Category: Black Women

Bush Mamas: A Black Film Gives Birth to Sociohorror

  Professor, Writer and Director Haile Gerima’s 1975 student thesis film Bush Mama premiered on the independent and student film circuit a year before I was born. I was born in the small-town Midwest: Kankakee, Illinois, a town most people have not heard of and can barely pronounce when they do. Once I was born, I … Continue reading Bush Mamas: A Black Film Gives Birth to Sociohorror →

Women Should Tell Women’s Stories: on the films of the capital punishments of Wanda Jean Allen and Aileen Wuornos

In 2002, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus was forced to end her documentary on the last three months of Oklahoman Wanda Jean Allen, a twice-convicted murderer. Allen was the sixth woman put to death in the United States after the 1977 reinstatement of the death penalty. The Execution of Wanda Jean depicts the frantic and pathetic clemency pursuit in the Bible … Continue reading Women Should Tell Women’s Stories: on the films of the capital punishments of Wanda Jean Allen and Aileen Wuornos →

I love mad Black women even if no one else does…

In the elite class of  First Ladies in which she resides and with nearly 50 predecessors before her, Mrs. Obama ranks among Abigail Adams, Mary Todd Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy in terms of recognition, studiousness, diligent work and an identity of her own entirely separate from her world-leading husband.