Jordan McDonald

"The never-ending playlist of R&B and gospel jams drowned out the thoughts of everyone in the car, each song turning travel into a trance."

How a Christmas spent grieving the loss of her brother in South Carolina helped one writer and her family reconnect to their ancestral past.

Loss has a way of unraveling tradition. The first Christmas after my brother’s unexpected passing in 2014, my parents and I had no desire to spend the holidays with loved ones over an array of home-cooked foods. Cert...

Anyone who watches romantic thrillers knows what to expect. This is precisely why we watch. The goal is not to be surprised so much as it is to have our suspicions confirmed. These films promise to reward us for our anticipation. With the rise of Black-led romantic thrillers, however, audiences are often asked to suspend our disbelief in more ways than one. Unlike the increasingly popular, so-called “Black social thrillers,” such as Get Out, Us, and Luce, the Black romantic thriller is rarely...

In “Strange Case,” the fifth episode of HBO’s horror drama Lovecraft Country, a Black woman named Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) has sex with William (Jordan Patrick Smith), a mysterious white man, and wakes up trapped in the body of a white woman. Frantic in the flesh of another, Ruby struggles to make sense of her transformation and ends up roaming the segregated streets of 1950s Chicago, half dressed and frazzled. She’s overwhelmed with a sense of confusion that turns into understanding: The world’s ...

As two young journalists, we have experienced firsthand how much the lives of young people have been upended during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we navigate major life transitions during this period of uncertainty, one of us just graduating college and the other entering her senior year, it’s hard to not feel alone. We know others around our age are probably feeling the same.
In this vein, we wanted to hear from young people like us about how their lives have changed since spring. From reexamini...

During the late 19th century, in the midst of the United States Civil War, two free Black men set out to plan an art exhibition. At a time when the future of chattel slavery and Black life hung in the balance of a national quarrel, these men, William H. Dorsey and Edward M. Thomas, negotiated their precarious freedoms through the collection and promotion of Black art.

Thomas, who worked for the government as a messenger of the House of Representatives, had established himself outside of work ...

At the end of January, the rapper Lil Wayne (born Dwayne Carter Jr.), one of hip-hop’s most lauded lyricists, released his 13th studio album, “Funeral.” Lengthy and all-consuming, the album’s 24 tracks follow up on decades of genre-defining creativity and charisma. “Welcome to the funeral, closed casket as usual,” Wayne proclaims at the album’s start. The first follow-up to his highly anticipated album “Tha Carter V,” “Funeral”feels like both a beginning and an ending in the rapper’s career.
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I saw Negrita, for the first time, in 2018, on a shelf in Barcelona where I presumed, she had always been. Her name emblazoned on the bottle, “Negrita rhum” was not shy about the history fermenting inside of her. Inviting me in, the rum’s branding alone caught my eye before the full story made itself apparent. Slender and dark, her bottle was brown, blue, red, and yellow. Negrita, the rum’s namesake was indisputably black — her face, a familiar one. When I looked at her, then, I thought for a...

Dissecting Walker’s story into four 45-minute episodes, Self-Made delivers a rags-to-riches empowerment tale about what it means to do beauty. Treating Walker’s history-making achievements as its base ingredient, the miniseries goes on to introduce a number of platitudes into its narrative mix. The most potent of these asserts the transformative power of self-making, particularly where matters of beauty are concerned. More often than not, “beauty” is a variable that determines so much of one’s life experience, and power only works to accelerate beauty’s premium. Thus, for the disenfranchised,

In A24’s latest crime thriller, Uncut Gems, everything begins in Ethiopia. Opening with injury, the film starts in 2010 at the scene of two familiar crimes—the exploitation of land and of man. First, an African miner emerges from the Welo mines of Ethiopia carried by his coworkers. His leg, mangled and bleeding, demands the attention of medics and mine managers alike. Shots of the man’s bone exiting his skin are soon replaced by those that show another protrusion. Though his bloodshed breeds ...

In 1980, painter, curator, and mixed-media artist Howardena Pindell debuted a short film entitled Free, White, and 21 at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. Her first work with moving images—and a stark diversion from her career as an established abstractionist—this film marked Pindell’s embrace of a new medium and the creation of what has been considered a seminal work in the history of American video art. Recounting her lived experiences as both a target and a neglected object of racism and misogyn...

Love is supposed to transgress borders on 90 Day Fiancé, TLC’s rippling reality show about couples navigating the ins and outs of courtship, romance, and international travel within the strictures of a K-1 visitation visa. For six seasons, couples have encountered myriad relationship obstacles, including language barriers, unsupportive families, and differing worldviews. A standout among TLC’s slate of reality TV shows, 90 Day Fiancé marries the cheap thrills typically associated with reality...

When George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, an all-white and all-male Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Anita Hill to testify about the nominee sexually harassing her. After ridiculing Hill and rejecting her claims, the Senate confirmed Thomas and tarnished Hill’s reputation, turning 1992 into the “Year of the Woman”—a cultural moment marked by the passage of new sexual-harassment legislation and several women gaining Senate seats. Generations of women ha...

In the summer of 1980, art historian and critic Judith Wilson was commissioned by Essence magazine, a Black women’s publication founded in 1970, to conduct interviews with Black women visual artists working in the new decade. An Essence typescript memo in the Judith Wilson papers, dated September of the same year, shows a request for Wilson’s expertise in the formation of a list of Black women artists, a list that would be forwarded to none other than the multinational cosmetics powerhouse Re...

Since its discovery in the early 20th century, the bust of Nefertiti, a work of limestone and stucco crafted by the sculptor Thutmose around 1345 B.C.E., has cemented the ancient Egyptian queen’s relevance as a global pop-culture icon. The Nefertiti of the infamous sculpture dons her signature cap crown, an extravagant royal blue headdress with a golden diadem band and elaborate designs, which suggest a power embellished by an elegant aesthetic. Beneath it, her face—symmetrical, poised, and o...

In When I Get Home, Solange’s 2019 follow-up to her Grammy award-winning album A Seat at the Table, images of Black cowboys are intermixed with images of techno futures and the sprawling metropolis of Houston, Texas. Centering Blackness in the imagery of Southern rodeos, jockeying, and horseback riding, the visual album features Solange and an assortment of others in the aesthetic trappings of the Southwestern United States. In one scene,a sea of Black girls in a field wear white leotards, co...