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Ok folks, let's just jump into the fray!  Check out our latest episode of Afronerd Radio's Grindhouse broadcast-airing this Sunday at 6 p. m. eastern on the BTalk 100 network.  Your esteemed AFROnerdist hosts will bring their unique analysis to the following topics:  almost like clockwork during these COVID-19 times, another Black hip hop legend passes in an untimely manner-Humpty Hump himself, Shock G dies at 57; 

an interesting article from the New York Times highlights the recent (and somewhat expansive) spate of Black themes and characters receiving mainstream exposure in the sci-fi, fantasy, and geek genre space; another NYT piece from celebrated educator and graphic novelist, Dr. Eve Ewing, details her triumphs and travails as a Black female writer in a mostly white and protective comic nerd landscape; longtime friend of the "steam engine," filmmaker, Hilton Ruiz stops by to discuss his new project, Klans Rules.....think Klansmen and Black vampires....nuff said;         

A topic we failed to address during our last  Mid Week in Review broadcast, the new "wokeness" agenda many elite prep schools are enacting into their curriculum is upsetting some parents; Is it about education or indoctrination?;   according to TheMarySue.com, a new fan-funded campaign is afoot demanding that Marvel revise the Ironman character a la #RestoretheSnyderverse with Los Angeles billboard stating-#BringBackTonyStarkToLife......we're off to the races, people!; our thoughts about the HBO Max/theatrical release of Mortal Kombat; after the final episode of S1 of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, now we're hearing that a mainstream MCU Captain America 4 release is being produced (which may be separate from a Chris Evans MCU film....hmm).

One thing that Dburt is doing (finally) is investing in cryptocurrency, courtesy of Roundlyx. We would implore our followers to investigate, discern and then explore by using our referral code: afro-87A4BF

Call us LIVE at 508-645-0100. AFTER CLICKING ON THE HIGHLIGHTED LINK, GO DIRECTLY TO AFRONERD RADIO!!! 

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Heyyy! It’s Kuya P and I got together a few of the NOC Family members’ Laura Sirikul & Mike Manolo to discuss… okay, FIGHT over Mortal Kombat out now in Theaters and HBO Max! Who will win? Place your bets now. CHECK OUT THE TRAILER HERE! Check out the Opening Seven Minutes! Featuring Joe Taslim […]

This week, a truly terrible decision came down from the Supreme Court in the case of Jones v. Mississippi, which affects a court’s ability to sentence a minor to life without parole. Previously, the court had ruled that mandatory sentences of life without parole for a minor were a violation of the 8th Amendment (being cruel and unusual punishment), and that that sentence could only be issued in extreme cases as determined under a separate assessment.

What this new ruling did was to do away with the need for that separate assessment, making life without parole an option for minors, just so long as it wasn’t mandatory—basically leaving it up to the individual discretion of a sentencer.

A punishment of life without the possibility of parole is something that arguably should not even exist for juveniles, and this ruling does away with the limitations that were at least in place around it.

Today’s decision is a huge blow against the movement to end juvenile life without parole. As Sotomayor correctly notes in her dissent, the court “guts” precedents that had strictly limit JLWOP. This is a major defeat for JLWOP reform. https://t.co/XS5CPsa2In pic.twitter.com/fTczLRlYqN

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) April 22, 2021

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor highlights in her dissent, not only does this new ruling step on the fairly recent precedent set, but in his majority opinion, Brett Kavanaugh pretends that precedent doesn’t even exist. Sotomayor said Kavanaugh, along with the other conservative justices who ruled in favor here, “rewrites [the case of precedence] Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing. The Court knows what it is doing.”

“It admits as much,” she adds, accusing the justices of “burying” that precedent as a mere footnote and “[urging] lower courts to simply ignore Montgomery going forward.”

“The Court is fooling no one,” Sotomayor writes.

It is truly amazing that Brett Kavanaugh of all people felt comfortable and confident writing this opinion, in which he declares that there is no need for a court to determine whether a young person is capable of being rehabilitated before being served such a harsh sentence. This is, after all, the man who (successfully) argued in front of the Senate that it was unfair to judge him as an adult by his actions (either alleged or admitted) as a teenager.

Kavanaugh hard in favor of life in prison for people who make mistakes as teenagers. Well isn’t that special

— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) April 22, 2021

When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were both in high school, he and his supporters trotted out a lot of weak defenses, including and especially the idea that it is unfair to hold a man’s actions against him from when he was just a boy. As Kavanaugh told it, he was just a beer-loving teen whose view of the world and of women had been shaped by the era’s excessively misogynistic pop culture trends.

So what if his own high school yearbook bio made demeaning references to his female classmates, or that in college, he was part of a fraternity known for behaviors that “demean women” and an all-male secret society that was shut down after video surfaced of members chanting “No means yes, yes means anal” in front of the campus’ Women’s Center.

When all of this came out during Kavanaugh’s confirmation, what were we doing but trying to determine whether he had been or could be rehabilitated, or whether his actions as a youth constituted “permanent incorrigibility,” as Miller and Montgomery—the precedent Kavanaugh just overturned—said was necessary?

Of course, it’s not surprising that Kavanaugh sees the crimes and other reflections of his character as a youth as being different from those young people who would be affected by this ruling. He went to Yale and before that—during the time Blasey Ford says he attacked her—a posh prep school. Meanwhile, Black youth are five times more likely to be arrested than white youth (as a national average—in some states that rate is twice that), and Black and Latinx people are historically far more likely to receive harsher sentences than their white counterparts.

This new ruling, which leaves the discretion up to the sentencer, seems designed to only widen those gaps. And while Kavanaugh’s defense of himself boiled down to “boys will be boys,” this ruling gives no thought to those young people for whom real trauma may have played a role in the violent crimes they have been convicted of.

Jones v. Mississippi upholds the ruling in a lower court case, in which Brett Jones was sentenced to life without parole for killing his grandfather when Jones was just 15 years old.

Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin writes that in her dissenting opinion,

Sotomayor also reminds those reading that Jones was “the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape,” with an alcoholic biological father who abused his mother and a stepfather who abused him with “belts, switches, and a paddle” and openly declared his hatred for Jones. When, per Sotomayor, Jones moved in with his grandfather—who abused him as well—he abruptly lost access to medications he was prescribed for mental health issues, including hallucinations. In 2004, when his grandfather tried to hit him, Jones says he stabbed him in self-defense.

Those are circumstances that Kavanaugh couldn’t possibly fathom, and while in an ideal world, Supreme Court justices would have both empathy and a respect for precedent, it is clear he has neither.

(image: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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The Hugo award is the Oscar of science fiction, and N. K. Jemisin has won it four times. Hands down, Jemisin is one of the best writers of our generation (I highly recommend The City We Became). She has a phenomenal course in fantasy and science fiction writing on MasterClass. In 16 lessons, Jemisin teaches writing technique and shares vital business tools for selling science fiction and fantasy and wisdom for anyone interested in becoming a writer. BGN spoke with Jesimin via Zoom about her new MasterClass.

In Lesson 1, you share that one of the reasons you love science fiction was because it allowed you to figure out where you were going. How does it feel to be an afro futurist explorer?

It’s just the way that my creativity runs. I spent my childhood reading science fiction. When I started writing, I wrote science fiction. There was never really a question that I was going to be doing science fiction and fantasy of some flavor or another because there are things that have always caught my attention and attracted me. The idea that we exist in the future was not a thing that I saw in science fiction, except in occasional works like Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, people like that. But it was the thing that I grappled with when I was younger. Of course now that I’m a writer myself, I write what I’m interested in, I write what I want to see. I’m just glad that other people want to see it, too.

During your World Building lesson in MasterClass, my mind broke open and drank up all that wisdom. How did you develop your style of world building?

World building — it’s just a thing that you do if you’re gonna write science fiction. You have no choice. When you’re a young science fiction writer, you usually start by reading books by existing writers. I read Stephen King’s On Writing, Orson Scott Card’s books  — I have some issues with his politics but his writing book was actually very useful. Then there are a number of other books that I read on how to write. When you’re a good reader, you read other people’s books and study their techniques to develop your own. I would read people like Octavia Butler and realize that she borrowed from certain kinds of biology and certain kinds of sociology. Her futurism turned out to be a lot more accurate than the future that you see in most science fiction and fantasy because she just was reading the headlines and watching the news. She had a person of color and an oppressed person’s understanding of how America really works. She wasn’t going with the propaganda; she was going with the reality. That kind of thing is something I gained just from reading her work. I’ve read her books repeatedly. I’ve read lots of other books, and then, of course, in my own background, I went to grad school for counseling psych. I was a practicing counseling psychologist doing career counseling and counseling of various kinds for like 20 years, so my experience seeing people dealing with trauma just naturally feeds into my writing.

Which creates nuance and reality. That’s why I feel invited into your novel’s worlds and have a relationship with the people who reside in your mind, which is spectacular. 

Thank you.

It’s so easy for writers to get caught up in ego. How can writers let go of ego in order to tell better stories?

Concentrate on the importance of the story. The story has to come first. It’s not about you. It’s not about your research skills. I’ve probably written dozens of really good lines that I write and I’m like, “Oh that’s a killer.” And then in the editing, I realized that line is superfluous. It’s not helping the story. At the end of the day, the overall product that you’re producing is also an act of ego. You want that whole book to hang together. It’s not about the individual lines. We have a saying in science fiction: “Murder your darlings.” The lines that come through that you’re like, “Oh that’s my good one,” no that line may not be useful, so it’s got to go. 

In Lesson 2 you talk about “rubbing the serial number off of an existing culture because they’re afraid of creating something new.” I love this quote. Please tell me more about this aspect of writing.

Well, that’s a difficult thing to answer in a quick answer, but what it comes down to is you shouldn’t be afraid of world building. You should not be afraid of coming up with something that you’ve not seen elsewhere. Plus also it’s kind of disrespectful to take people’s culture and, you know, turn it into a prop. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s good writing to not steal from people. Writers are pack rats. We all do that; we all steal. It’s just a question of like, you know, stealing better.

You decolonize science fiction and fantasy. In Lesson 10, you break down where rugged individualism comes from in American storytelling. How has your ability to disrupt that stereotype brought you joy in your storytelling?

To me it’s just what I want to see. There’s no plan that I have and how I do the writing that I do. When I’m talking about these techniques or these decolonization things, this is just stuff I’m going through myself. This is stuff that I do to hopefully help myself become a better writer, things that I find more interesting. I get bored with the same kinds of stories. It comes down to I write what I want to see.

In the later lessons, you get into the nuts and bolts of being a writer. The most powerful part of those lessons for me were dealing with rejection. What is your best tool for living a life as a writer and coexisting with rejection?

Coexisting with rejection is the best tool for living life as a writer. Like I said in my MasterClass, it’s best to treat rejections as achievements. Yay, you submitted something! Yay, you got feedback! Even if that feedback is just a form letter, it tells you something useful. Maybe the market you submitted your work to is a bad match for it; maybe you were way off from the guidelines and didn’t use the right format; maybe you just need to try again. It’s hard to separate yourself from the hurt and disappointment, but you have to try because this business is so full of it that you won’t make it otherwise. So focus on what you gain from every rejection.

Even if fantasy and science fiction aren’t your genre, N. K. Jemisin’s MasterClass is a vital tool for writers to experience. This course will enhance your scope of storytelling. I highly recommend this fantastic online course.

N. K. Jemisin teaches Science Fiction Writing on MasterClass streaming now on  www.masterclass.com. 

Follow on twitter: @nkjemisin @masterclass