Jordan Taliha McDonald

The titular spook from Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, is a double agent. The novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman, is the first Black officer in the history of the CIA, and to make up for being a token agent of the state, he takes his newly acquired intel and tactical skills to his community in Chicago to train up its working-class Black youth as freedom fighters. The 1979 film adaptation, directed by Ivan Dixon, was subsequently yanked from theaters for its radical con...

Caul Baby, the first novel from bestselling nonfiction writer Morgan Jerkins, opens with the story of Laila, one of the “last vestiges of the Black elite in Strivers’ Row,” a well-to-do Harlemite in the late ’90s who has struggled for years to carry a child to term. “Her body was a desolate land, each crack in her earth a forewarning from the last child to future ones that this place was no home,” Jerkins writes about Laila’s chronic infertility. Framing these reproductive sagas as a bodily d...

At Barack Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009, the 44th President of the United States gave his first official speech to the American public: “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” Nearly a decade later, the First Lady Michelle Obama recalled that fateful day on the National Mall in her 2018 memoir, Becoming. “There were people in every direction, as far back as I could see,” she wrote. “They filled every inch of the Nationa...

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie begins with a resurrection. “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” the book’s eponymous protagonist Libertie Sampson—a free Black girl living in the 1860s—remarks in the novel’s opening line. Sitting at the intersection of freedom struggle in the Americas, Libertie is born to a freewoman and a fugitive, defined on both sides of her family tree by the legacy of slavery near and far. And though she is freeborn and class-privileged like her mother, Libertie’s d...

In the final days of the Obama administration, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lewis announced plans to place abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill—where the rebel would replace the nation’s seventh president Andrew Jackson, whose face has been featured on the front of the note since 1928. The proposed feature would make Tubman the first African American to grace a piece of U.S. currency. An unprecedented recognition of a Black historical figure, many Americans expressed excitement about t...

In Greek mythology, the figure of the muse refers to the nine daughters of Zeus, divine beauties who were tasked with the role of stirring young men to realize their potential in literature, science, and the arts. Throughout the body of myths that make up the tradition, muses are a distinct class of social beings: Though talented themselves, they didn’t dance or write t or sing, or otherwise share their own gifts in pursuit of validation. Rather, their talents were meant to hint at the virtuo...

On February 3, Tessica Brown, a 40-year-old Louisiana woman, uploaded a now-infamous video to her TikTok account in which she explained that her hair had been stuck in the same hairstyle for more than a month. After running out of Göt2b Glued hairspray, Brown sought a replacement product that could hold her intricate do intact. She turned to Gorilla Glue, an industrial-grade Gorilla Glue spray, and that’s where her troubles began. An American brand popularized for its polyurethane adhesives, ...

"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.
...

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,