you going to do it?'” he said. “‘You want to do it, I get it. How are you going to do it? You’ve never done this before. No one informs you how to do this. You don’t even have the tools to do it. I don’t know, but I’m going to do it because I’m ready.’ And that’s why I say, ‘You mature faster than me, I wasn’t ready.’ I just ran into this place and we built this big, beautiful mansion of a relationship that wasn’t totally built on the 100 percent truth and it starts cracking. Things start happening that the public can see. Then we had to get to a point of ‘Okay, tear this down and let’s start from the beginning.’ And it’s hard. Remember, we just talked about me. I’m from Marcy Projects, shot at — nothing’s harder than this. By far. I’m telling you. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And most people, humans, us, we’re not willing to put ourselves through that. Most people give up.”

You already know the drill. If you want to see the interviews and the full “Footnotes for 4:44” clip, you have to go to Tidal. But it’s definitely worth a viewing.

The post Jesse Williams Responds To Rumors “I Threw A Person And My Family In The Trash” Over Minka Kelly appeared first on MadameNoire.