Essays
“Your Name Is A Blessing to Stand On”, Catapult
“What we didn’t know was that we came from a culture in which the act of naming was a powerful ritual, one meant to overwhelm—to claim for a child an identity large enough for them to grow into. We didn’t know that where we came from, we named like praying….” (“Your Name is a Blessing to Stand On, Catapult)
“Blackness and Beauty,” AEON
“In the history of modern Western culture, the politics of perception has long been instrumental in legitimising social relationships and dynamics based on racial classifications. From the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon to contemporary literary and cultural critics such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, the notion of ‘the gaze’ has been understood, with its varied qualifiers, to locate the viewer and the viewed in distinct social locations based on hierarchies of power and gradation of value. The effects of this way of looking and interpreting are so ingrained into how we engage with the world that we rarely think to interrogate our own gazing, to the point where it becomes a kind of blindness.” (“Blackness and Beauty,” AEON)
“A Return,” The New York Times