My Courses

Of all the sophomore seasons of television released in the last decade, “House of the Dragon” remains one of the most perplexing. While the acting was still on par with season one, the plot meandered with no sense of urgency or understanding of the work it was based on. With “A Knight of the Seven…

Nearly five years ago, in August of 2021, Maya Cade unveiled Black Film Archive. Her online database, with films spanning from the early days of cinema to, at the time, the 1970s, put many rare films and treasures of Black cinema under one digital roof. In the days and months that followed, the site became…

I’ve always been interested in travel, but as much as I wanted to go to these faraway locations, I found comfort in just staying put. Watching TV and later movies actually fed into this duality. On many TV shows, there were cities like New York and Paris that seemed exciting, but early on, I never…

This is the third year I’ve helmed Black Writers Weeks in my role as Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com, a privilege granted with the immense support and trust of Chaz Ebert, and each year I am astounded by the breadth of the pieces we receive. They’re sometimes anniversaries commemorating pop culture items reframed for today’s readers; pressing critical…

“Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation…But 100 years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the…