Arts & Culture

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a film of operatic intensity, poetic emotion, political clarity, and a touch of magic realism.

What is at the root of what one tastes? This is not an Alex Haley-like koan, but rather a historical and spiritual question.

Early in my career as a writer, I met Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, author of Vibration Cooking or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. When she lived in Washington, D.C., we met on occasion at the local Safeway supermarket. Smart-Grosvenor was an American culinary anthropologist—and a food writer with a wonderful sense of humor.

Culinary historian Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene falls in the lineage of Smart-Grosvenor and maybe even the work of novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.

I first met Twitty years ago at Howard University in D.C. He was usually sitting in the main office of the African-American studies department in conversation with the secretary, Joyce Rose. One day I became aware of a change in his dress. Twitty may have been the only black person on Howard’s campus wearing a yarmulke.

Being black and Jewish is not new but remains intriguing. Howard is a place that prides itself on attracting a large number of students from Africa and the Caribbean. It upholds the tradition of advocating racial integration as well as the tenets of black nationalism. It’s an institution that can enhance one’s understanding of the various factors that define the black experience.

“I love the truth I find in dark films.”

In a 2003 speech titled “A Filmmaker’s Progress,” Sinister and Doctor Strange filmmaker Scott Derrickson, a Christian, made this statement in reference to spiritual and moral themes in his work. It’s an interesting idea to consider, not only because tales of terror get more popular this time of year, but also because Derrickson does most of his work in horror, a genre that doesn’t often get positive associations with faith.

Horror is typically considered exploitative, good for nothing more than the basest forms of gratuitousness that cinema can offer. But in fact horror is a smarter, more diverse genre than it’s given credit for. It is one of the best cinematic vehicles for social commentary.

In his seminal work Mythologies, French philosopher and critical theorist Roland Barthes announces that “Myth is a type of speech.” And not simply any type of speech, but a dangerous kind. Myth is problematic, he says, because it allows a fictional brand of naturalism to subsume history. It creates a false narrative that the way things are is the way things are meant to be, leaving ample room for injustice to flourish.

Recently, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris tackled one particular section of American mythos: education. And, in typical Jeremy O. Harris fashion, his exploration is complicated.

I went to see Harris’ fantastical play “Yell: A ‘Documentary’ of My Time Here” in a state of fear and excitement, wondering what dirty laundry he would air about my then-future intellectual home.

WHEN YOU WALK into the theater, you feel you’re at an American Legion community center, with hundreds of framed male portraits lining the walls. It’s a little daunting. And then Heidi Schreck as a young woman arrives to give her speech, “What the Constitution Means to Me.”

She explains that this is how she raised her state college tuition: winning speech and debate competitions about the Constitution, taking on the male power structures that surrounded her. Our 230-year-old Constitution is a wordy and tricky document, to say the least, and Schreck steps up to it with delightful rhetoric, full presence, and comic genius. She shows us why we should be in love with it and why we should uphold it.

But then things shift, and she comes to us, blazer tossed aside, as a now-40-something woman with wisdom and deep questions. The second half of the play takes us on a whirlwind history of the document with all of its problems, especially how this male-conceived, male-written constitution suppressed and continues to suppress women. Sitting quietly at the side, and sometimes explaining the rules of the speech debate competition, is an American Legion representative, played on Broadway by Mike Iveson.

The film challenges Western beliefs about familial and individual responsibility, as well as the often-unrecognized personal sacrifices we make for the ones we love.

A few days ago, I gathered with my two Potawatomi sons on our couch to watch Molly of Denali, a cartoon that recently premiered on PBS starring a young girl named Molly who is an Alaska Native (specifically, Gwich’in/Koyukon/Dena’ina Athabascan). This show is the first of its kind in the history of the United States.

Why wouldn’t they drop by, stare up
approvingly at the point of the minaret?

Perpetual connoisseurs of the loving work
of centuries, the stacked stones, nails pounded
until synagogues, temples, shrines
little houses of worship rise from the land.

WHITE EURO-AMERICAN Christianity is dying, according to Miguel A. De La Torre, and from his point of view, its death is necessary. It has distorted the gospel with Euro-American nationalist ideals that benefit white communities at the expense of communities of color—heretical beliefs grounded in fear and exclusion, rather than love. In Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity, De La Torre deconstructs Donald Trump’s abundant evangelical support. In doing so, he offers guidance on how Christians can move forward.

Whiteness lies, he explains. It lies about the superiority of particular beliefs and nations. And this superiority complex has led to a lot of violence being done under the name of Christianity, including displacement, slavery, and genocide.