Several Black creatives from the industry weigh in on issues such as unconscious bias, tokenism, and microaggressions.

In the 1930s, a black woman with mysterious abilities interviews to be the housekeeper to an eccentric white widow, but in order to get the job she must use her abilities in a way she didn't intend. Written, directed, and produced by Joyce Sherri. This is one of my favorite short films. I invite you to watch and journal or share your thoughts afterwards.

Giant Steps follows the 5-time Tony-nominated director and choreographer of Broadway’s Gypsy and Hell’s Kitchen as she elevates the possible with bold explorations of everyday movement, and African Diasporic dance. The film foregrounds Brown’s visionary talent – affirming urban youth, Black female identity, and community power — from her Queens, New York neighborhood to the Broadway stage, television and movie screens, and schools around the world.

For centuries, Black enslaved communities invoked mermaids as they organized rebellions against slavery. From the 16th century, kidnapped West African ancestors brought water spirits across the Atlantic and introduced them to the New World: the simbi from the Congo, the orisha (like Oshun) from Nigeria, or the vodun (like Ayida Wedo) from the Fon. In West African lore, these water spirits were worshiped for healing and protection, and they took many forms, from snakes to fish-tailed women. Slavers also used the image of the mermaid, seeing it as a cultural patron of their slaving enterprise, a wraith that delivered the "amazing grace" of safe passage across treacherous seas. But to the enslaved Africans transported on these ships, that mermaid was a symbol of righteous rebellion and holy mutinies. This is because West Africans often saw water spirits as arbiters of justice—they preserved social harmony, and if that harmony was disturbed by human avarice, watery destruction was sure to follow. By the 19th century, after thousands of coercive journeys across the Atlantic, West Africans had absorbed European images of mermaids—from ship figureheads to a mass-produced chromolithograph of a dark-skinned female Samoan snake charmer, Maladamatjaute—and remade the Western mythic creature into the mermaid, Mami Wata, Mother of the waters. SOURCE: Time Magazine https://time.com/7313994/mermaids-culture-history/

Love LP Longmire breakdowns, his analysis of cinema and representation always makes me think.