Gerald Nesmith

Essence • 4th September 2023

The Blind Side: Propagating the Myth of Post-Racial America Through Film

It is easy to look back at the world in 2009 and believe things were much simpler. The United States had just elected its first Black President in Barack Obama, his hope-laced rhetoric brought an air of optimism that was sorely missing in a country on the verge of economic collapse. This feeling was delusional on the surface, but truthful in the depths if you are willing to examine it. The country felt as if it had finally lived up to the ideals it claimed to espouse in its founding. All men are

Show Discipline Magazine • 27th August 2023

Boots Riley and the Art of Being Human

There is a common analogy that involves a frog being placed in a pot of water. As the analogy goes, if you place the frog in water that is already boiling it will jump out, but if you slowly turn up the heat the frog will just adjust to each temperature change until the water is boiling and by then it is too late. The analogy is often used today to look at the worsening conditions we all face and how we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become complacent for fear that we will not notice the final cra

Salon • 9th June 2023

Meghan McCain's cries about a "woke-fest" backfire on the right

Last week, conservative political commentator Meghan McCain wrote an article for the Daily Mail about one of the more pressing issues of our time, the one-off appearance of Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, in HBO's reboot of "Sex and the City." Now, there is nothing wrong with people who usually spend their time gazing into the fiery abyss of our political landscape deciding to tackle lighter material, but unfortunately that's not what this piece was. The first sentence of the headline of her a

labaatan • 5th May 2023

R&B and Cyberpunk : A Story of Modernity —

To paint the picture thoroughly, I need to explain that this era of R&B not only had a clear, solidified sound—there was a presumed socially stringent and well-defined categorization of the genre. Contextually, R&B was seen as ‘the love song’ genre that allowed artists of any gender to display feelings of aching longing, desperate desire and forlorn yearning. This was all over the sounds of striking harmonies and soaring romantic imagery. However, what it was not viewed as was the brooding and,

Show Discipline Magazine • 12th December 2022

YE POST CHILDHOOD

For a large portion of his career, Ye ( the artist formerly known as Kanye West) made his creative journey synonymous with the freedom of expression and thought that we allow children as they navigate a new and unfamiliar world. Ye was once quoted saying “ I’m trying to bring a piece of my childhood out in every piece of music I put out”. He did this to such a degree that from time to time, as I aged it felt like my own childhood became inseparable from the works that he produced. Around 2010 I

The Daily Dot • 21st September 2022

Allen Iverson's classic A5 ad is a lesson on how not to other Black culture

It’s 2001, the new millennium is just getting its sea legs, and both hip-hop and basketball are attempting to do the same. Leaving behind what would become known as a golden era for both the genre and the sport, it became evident reinvention would be key.

For basketball, the answer was a simple one, yet not one that management was ready to embrace: NBA MVP Allen Iverson. For hip-hop, the need for change led to an embrace of corporate interests that increasingly attempted to water it down. In th

Show Discipline Magazine • 12th March 2022

What does basketball want from Blackness?

What does basketball want from Blackness?

There is an incident that took place a few years ago, during an NHL game between the Chicago Blackhawks and Washington Capitals that put a fine point on something that often goes unsaid. After fighting with the Blackhawk’s Connor Murphy, Capitals player Devante Smith-Pelly (one of only 30 Black players in the league at the time) was sent to the penalty box, where a group of white fans began repeatedly chanting the word “basketball” at him.

Despite the

Teen Vogue • 29th June 2020

Civil Rights Nostalgia Can’t End Racism

Though it seems to have come as a shock to many of us, the past several weeks of protests and rebellion did not materialize out of thin air. In fact, if you listen to what politicians have been saying for years, you see a trend of linking nearly a decades’ worth of Black Lives Matter activism to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

We might focus on the waves of protest that have come since Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, but this messaging started long before that and the current uprisings