Jordan McDonald
Freelance Writer
a little bit of everything but most of my writing explores American history, pop culture, queer identity, literature, and politics as they relate to Black women in the past and the present.
PROJECTS
bitchmedia.org
Light of Truth: Ida B. Wells Enters the Very White, Very Male Statue Game
In her 1987 article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers wrote that “the cost of Americanization, of equality, is to forget.” If this is so, what is the price paid for forgetting? After all, memory is an issue of national concern. Who and what we choose to honor with remembrance often reveals a society’s true foundation, and as factions form around some of America’s most controversial statues, we’re witness...
bitchmedia.org
A New Tail: “Siren” Treads the Muddy Waters of American History
Siren, Freeform’s biggest drama debut since Shadowhunters premiered in January 2016, has captivated viewers with a show packed with enthralling characters and set in a town with plenty of sordid history. The hour-long drama considers how fear and contempt would inform the way humans interact with the infamous Sirens of Greek myth—half-human lady monsters who use their beautiful voices to lure sailors to their deaths. Siren innovates a dark myth by indulging cultural fantasies about mermaids w...
The Dartmouth
Cheng’s ‘His Music Was Not A Weapon’ talk educates, inspires
Informed in part by the interest of students in his course Music 45.04, “Changing the World with Music,” professor of music William Cheng has been sharing his lecture “Loud Music Trial: His Music Was Not A Weapon” at colleges around the country. On Monday, Cheng brought the talk to Dartmouth, sharing the story of the fatal shooting of unarmed black teen Jordan Davis. Seventeen-year-old Davis was shot in Florida by Michael Dunn, a 47-year-old white man who claimed that Davis’ “loud rap music” ...
blackpraxis.com
Queen Bey and the Utility of Nefertiti
In her poem “Homage to Black Madonnas,” poet and visual artist Marianne Burroughs writes of the "magnificent black women” of the world. Continuing her reverential efforts, Burroughs honors those of us who have been ignored. To these women, she writes that “poets and singers have been remiss/have sung too few poems and songs of you/and the image makers have not recorded your beauty/.” Burroughs speaks of Sheba, Nefertiti, Zaiditu, and Cleopatra–the African beauties she believes that time has f...
The Dartmouth
Raunchy “Blockers” is a fresh take on teenage virginity narratives
“Pitch Perfect” screenwriter Kay Cannon made a splash at the South by Southwest Film Festival when she became the first female director to premiere an R-rated comedy with her film “Blockers.” With the teen comedy — Cannon’s directorial debut — hitting theaters Friday, the Hopkins Center for the Arts hosted an advance screening of the film over the weekend, giving Dartmouth the opportunity to view the teen drama a week before it hits theaters. “Blockers” strikes a balance between social commen...
blackpraxis.com
Cardi B's Constitution
On April 6, 2018, Bronx rapper, Cardi B, born Belcalis Almanzar, released her highly-anticipated debut album, Invasion of Privacy. Capturing the attention of millions with her sense of humor, blunt honesty, and a come-up story fit for a star, Cardi B has amassed a considerable fanbase in her own right. Through Instagram, two mixtapes (Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), and a stint on VH1’s Love and Hip Hop: New York, she’d emerged as a public persona long before her latest project went g...
bitchmedia.org
Not As Free “Grown-ish” Reveals the Dating Woes of Young Black Women
Grown-ish, Freeform’s Black-ish spinoff, explores the experiences, worldviews, and values of Generation Z through the eyes of Cal U freshman Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her eclectic group of friends. Through fast-paced and occasionally disorienting storylines, the show navigates sex, complicated friendships, romance, and the effects of drug use while centering Johnson’s quest to figure out who she is. However, in the episode “It’s Hard Out Here for A Pimp,” Grown-ish focused solely on Jaz...
The Dartmouth
“Text Me When You Get Home” celebrates female friendship
In Kayleen Schaefer’s “Text Me When You Get Home,” released Feb. 6, the infamous words of parting friends are made into the foundation for a broader dialogue about the nature of women’s friendships, on screen and off. Taking the American media and patriarchy to task, Schaefer challenges the ways in which the history of considering women physically, emotionally and mentally inferior to men undermines their relationships to themselves and each other.
“Text Me When You Get Home” merges personal ...
The Dartmouth
Weekend Picks: "Black Panther," Nicki Minaj, Cardi B
"Black Panther"
Friday and Saturday at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, 7 p.m.
In light of the failure of “A Wrinkle in Time,” the cultural importance of “Black Panther” has become all the more evident. Both films were monumental for black representation in front of and behind the camera, yet the latter succeeded where the former failed by engaging an eager audience with the most thoughtful story and well-developed characters yet seen in a Marvel film. After a second viewing, I reveled in the...
blackpraxis.com
Essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Hosts Reading at Dartmouth
On Thursday, January 25th, 2018 at 4:30 PM, The Cleopatra Mathis Poetry & Prose Series welcomed essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah to Sanborn Library for a reading of her work. Ghansah, an essayist popularized for her skilled and tactful use of the writing craft to explore the interiority of Black life and the external reality that informs it, shared a piece of her work with a packed library full of eager listeners for a brief but intimate hour, before opening the floor for questions.
After some ...
The Huffington Post
‘Grown-ish’ Missed An Opportunity To Get Real About Black Women’s Lives
When I first heard about “Grown-ish,” the spinoff of Freeform’s new hit “Black-ish,” I was excited to see a teenage black girl on TV in the same phase of her life that I find myself in now. Zoey Johnson and I have a few important things in common: We are both reluctant big sisters, college freshmen and black girls on the cusp of adulthood.
In the last few years, television viewers have been introduced to many black women on television, but Zoey is something different: a black girl on the prec...
The Dartmouth
Review: ‘Never Caught’ grapples with freedom after slavery
The biography of Ona Judge, the Washingtons' runaway slave, is a meditation on the nature of freedom and the silence needed to keep it.
In 2017, writer and historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar published the biography “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit Of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.” Attempting to accomplish an ambitious feat, Dunbar imagines the life of Judge, a young woman who was enslaved by America’s first family but managed to escape from bondage. The book reconstructs the...
bitchmedia.org
Nova, Nola, and Annalise: Queer Black Women and the Arc of Representation
In a keynote address given at Stanford University in 1991, Jamaican American poet and essayist, June Jordan, proclaimed that “if you are free, you are not predictable, and you are not controllable.” She expanded upon this idea of freedom, adding “to my mind, [this] is the keenly positive politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation.” Jordan, a Black woman who openly and deliberately identified as bisexual, used her writing to voice her experiences with racism, misogyny, and biphobia at t...
The Dartmouth
Alumna Q&A: audio journalist and producer Laura Sim ’16
Independent radio and podcast producer, Laura Sim ’16 majored in English at Dartmouth and completed a thesis on race in radio and podcasts. In 2016, her podcast “This Dartmouth Life” helped Sim receive the John D. Bryant award for Creative Production. After graduating, she worked at Slate, Gimlet Media, Radiotopia and now, the Wall Street Journal. Sim helped produce “The United States of Debt” at Slate and worked as an associate producer on Radiotopia’s “Millennial” and Gimlet Media’s “Crimet...
bitchmedia.org
We Are Not Yours: Black Women Are Supreme But Not Superhuman
This article appears in our 2017 Winter issue, Devotion. Subscribe today!
Playing with God
In her 1976 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange wrote, “I found God in myself, and I loved her. I loved her fiercely.” Shange likens God to an entity akin to herself—not necessarily a woman, but a feminine presence—from whom she wishes for “not a laying on of bosom and womb, [but] a laying on of hands, the holiness of myself released.” Her wo...