A list of films labeled afrofuturism... that label or its definition is not standardized, but all of these films involve science fiction elements and black characters. 
Great list https://www.criterionchannel.com/afrofuturism
In amendment
My issue is the criterion collection made its own streaming situation and it isn't everywhere, again, the problem with streamers is they have all these paid services and well, I Am not paying for all these services. I know this is a film group but I think beinsports has it right, streaming services must be free and paid for through commercialing in the future, the fragmented cable model for streaming services is dysfunctional 
From the website
Afrofuturism
Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” Afrofuturist ideas have found fertile ground in film, and this expansive series takes viewers on an international, intergalactic journey that stretches back long before the term existed, and far into the future. Spanning animation, documentary, and genre spectacle, these exuberant visions of Black creativity, resistance, and freedom zigzag across the African diaspora from New York to Brasilia to Kinshasa to worlds unknown. Curated by Ashley Clark, the series draws together films from Space is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, which took place at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015; a sequel planned for 2020 that was canceled due to the pandemic; and a selection of all-new titles, many of them available for streaming for the first time.

Free Black men and women founded an Eastern Shore village to avoid attention. Now their descendants want to share the stories.

It’s a sunny late afternoon on Gran’Sarah’s Hill, Newell Quinton’s 40-acre spread in a wooded corner of northwestern Wicomico County, and the lanky 77-year-old is in his element.

His 50 goats scurry and bleat as he walks among them, tossing out feed. His female hogs, Laverne and Shirley, nestle in a pen, each pregnant with a litter of piglets.

He’ll sell the goats and butcher or market the hogs when the time comes, making use of every cubic inch of living inventory just as people have done in the remote community of San Domingo, Md., for more than two centuries.

“We’ve never wasted much of anything here,” he says cheerfully. “It’s one of the values that has kept us going.”

Quinton is a native son and ongoing champion of San Domingo, an enclave of a few hundred mostly African American residents just inland from the Nanticoke River on the Eastern Shore.

Established as a settlement of free Black men and women in the early 1800s, it is believed to be the first and oldest such community in the state. But that is not all that makes this out-of-the-way place unique.

In a place and at a time when the slave trade was at its strongest, and when most Black people classified as free lived on property owned by others, San Domingo’s founders owned and tended land, set up businesses, built a church and a school, raised families and generally created a close-knit, thrifty and self-sufficient community that coexisted peacefully with the White towns around them well into the mid-1900s.

When Quinton works Gran’Sarah’s Hill, he says, he’s not just earning a living. He’s carrying on a way of life that made the community possible for all those years, right into his childhood.

He pauses and leans on the hog-pen fence.

“Not everyone was lucky enough to grow up the way we did, and we’d like to keep those values alive,” he says.

It has been said that San Domingo, a census-designated place between Mardela Springs and Sharptown near the Delaware line, is not on the main road to anywhere, and a two-hour drive from Baltimore bears out the idea.

Cross the Bay Bridge, head south through Caroline and Dorchester counties, hit the successively smaller towns of Federalsburg, Eldorado and Sharptown, and you’re in the neighborhood.

You may spot a lone sign — “Welcome to San Domingo: A Community of Free Black Pioneers” — that residents put up in recent years. From there, a byway curves to its central gathering place.

Quinton and two contemporaries are already at the San Domingo Community and Cultural Center, a two-story frame building that once served as the area’s “colored school,” and ready to talk their hometown.

Told it was a little hard to find, they all burst out laughing.

“Oh, San Domingo was designed that way,” says Rudolph Stanley, 72, a retired math teacher who has been conducting genealogy research on his birthplace since 1999. “It can be tricky if you don’t have good reason to be here.”

And he, Quinton and Quinton’s older sister, Alma Hackett, 78, launch into tales about growing up in a place where you had to know every creek and clearing just to get from one place to another.

The Johnsons were free Black pioneers in Virginia < https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/anthony-and-mary-johnson-are-pioneers-on-the-eastern-shore-whose-surprising-story-tells-much-about-race-in-virginia-history/2019/04/29/aefaec8e-605d-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html > 

No one knows for sure exactly how and why San Domingo first came into being, but U.S. census records from the early 19th century offer tantalizing clues.

They suggest, for one thing, that no free Black people lived in the area as of 1810 but that more than 600 had settled there in 109 households by 1820. Residents were listed as having a range of occupations, from grocer and carpenter to shipwright and pastor. Several owned acres in the hundreds.

Historian Mary Klein was astonished to stumble on that information in the early 1990s while conducting research on the lives of free Black residents of the Eastern Shore for her master’s degree thesis.

It was remarkable, she says, not just to see a community of free Black people on the plantation-rich Eastern Shore nearly half a century before the Civil War but to realize it came together so rapidly and intentionally.

“You could see they had gathered together on purpose to form this large community, and it became this very successful, largely self-sustaining venture,” says Klein, now an archivist with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. “I’ve researched communities all over the state, and I’ve never come across anything like it, especially that early.”

Her efforts led to “These Roots Were Free,” a 36-page book that remains the only academic study of San Domingo. But a handful of people who grew up there have long worked to paint a fuller picture.

Research into church records and family trees by Stanley and by Eubert G. Brown, a retired Air Force officer, confirms that a James Brown who is listed as a mariner in the 1820 Census was its founder.

Image without a caption

The headstone for San Domingo founder James Brown in the woods at the edge of the community. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun)

Brown’s children and grandchildren became community pillars, and his descendants — including Eubert Brown, 85, his great-great-grandson — have proliferated alongside a few other families, the Stanleys included, ever since.

Many residents believe that James Brown and others first came to the area by boat in the aftermath of a notoriously bloody slave revolt that took place in Santo Domingo, Haiti, around 1800 and that they named the community as a nod to that uprising.

Eubert Brown disputes that — he believes the founder was a different James Brown, a free Black man born in Somerset County — but he agrees with most that the name was chosen as a tacit warning to “intrusive Whites,” as he puts it.

“We feel the community avoided trouble out of fear of the name,” Brown says.

True or not, it’s clear the community prioritized keeping a low profile, a fact Quinton is sure helped foster the tranquility it enjoyed right into the 1960s in a region not known for its solicitude toward African Americans.

Though many San Domingans worked in nearby White communities — Quinton’s mother did “day work” in family homes in Sharptown, for example, and Stanley was a part-timer at a packaging plant there — their lives overwhelmingly centered on supporting and taking care of one another.

Someone was available to provide just about every important skill, Quinton says, whether it was delivering babies, digging wells or helping hogs through the mating process.

Eubert Brown’s grandfather, Hargus, couldn’t read or write, but he built sturdy houses, crafted headstones and used a dowsing stick to find water. Stanley’s dad, Rudolph Abraham Lincoln Stanley, owned the trucks that carried many to work, and Quinton’s father, George Bernard Quinton, raised soybeans and felled trees for firewood.

Brown recalls a group of ladies who moved from house to house, making quilts for families for the winter. Quinton remembers that someone always seemed to be preparing to harvest a hog in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

“The whole community had that independent spirit, helping each other to be successful,” he says.

San Domingo was so self-reliant, Quinton and others say, that growing up in the 1940s and 1950s they had little experience with the Jim Crow realities that prevailed just beyond its borders. Children heard almost nothing.

Harriet Tubman’s lost Maryland home found < https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/20/harriet-tubman-maryland-home-found/ > 

Ask about their childhoods and each becomes a griot. Hackett remembers the “Sharptown Colored Elementary School”as a place with classrooms full of children, caring teachers who lived in the community and May Day galas that brought out the girls’ finest dresses. It was in San Domingo but served surrounding areas, too.

The school was the local version of the Rosenwald Schools built for Black children , https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/we-refuse-to-let-people-forget-in-virginia-a-push-to-remember-historically-black-high-schools-before-they-disappear/2020/01/03/3ddd3dea-2e2f-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_57 >  across the South in the early 1900s — facilities made necessary by segregation. But Hackett says the children had no clue about such things.

“Everyone there was totally committed to us succeeding,” says Hackett, who attended the school from 1948 to 1954, three years before it closed as part of desegregation. “We were blessed to go there.”

Church, too, was central. Nearly everyone attended services for hours each Sunday at New Zion United Methodist, and the building hosted community dinners, emergency meetings, even raccoon and squirrel hunts.

Quinton’s great-uncle Norman T. Brown, a school bus driver, also ran the town’s general store, where he peddled everything from coal oil to wheels of cheese, often extending credit.

Quinton worked there when he was 13. “If Uncle Norm had to leave me in charge, he’d say, ‘Give them what they want and put them on the book — they’ll settle up Friday,’ ” he recalls. “If they had no money Friday, they’d come in with some eggs or potatoes and say, ‘Will this take care of it?’ ”

“It always did,” he says. “I never, ever saw a disagreement.”

The children of Quinton’s generation became successful in life, he and others say. They cite the long hours they spent working nearby farms each summer — which taught them what they didn’t want to do — and the way their parents pushed them to get educated.

Most graduated from Salisbury High School, the county’s all-Black high school nearly 20 miles away. Quinton, his seven siblings and Stanley all went on to graduate from what is now Morgan State University.

Quinton joined the Army and turned the experience into a four-decade career with the federal government. One sister, Barbara, became a doctor. Stanley had a 42-year career teaching math in Wicomico County schools, and Hackett taught biology and chemistry for 38 years in Somerset County.

Once segregation ended, San Domingo’s young adults began leaving the area in search of greater opportunity. Many sold inherited land. Some houses were razed or abandoned. But some old-timers, like Stanley, never left the area for long; others, like Quinton, returned decades later.

Image without a caption

San Domingo, nestled between the Nanticoke River and Sharptown Road in rural Wicomico County. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun)

Today, Quinton leads an effort to preserve San Domingo and share its story. The John Quinton Foundation, a nonprofit group he and Barbara established (and named after their great-grandfather), got the Rosenwald School restored in 2004, reopened the building as a community center in 2014 and continue to use it as, among other things, headquarters for an annual Founders Day gathering each April that has drawn crowds as big as 200 for lectures and historical reenactments.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced its cancellation for two straight years, but Quinton is planning to host one in 2022. Donations to the nonprofit help underwrite that effort or can be directed toward scholarships and life-skills tutorials for local youths. “Everything we do is to continue teaching the value and character we believe our founders and grandparents instilled in us so that younger people can benefit from the same things we originated from,” he says.

Gran’Sarah’s Hill, meanwhile, is a living testament to those values. It’s named after Quinton’s great-grandmother Sarah, the granddaughter of community founder James Brown, and was one of his favorite places to play as a boy.

Quinton plans to slaughter two or three of his hogs this year and use the meat for pork loin, sausages, scrapple and more. And one day this November, he and a few other residents will follow a more recent tradition, offering the food to whatever friends and neighbors decide to drop by.

For Quinton, San Domingo is worth sharing.

“It had virtues that should not be lost,” he says. “We want to make sure people remember what created this community we love.”

— Baltimore Sun
ARTICLE
< https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-blacks-san-domingo-eastern-shore/2021/05/24/86ed2760-bca5-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html >
 

Entertainment Spotlight: Dara Reneé
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series
Orange you glad that Dara Reneé, AKA Kourtney, took the time to play two truths and a lie, tell us about her most awkward date, and cast herself in the HSMTMTS Marvel alternate universe.
FULL VIDEO Question and answer 

https://featured.tumblr.com/post/652454341204230144

Well... it is another Friday, another day to love, to Oxum, Oshun, Freya, or Venus, another day to Kizomba!
The thing about Puto chinez that you may already know is how much he loves the sliding techniques. What I liked alot in this video was that Efy used a lot of small movements as well. I find that rare. Usually, the leg movements from women are long stride or simple, designed to do whole body movements or to keep the momentum. But, not the embellished steps that the male dancers tend to love to do.

Africa day, a historic opportunity to reinvent africa's development
#africaday2021 @tropicsbusiness
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0mTocvrPaHoqzeOZwvGnXQ

Survivor - Session 2 - May 21, 2021 - OEB Slow-Read

The True Story Of Black Wall Street with Raven Majia Williams- audio podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1471015571?i=1000515789193

Maria P. Williams, who, like Tressie Souders, also lived in Kansas City, Missouri, produced, distributed, and acted in her own film, The Flames of Wrath (1923). The Norfolk Journal and Guide, as quoted by Yvonne Welbon, thus lauded her: “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the United States…” 
 

Read the complete article below

https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/maria-p-williams/

The article author begins by explaining how magic or myth primarily or only involving Black people was all about her environment growing up in Sierre leone, even with the war. 
Then she says the following, I quote in brackets <
When I moved to the US in 1996, war was suddenly no longer a part of my life. But neither was the magic. Instead of goddesses and Amazons, there was now the legacy of slavery, civil rights and racial struggle. I was told that I was a Black person, and that Blackness came with a particular history and set of expectations, most of which I’d never heard of before. I’d only ever been Temne, my tribe in Sierra Leone. How was I supposed to understand this new identity?
>

funny how someone from a country called Sierre Leon, which means mountain lion in a european tongue, started by white peoples of england to rematriate black people of africa into africa had no comprehension of being black before coming to the usa. I don't know if it says more about her or the adults about her growing up. BUt, she is wrong. The magic of the black community exist, alongside its history of enslavement-wars-coexistence to whites. Les Cennelles is magic. High John is magic. The DEvils Daughter is magic. The Gullah is magic. The seminoles, like Jonas Caballo, is magic. Now, was any of this magic on hollywood boulevard? no. Was all of this magic in every black home in the usa? no, most black people whose forebears were enslaved in the usa will never admit the black community in the usa after the war between the states tried to get rid of alot of its culture, collectively or individually, home to home. 

I quote the article  < 
Worse, there were no more epics. Growing up, my father had explained to me that epics – especially fantasy epics – are the mythos of a culture: they determine how a people see themselves. But in the US, it seemed Black people weren’t afforded the privilege of crafting our own narrative in the fantastical sense. In every book, every film, every advertisement, Black people struggled. We were poor, we were uneducated, on drugs or the drug dealers. We were baby mamas, gangsters and prisoners. We were perpetual victims or perpetual predators, lurking on the fringes of society.
> 
 
SHe used the word : seemed as in past tense. It did not seemed, it was true. from the 1500s to 1860s black people in uncontestable majority were disallowed by whites to read or write, by pain of death. 350 years solid of that kind of treatment seems to me a great disallowance, not merely a privilege but a right. Yes,most media in the USA, including today, is written/financed by white people who don't have a positive view of black people or at the least have a laborious opinion to black life in the usa. But, the usa is a white country. DW Griffith wasn't alone. But his argument is key. Griffith argued against the NAACP that every artist has the right to create what they want. Nothing stopped black people from making films providing negative caricature to whites. The problem isn't merely that white people in the usa dominated black people. But black leaderships choice to lead the black community on the grounds of aracial morality, had a cost. 

I quote again in brackets < 
But this didn’t make any sense to me. I knew my history. Yes, some Black people had been slaves, but others had been queens, kings, adventurers, tricksters, country folk. Yes, there were huts and slave cabins, but there were also castles in Ethiopia, towering walls and streetlights in Benin, libraries in Timbuktu and fortresses in Great Zimbabwe. The richest man to ever exist, Mansa Musa, was African. The N’Nonmiton, the female warriors my father and grandmother had told me tales about when I was young, were African. There was more to Blackness than struggle.

But in every Black book that won a medal, or every Black film that won an Oscar, there was always a Black person struggling against racial oppression. There are consequences to only lauding such portrayals. Perpetually tying the narrative of Black people and Blackness to slavery, colonisation and oppression meant that Black people – Black children especially – were denied the chance to see ourselves as heroes with agency over our worlds. And non-Black people were denied the chance to root for us, only feeling pity and, of course, relief that they were not Black.
>

I notice she likes to place Black happiness in Africa alot. Black people in Haiti built the sans souci palace or the citadelle la ferriere, designed by a white man. Black people in India built a castle that still stands facing the indian ocean. Free black communities existed in the south western coast of mexico to the north eastern coast of south america. MAroons is the name in Jamaica. I can't deny it was hard for black people to be advertised as kings or queens in the american continent BUT we had country folk like free gunfighters, adventurers in every free community, tricksters like High john. 
Her greatest problem is she confuses white awards placed on black people that suit white narratives or white made art interpretions to black people with Blackness. 
... I admit my biggest problem is personal. I grew up in the USA, in NYC,  by two black parents, and I always felt the black fantasy world was full of life. I don't accept the narrative from her or any black person that our fantasy wasn't around. Her parents or whomever raised her failed. 

I Quote her again < 
This is the reason I became a writer. I wanted to create a fantasy world on par with the ones in my favourite books from childhood: The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. I wanted to put Black and brown people at the forefront of this world; and women, who have so often been pushed to the periphery of fantasy, at the very centre. In the tradition of my favourite Black female authors, such as Toni Morrison, Octavia E Butler and Zora Neale Hurston, I wanted to create spaces where I could hold up Black people, especially Black and brown women, to ensure that they too were seen through the lens of the fantastic, that they too could be fairies, mermaids or creatures of myth.
> 

I write simply what I want to write. I admit, I never wrote anything trying to make it on par with anything else. I have an idea, a world I want to create and I create it. Her work by her own admission is agenda filled. She wants to show everybody, black or nonblack, that she can make a fantasy world that will be adored by all, and at the center of it will be women of color. I am a black man so I don't have the advertised limits that go with being black plus woman. 
...
Then she explains her work.  I imagine if any one who read this gets this far, they will think I despise this , quite pretty, black woman. I am a black man and I do not:) but, I have issue when any black artists starts speaking that lie of black myth absence. It is black people's fault, black parents fault. Plain or simple. Black people from the Haitians to the Ashanti to the Negritos all have myth or legends. Yes, most are merely oral tradition. The least are in books out of print or in libraries. But, the black fantasy world exist. Trust me folks. 

Article
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/22/namina-forna-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-fan-the-guilded-ones

Photo citation
Namina Forna, author of The Gilded Ones. Photograph: Lillian Hathaway
 

I admit, without shame, that outside a recent work, I haven't written anyone who is paraplegic or in the commonly called disabled ranks. Does this mean disabled people shouldn't have a place in afrofuturism or any genre  ? of course not. 
Does this mean I need to make an effort to place so called disabled people in my work? no, cause I don't believe in pushing agenda in my fiction. I speak agenda writing prose. My fantasy worlds are not built for agenda, they are built for fun. I enjoy my fantasy worlds. ... A woman with one leg can be stronger, more abled than superman, yes running with one leg faster than he can run with two. She isn't in my fantasy worlds, but I can't believe she isn't in any. 

I quote the article in brackets < 
According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s 2019 study, only 3.4% of children’s books have disabled main characters. Compare this statistic with the CDC’s finding that 26% of Americans have disabilities, and it’s easy to see there’s a problem. The children’s book industry is failing to portray the many myriads of ways bodies and people exist and interact with the world. These are ways that many children experience themselves or will experience in the future.
>
The article author ask an important question but leads to a false answer. The question is, how can representation of fictional characters with disabilities have greater quantity in books published in a year? The answer isn't in the industry but in the members of the industry. The author suggest the publishing houses need to modify their yearly quota of published books to make sure certain characters are in them. But that goes against fiscal capitalism. If the publishing houses do as she suggest and then their accountants say they lost money compared to the prior year, what then? 
The answer is for the government to make its own publishing house.  Said publishing house has two costs: costs of infrastructure, revenue from books. Book authors get a percentage of revenue from sales. The rest goes to infrastructure for the publishing house and any extra goes to a financing growing infrastructure. But, the publishing house chooses stories reflecting demography. so the characters in books as well as the quality of characters in books have to equate to the average in the population. so, if 58 percent of the people in the usa are women then 58 percent of the characters in the combined books published for a year need to be 58 percent women, give or take a five percent shift, forward or back. To use the statistic above, 26 percent of the stories need to be people deemed disabled. In the women or disabled,  it is wise to make sure, half are positive while half are negative. HAving every female character a villain is dysfunctional or negatively biased at the least. 

...
the article end with explaining how industries dominated or owned by one community do not cater to the other. In the same way, white owned firms do not cater to black fantasy. Abled, meaning no disability << even though every human has disability, which is why I prefer extrachallenged over disabled, cause every human can overcome any challenge if they believe in themselves, but we all have disabilities >> people, own or dominate the publishing industry so why will it be natural to support the commonly called disabled. Blacks/Women/Extrachallenged/each from the LGBTQ+ need to OWN THEIR OWN FIRMS to produce content for them. THe USA allows anyone to own today. That is the closest to an aracial morality you can get in fiscal capitalism. But asking every human heart to be aracial is not only silly, it will never receive 100% positivity in reply.

Article
https://bookriot.com/disability-representation-in-childrens-books/

A Moment Or A Movement? Black Bookstore Owners On Business One Year Later

On the day George Floyd was murdered — Monday, May 25, 2020 — there weren't any books exclusively tackling white privilege, anti-Blackness, or policing on the New York Times' Best Sellers list. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo was the only book to break through the week of May 31, but by June 21, almost 70% of the Times' Best Seller list confronted race.

With the sale of print books rising just over 8% and all unit sales of books surpassing 750 million, Black bookstores would play an integral role in feeding the nation's "sudden" appetite in the plight of Black people.

Black bookstore owners like VaLinda Miller of Turning Page Bookshop in Goose Creek, S.C., can attest to the book boom.

"It was crazy and extremely overwhelming. And I had to hire some more staff members just to mail out the books," Miller says. From June through August, Miller says they "were getting [anywhere] from 100 to 200 to 300 orders a day."

Even though anti-Blackness is an indiscriminate system that pays little attention to borders, Miller was especially shocked by the international shipping addresses.

"About 70% of my customers were from the United States... [but] I was surprised I got so many people from Brazil and Venezuela and so many other foreign countries," Miller says.

She called the surge "unbelievable," and that word resonates twofold for Miller, who had to close her first bookstore, The BookSmith, after only a few years when "people weren't interested" in what she had to offer."

After Miller reopened in June of 2019, she learned from this and took on a different approach when engaging this past summer's burgeoning readers. She prodded customers to buy a book from their favorite genre in addition to the book on race that they were solemnly after. Miller vividly recounts an instance where an elderly white man entered her store looking for White Fragility.

"He said 'My wife told me to come in here and buy a book by a Black author so I can support a Black-owned bookstore,' " Miller says. Her store is the only Black-owned, brick-and-mortar bookstore in the state.

"I want you to support my store," she remembers saying, "but if you're going to buy this book, especially considering what's going on, I need you to also buy another book because I know what you're going to do. You're going to take this book home, put it down, and read the other book," Miller says.

A few months later, this same gentleman stopped by Turning Page Bookstore to confess that he did exactly that.

In other places across the country, Black bookstore owners saw new customers who were engaging in anti-racist reading. Derrick Young, one of the co-owners of Mahogany Books in Southeast Washington, D.C., where the population is more than 90% Black, says he noticed more white customers coming to shop in his store.

"We're definitely seeing more people who seem like they're really willing to do the work; we see people who aren't just picking up notable bestsellers like White Fragility," he says.

Young is able to gauge those willing to "do the work" based on the books they're asking for. He believes it's indicative of where that person is on their journey.

"We see people who are coming in to buy books like Chocolate City from us, or Medical Apartheid," Young says. "Books that are a little bit more specific and dealing with issues that we've been talking about for a long time that create issues of equity in our communities."

Young says that his store, which was recently nominated for Bookstore of the Year, has seen some patron attrition, but admits that was inevitable. He isn't discouraged; he's moved by the continued growth of readers who keep coming back.

"They're coming back not just to purchase books around Black people, but we now have people who are purchasing books specifically about women issues, about LGBTQ issues," Young says. "So, you know, it is really good to see that people are sticking around and trying to do the reading necessary to really open up their minds."

La'Nae Robinson, co-owner of Bliss Books & Wine in Kansas City, Mo., saw something similar in her customers.

"They were forming some of their own book clubs and reading groups and they were looking for recommendations," she says. "They wanted us to help facilitate."

These facilitated conversations led to a bevy of questions.

"Like 'I really didn't understand everything that was going on, but now that I do know, how do I learn more?' And 'What do I do with the information that I have now?' " Robinson recalls.

Bliss Books & Wine made these conversations more immediate to Kansas City and started virtual book conversation with local authors. Robinson believes this is how her bookstore was able to retain some customers who may have stopped by once or twice just to say they supported a Black bookstore and bought an anti-racist book.

"I think it allowed us to bring in those new customers and then introduce them to new books and some of the classics — some of the ones that were more known within the Black community, but not necessarily mainstream or within the white community," she says.

While print book sales are still surging, the Black bookstore owners who spoke to NPR say sales are down for them when compared to last summer, when they were handling 100-300 orders per day. Some of the books purchased at the apex of last summer's protests were never finished. And there are no longer legions of protesters marching for accountability for consecutive days, despite their personal feelings toward the Black Lives Matter global network.

Measuring America's progress on race relations one year after a video of George Floyd's murder at the hands of former police officer Derek Chauvin went viral is both premature and inconclusive. However, if last year's book boom on all things white privilege and anti-racism is a litmus test, then, at least in theory, Americans are intrigued at understanding racism and its byproducts.

photo citation
Derrick Young, co-owner of Mahogany Books in Washington, D.C., says his store has seen new customers in the last year who seem to be "willing to do the work" to educate themselves on issues of race in America.
Bonnie Jo Mount/Getty Images

La'Nesha Frazier and La'Nae Robinson own Bliss Books & Wine in Kansas City, Mo. Robinson says that even though readers might have initially come in "to check the box," overall they've retained new customers.
Courtesy Bliss Books & Wine

Article link
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/999956694/a-moment-or-a-movement-black-bookstore-owners-on-business-one-year-later

Welcome to the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition! Or the spussfic, as we like to call it around here. What in the world is the SPSFC? It’s an opportunity to shine a great big laser beam on wonderful works of self-pubbed science fiction.
Some rules for admission
1) Your book must be a standalone or the first in a series.
2) One book per author. So send your best!
3) It must be a novel, not an anthology.
4) The book must be self-published and available for purchase now.
5) Works must be at least 50,000 words.
Contest link 
https://hughhowey.com/the-spsfc-begins/

Referral
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/05/29/a-wattpad-imprint-emily-bronte-poetry-and-a-steinbeck-werewolf-novel-this-week-in-book-news/

Nana Malone is the bestselling author of sexy, feel-good, action-packed romance novels.
The Spy in 3B is the first book in the Covert Affairs Duet.
What are you reading now?

I’m reading a #brownnipplechallenge book called The Road to Rose Bend by Naima Simone. It’s a small town romance, which I don’t normally love — but it’s really good. I really like Naima’s writing; she’s such a seasoned writer and her writing has such an effortless flow to it. [More on the #brownnipplechallenge at the end of this interview – Ed.]

I partnered with Lyric Audiobooks to do Audio in Color where we created a grant program to help writers of color do their first audiobook. And so I’m reading through submissions for that to see what’s going to work well in audio.

Have you found that turning your own books into audiobooks has influenced how you write?

I realized a while ago that I’m basically writing television. My editors are always asking for more emotion, more description, more on the page. But my strong suit has always been banter, as if the characters are on screen. So I’m always ready for audio.

My books that haven’t worked in audio have been the ones where I tried to do more exposition and wrote less naturally to my strengths. I think it’s important for a writer to evolve, but you’ve also got to understand yourself better so you can sink into who you are. I’ve tried to write straight rom-coms, but I just always need a bad guy — someone has to get their comeuppance. So that rom-com with an action twist is really where I like to play, and that’s The Spy in 3B.

It’s almost like a professional athlete who has to decide early on what their position is and play that, and not worry about being bad at playing the other positions.

I was a track and field athlete, and there’s this thing where you have your strength but you ignore it because it doesn’t fit what your idea of your strengths are. For years I was trying to be a short-distance sprinter, and I had a track coach who wanted me to run the half-mile. But I fought it because it wasn’t my own idea of me — and then he made me run it, and I got it. It tapped into a strength I had but didn’t acknowledge.

Series writers are told to “write the same — but different.” And that was me writing the Royals books for three years. I had to figure out what to do next, so it was Royal bodyguards, which kept the same tone. Then Royal cousins, and on and on, all in the world I love which is heists and capers, action-adventure.

“I don’t go to bed until the words are done. If it’s six scenes for the day, then that’s what I need to do, and if I’m smart I’ll get a couple done early.”

Did the pandemic change how you write?

Not so much the pandemic, but when I’m writing I can’t be reading anything at the same time. I’ll be working on a “best friends to lovers” plot, and suddenly I’m finding the guy is turning into a total jerk. It’s because of what I’ve been reading. So when I’m done with edits I’ll gorge on three books before I dive back into it. I have a Christina Lauren on my list that I really want to get to. Sierra Simone has a series that went Priest and Sinner, and I can’t wait for Saint. She’s a friend so I know I’ve got an advance copy for that coming — and that’s the last thing I’ll inhale before I go back into my writing cave for the next Covert Affairs book The Assassin in 3F.

You’re such a busy writer — how did the pandemic impact your focus? I’ve heard from other writers that it was a strange kind of freedom to have no social interactions to turn down when writing needed to get done.

In my case, I went into the pandemic with a heavy schedule and I don’t let myself miss a deadline. I had to find a way.

I used to wake up at 5:30 every morning when my daughter was very young just to get some words in before going on to my full-time job, and sometimes that would mean feeding a baby and typing one-handed. I’ve switched to dictation due to a shoulder injury, so then it became dictation and feeding. I learned I can work in 15-minute chunks and get 500 words out of each chunk. And by building up these 15-minute chunks through the day, I could get about 3000 words, which for me is about a chapter and a half.

So when the pandemic hit, I took that focus and adapted it. When the weather was warm I’d just walk in the backyard and dictate and knock out chapters. But then with remote school, and moving my daughter from her room into the main space of the house, my daughter’s French lessons and Spanish lessons started becoming my French and Spanish lessons, so we had to switch it up again. I became nocturnal and worked after my daughter and husband had gone to bed. I don’t go to bed until the words are done. If it’s six scenes for the day, then that’s what I need to do, and if I’m smart I’ll get a couple done early. I’ve learned my brain is better in the morning.

But you’ve also got to give yourself grace. I moved one deadline and I still think about it. [laughs]

My daughter’s back at school a couple days a week, so I’m adjusting again.

Many authors are driven to write because of the stories they want to read. But you went a step further into how those stories are presented to readers before they’re read — by posing as a model on covers for other writers. How did that come about?

I’ve been published since 2010 and in the beginning, let’s just say I was really naive, and I let my publisher define who I was as a writer. Like with my first book, which was an adoption story about a Black woman who raises her best friend’s kid who’s white, and they marketed me as a “multicultural author” and I figured at the time, okay I guess that’s what I am.

I knew I wanted to write books about brown women just living their happy Black lives — and it wasn’t a huge deal that they were deserving of happily ever afters. I took that on as a mission. Because when I started there was a lot of chick-lit with not a speck of brown to be seen; even in my favourite chick-lit books, there aren’t even secondary characters of colour.

So I remember they just put the hand of this woman on the book about the adoption. And I didn’t think about why they would have done that. Only when I started self-publishing and taking responsibility for my own covers, that’s when I understood the pickings were slim.

“It wasn’t enough for me just to depict a Black woman on the covers — I wanted to show a dark-skinned Black woman.”

At the same time, I was pursuing traditional publishing deals and hearing from agents and publishers that people aren’t really looking for stories with Black women in them. But I was stubborn about my mission and staying authentic to myself. So I started playing with object covers. I also realized that if I’m writing an interracial story, I can put a white guy on the cover, and I can leave it until page 100 that the reader gets a description of a brown nipple.

But last summer, with the racial uprising and sea change that happened, Nina, my publicist, told me I need to go back to my older books and put brown-skinned women on the covers. And I wanted to, because it’s important for little girls like my daughter to see women who look like her who are deserving as anyone of love without complication. But I needed a push. I mean, I knew the reality of the available stock photos.

It wasn’t enough for me just to depict a Black woman on the covers — I wanted to show a dark-skinned Black woman. Look, in Ghana where my family is from I’m a medium brown. But in the US, I’m considered dark-skinned. At the same time, in the stock photos there are some mixed-race girls available, but I knew my books and I knew my heroines were dark-skinned. But also, these are books about royalty, so she’s also going to need to be in a ball gown, jewels, a crown. And then to add a male model to that mix — I couldn’t find anything.

But I knew a photographer whose work I’d bought for other covers, Wander Aguiar, and for 10 years he’d been saying, “You’re beautiful. I want to shoot you.” And I didn’t know what that even meant as a writer — I was content to just write my books. But I was in my Year of Yes, and thanks to Shonda Rhimes this was just another crazy thing I was going to do.

When one of the first photos went out through the Romancelandia newsletter, my phone blew up with messages from Black authors saying thank you, but also white authors who let me know they’d just bought the image for their own use!

I thought I was done. There was a problem and Wander and I made our contribution to solving it.

But then you started posing for covers for your own books. Can you tell me about how your thinking evolved here?

It was the same thing: I was looking for an image and I couldn’t find it, and it was extra-challenging because I was going to need a set of four for the series. So again, I was talking to my publicist and she said, “You’re going to have to do it yourself.”

It was terrifying. It’s one thing if someone doesn’t like the cover on someone else’s book. But to have my image on my books, with my readers judging them… But I did it and the books are selling. The audience had changed. Many more readers are ready to read stories about heroines who don’t look like them.

“I’m old! Modelling requires a significant amount of work to fit into things and look a certain way. I want to eat oreos!”

If suddenly there were many wonderful stock images featuring Black models you could use for your covers, would you hang up the ballgown?

I don’t think we’re going to see that plethora of options in my modelling lifetime. Though I really don’t feel a need to be on my own covers, I’m not opposed to it. When we were talking about cover ideas for The Spy in 3B, we were talking about maybe illustrated, but that’s not something on my other covers and I wanted readers to be able to make the connection, and so when the idea came up to have me on the cover, my first thought was, “Oh no, kale again?” [laughs]

I’m old! Modelling requires a significant amount of work to fit into things and look a certain way. I want to eat oreos!

Having done it before made it easier to say yes. My only concern was whether my face on another cover would be too much, but then I’m also learning The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***.

You’re a champion for diversity in romance beyond the world of Nana Malone and covers featuring you — can you tell me about the #brownnipplechallenge?

With the #brownnipplechallenge I wanted to support other authors of colour — however they’re publishing, whether traditionally or through a self-publishing route — to put money in their pockets which will give them more access.

I come from a position of privilege, as the child of immigrants. I can get on a plane tomorrow and be in my grandfather’s village. Being Black in America and being able to trace that lineage, that’s a privilege. My father went to an Ivy League school, my mother’s a nurse, and that’s another layer of privilege. I do face racism as any other Black person does in this country, but it’s not the same burden that my brothers and sisters carry who are descended from enslaved people.

Last summer I wanted to take up a form of protest that feels safe for my family and feels authentic and sustainable for me. At the same time, people were sharing information about money they made in this business in #publishingpaidme and I was seeing the disparity between writers of colour, and my non-melanated friends — and I’m really happy for my friends and their success, but something had to change.

“I want people to know in these books there’s kissing, there’s happily-ever-after, there’s sexy-times. It’s not vegetables. It’s cake.”

So the #brownnipplechallenge is basically a book club. A non-performative one. I didn’t want to help anyone stock a “diverse bookshelf” of unread books. There’s this idea that reading books by these authors is like eating your vegetables. And I want people to know in these books there’s kissing, there’s happily-ever-after, there’s sexy-times. It’s not vegetables. It’s cake.

You will show up to these book club meetings having read the book, and we’re going to talk to the author, and it will make it more personal and real. It’ll be fun!

I’m lucky. I’ve had difficulty, but I made it. And there’s only a handful of us at this point. When people name Black romance authors, it’s always the same few: Beverly Jenkins, Brenda Jackson, Kennedy Ryan, Brittainy Cherry, Alyssa Cole, you know. But I know there are thousands who haven’t had the opportunities, so they haven’t earned the money, and they can’t run the ad campaigns to target readers. And when they do run campaigns, targeting readers of Black romance is hard because you’re back down to that small list — and if your books aren’t in the same genres as them, then you’re out of luck. The #brownnipplechallenge is me holding the door open, whether it’s just keeping my foot in the door, or squeezing in a whole hip, I want these authors to get in and have readers find them. ◼

Article
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/05/28/nana-malone-on-solving-problems-and-playing-to-her-strengths/#comment-89084

Discover Hidden Narratives: The largest collection of African Comics in the World!
The Kugali Comic Club grants you access to the largest collection of African comics in the world, as well as new chapters of ongoing comics every other day. For this first season, you get a new chapter of Versus every Monday, new chapter of Olwatuuka every Wednesday and new chapter of Nani every Friday. Three issues of Mill City's Finest will round up season one in Septmeber. Season two kicks off after a two week break, so there's a lot more content to come! 
https://kugali.com/pages/free-comics
https://kugali.com/pages/read-free-comics
https://kugali.com/pages/read-free-comics-3
Video

Well... it is another Friday, another day to love, to Oxum, Oshun, Freya, or Venus, another day to Kizomba!
Love is a thing bred from fun and Yäir Fatal side Chalianna L. clearly are having fun, undeterred from any misstep or mistime. I find that blissfully common. We each dance so little in a couple we are bound to have many misses in the early days, keep smiling, keep dancing

Enjoy 

Let's Groove together this holiday season and all year long.
Brought to you by VisitDetroit.com
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***
ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE
(Detroit’s Tribute to The Funk)

Original song by Funkadelic was released in1978 by Warner Bros. 
Songwriters: George Clinton Jr., Walter Morrison and Garry Shider.
Published by Bridgeport Music, Inc. BMI

Performed by The Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences Choir
ft. King Bethel and Anaiya Hall

DAAS choir includes:
Sincere Austin, Ireland Bradley, Kyndall Bouldin, Drie Boyd, Alonzo Dock, Aniya Elkins, Taylor Glover, Morgann Hicks, Ari'Onah Jackson, Precious Jackson, Jeremiah Johnson, Tania Kato, Lucinda Liggions, Brionna Mahone, DeShawn Marks, Akeylah Mason, Charles McLean, Lillyan Orr-Mercer, Jessie Miller, Joslyn Mosley, Marcus Parker, Brandon Payton, Aja Ross, Aianya Smith, Ashanti Wade, Alanah Wingfield, Rian Woods

Choir Direction by Angela Kee
Dr. Ras Mikey C, Director of Choreography 

Also featuring:
Chi Amen-Ra, Percussion
Efe Bes, Percussion
Duminie Deporres, Guitar
Amp Fiddler, Synthesizer
Larry Fratangelo, Percussion
LaShawn D. Gary, Keys & Key Bass 
Eric “Rain Man” Gaston, Drums

Video presented by VisitDetroit.Com and the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau

Executive producer, director and editor, Bill Bowen, Octane Design
Co-produced by Mike Ellison, AddisDetroit

Song produced and arranged by Mike Ellison and LaShawn D. Gary
Spoken word written by Mike Ellison

Recorded at the Tempermill in Ferndale, MI
Sound engineers Tony Hamera and Jake Shives
Mixed by Carlos Gunn, Masterpiece Sound Studios 
Mastered by Danny Leake, Urban Guerrilla Engineers

Directors of photography: Andrew Stefanik, Iron Coast and Myron Watkins II
Cameras: Ed Knight and Scott West

It takes a village. Thanks to these people for their help.
All the parents of these beautiful children for allowing their kids to be at the various locations for filming.
Talent coordination by Ann Delisi, AddisDetroit
Interpretive performer, Dr. Ras Mikey C
Appearance by B-Boy, Haleem “Stringz” Rasul
Armen Boladian, Bridgeport Music, Inc.
Scott L. Guy, The Riviera Group Management
Crystal McMahon, DMCVB
PM, Christine Ribusovski, Octane Design
And anyone we may have missed : )

Special thanks to these locations/organizations:
Capoeira Mandinga Detroit 
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Detroit Institute of Art
Downtown Detroit Partnership (Capitol Park and Cadillac Square)
Eastern Market 
Guardian Building 
Great Lakes Crossing Outlets
The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation (Rosa Parks bus)
The Majestic Theatre
MOCAD
Motown Museum 
Narrow Way Cafe 
QLINE
The Riverfront Conservancy
Royal Transportation Co.
Yum Village

Image of George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic performing in Waterfront Park, Louisville, Kentucky on July 4th, 2008 by JMSchneid. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
See why you can't stop Detroit at VisitDetroit.com
#ItsGoTimeDetroit
 

I respect his journey in improving his process to create. I think it is valuable to read. But I like the following quote from him best
"Toward the end, a recommendation from Eliezer Yudkowsky (author of the fan-fiction novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) gave me a big shot in the arm, almost doubling my readership overnight. "
I have said countless times, how many book authors have been boosted by Beyonce/Oprah/Michelle Obama/JK Rowling... the modern currency is following and when those who are nearer to Cristiano Ronaldo level of followers give your work a wink, it is a boost unlike any other. I am not suggesting that any artwork is less or greater than any other, but the reality is, exposure matters and nothing is more potent in advertising in exposure than when the heavily followed pick an artists. I must add, it has always been that way.
What are the medici's? but the kardashians of their day from a media perspective. What are the Pharoahs? but the presidents of their day from a media perspective.
Artists are always blessed when those who have eyes on them, speak to their art.
Good segment on PAtreon. Thinking on ecurrencies , I think the business model of patreon fits well with the ecurrency market better than strict payment. Whether that is functional long term financially? we will see:)
The reality is, most of the artwork in any art movement isn't remembered or survived well. Does it mean that which is not today was poor? no. Does it mean that most artist must have another way to make money? yes. HAving another way to live comfortably, even if it means less art produced is mandatory.
One thing he didn't say about working as a fiction author, in particular serials, is having a confined plan. I will give an example. One of the books I read this year that I like is the Dungeons and Burglars series. I mention it cause it ended. It is a series, a comic book series. But it ends. One of the problems with writers in my view, is too many of us assume a story has to go on to part 9. No shame exist in a story ending. Yes, a serial means a thing that is in a series, ala a sequence. But, the sequence can end. Does that mean the following to the serial may be upset? yes. But, if that is all you have OR if that is all you can afford to do , then do it! No shame exists in saying, I have a full year to work on a serial and I will give 3/4 to submitting it. And when done, it is done.
I quote the article
"If you find a fandom for your own work, you will discover there are people who make community drama their thing. As much as you wilt in the face of the sort of stuff above, they get their kicks from it, they will stir it up, they'll seek it out, they'll put hours a day into it and to answer it or stay on top of it you'll have to match them in the same number of hours."
That is very true. The entire internet is that way. Some people love negativity.
Article link

https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/wildbow 

My thoughts as I listen to Episode 38 , when history of fiction of the BookDreams Podcast, Bethany C Morrow
1:45 they say this interview deals with the challenges of speculative fiction writing when it comes to race
3:03 the ask about her new book related to little women
Morrow calls the book a remix. Morrow speaks on elements that signify her book relates to Little Women. Her books plot or characterizations is not similar. She says she never liked Lorie. 
Her book is on roanoke island, free people of color, before civil war.
5:11 Morrow uses the word strange to describe the temporal period in the usa when you have black people in a state in the union that are free while other black people are enslaved. She used the word strange. Strange to some in modernity but to few in the past. Slavery must be comprehended as something that has not ended, never ended in humanity. Slavery exist today. It is a modern mythology that slavery died. Slavery no longer became legal in western european governments but that does not mean slavery ended in humanity. I argue slavery is alive and kicking. So having a people be one part enslaved while the other part free was not a strange thing for people in the past, in most places in humanity and even today it isn't strange. You take the usa out of the equation and I think slavery in various ways shows a permanence. So, I think the phrase, Statian Estrangement is better than strange. The issue of this talk, which I have not fully heard while typing this comment is about history in fiction. I think sometimes we all like to see what we want to see. 
5:26 she is tired by the strict dichotomy of union / confederates by white authors. Though I think people today don't know how tribal that war was, based on the after years. The often used phrase, brother faced brother was real. The best way to explain the war between the states from a white perspective is the presidencies of Obama AND Trump. In both presidencies , white families grew/gained/were destroyed by internal splits based on the existence/narrative/identity of either president.  She should had focused on the variance between usa history based on who you are. THe USA has three elemental groups: Indigenous or Native, White, Black . The Indigenous group is not a phenotypical group, it is a group of ancestry.  White or Black is phenotypical. Now in modernity , all three of these groups have a much more complex internal makeup than during the war between the states. But, each group mentioned had a varying relationship to the war between the states. For Whites it was, kin vs kin. Thus why , the daughters of the american revolution had such momentum in the white community in the usa for their historical narrative. White people wanted the war between the states to never happen again and white unity, no matter the cost, was their tool. But for black people, that same war was not even a balance. Again, most black people lived in the confederate states. when I say most I mean circa ninety percent. Sequentially, the choice of Morrow to use a free black colony as the base for her little women is not historically false, but not historically common, for black people. IF her imagination could had figured out a little women based in the confederacy, based in a plantation life, it will be more common to black people's experiences back then. She used the word strange. Most black people circa Civil War of the USA , found free black communities strange. 
6:02 She says that she was never taught about free black communities growing up. But, the question is where? Did she mean in public school or in her home or in community school programs? As a kid I don't recall free black communities getting a note in the history book. BUT, I recall in my home my parents, both of whom are black, taught me their existence. In addition, I recall, an after school program <No I am not going into my life> where we learned various aspects of black culture. What is my point? Too many black artists talk about not getting black history or true history in the white controlled public school system. But I argue that black parents have to do better. My parents, I love them, but don't tell me what they did was special or some sort of grand leap. I will not accept that. 
6:16 She refers to modern black artists utilizing speculative fiction in video media to tell true history. She refers to how many black people achieved their first glimpse of Tulsa Oklahoma through the Watchmen cable show. Again, I am not suggesting she is wrong in what happened. But, the problem is black parenting. She asks a question? how could you not know? the answer is simple, black mommy plus daddy failed. But they are not alone, Black grandmommy plus granddaddy failed. Any human being should know their forebears or their people's history. I do not mean you need to be a historian or conjecture on history. But, any human need to know their particular people's history. And hoping or relying on a public school system to do that or wanting it to do that, is the first problem. PArents get busy. 
6:36 She refers to how sun down towns became a noted thing after Lovecraft country. Though I must add, in this point, another set of parents need to be blamed. I just said any human need to know their own groups or tribes or clans history. But I was also raised to comprehend the history of others. I recall in a show about the Statian South , organized by Henry Louis Gates jr. while shown on PBS, a white woman said, I paraphrase:"I didn't know my grandfather too well, he was just this guy who gave me candy and was always nice, I didn't know he ran the chaingangs and were taking people illegally to do it" . What is my point? Most people don't like to concern themselves with the history of other people's groups. Most people know the groups they are not in but rarely show interest or have interest to their history. And as the white woman I am speaking of displayed, it starts from youth. Being multicultural is more than a word or holidays or months, it is living a life where you desire to know more about every human culture. That is a rare mentality. It is one being fermented in the USA somewhat by a growing group, but it isn't natural in humanity. 
6:58 She states her book has a similar role to lovecraft country or the watchmen hbo show in that it is meant to be entertainment but it has elements of history not advertised loudly, in this case, free people colonies in the usa pre war between the states.
7:15 Morrow see's her work as historical fiction , not speculative. She feels most readers will feel it is speculative. 
8:05 One of the interviewers ask, aside the black community, the lgbtq+ community using speculative fiction to highlight moments in history not widely advertised, so it something positive that the  current story isn't speculative. 
Morrow reply, she is coming through Little Women, an established property , not merely historical fiction. 
8:55 Morrow says we, including herself absent her impotency, the people in the USA are about myth , myth building, not history. I concur but I argue the why is important. It is the same reason why most black people don't know about the Black people who fought for Great Britain against the USA's founding. Why? Cause most black people who live in the USA want to raise their children to not villify or criminalize the place and spreading the history of the black people who fought against the creation of the usa, doesn't help that. So the myth that non violence is the black way forever is presented.
9:29 The Tiffany dillema she describes. I didn't know it myself. She says, when people write books about europe of the past recent centuries, they will use the name tiffany for female characters and readers will reject the use of the name cause they think tiffany is a modern name, when in truth it was common. Her point is valid, going against commonly accepted narrative is hard. 
10:13 Why was Morrow drawn to Historical speculative fiction for her first work? 
Her reply is, writers don't always plan things first. Then she describes her formulation to her book Mem. 
12:36 she found a case in canada where women were not considered persons by law. 
13:14 She states that many of the technological changes and their problems had a larger fatality in the late 1800s early 1900s than the modern internet or similar technologies humanity is learning to live with.I concur, I think the agrarian lifestyle, which by default is gentler, though harder to live, made the industrialization explosions more explosive.
SKip by 14:45 to 17:05
18:05 One of the host speak of the limitations of human imagination. She remembers painters in madrid who never were to jerusalem but made paintings of jerusalem. I quote one of the host: "Sometimes when we assume we are being creative we are tied to what we know" this is true, this is why , the formative years are vital in shaping up and why who controls those years, ala parents is vital.
18:31 West Side Story/ Clueless plus others are offered as examples of historical fiction remix... the hosts ask about the danger for black writers for doing what is common.
Morrow has a book coming out. So many beginnings, not out till september of 2021. Morrow hasn't finished it/ it isn't reviewed. They found two reviews, to a book not finished or published , that I paraphrase them as saying: is poisonously racists.
19:49 The interviewers ask, what books have influenced Morrow more than others. Morrow ask another a question. Where did she connect herself as a black american in the literature? 
She found Toni Morrison. My mother's storytelling was the first for me. Unlike Morrow , who went to christian schools or Morrow's son that went to mostly white schools as she lived or lived in a white village, I went to black schools. 
I think black people who live amongst whites, have to realize the solution for black people that lives amongst blacks is not the same, even though both black groups live in the usa. 
She found in Toni Morrison, who grew up in white lorain ohio,  someone who shared her voice; Morrow's white teachers growing up didn't think was Morrow's. 
23:45 THe interviewers quote Morrow from the article Medium. They asked her did she think of the quote when she wrote, a song below water. Morrow says the book is for everyone but to Black American girls.
24:35 Morrow says, I paraphrase: "I don't have to balance being a women while being a black woman, the question comes from the questioners perspective. I am these things, I am not balancing these things." 
25:20 An interviewer asks about a character , a song below water. Science fiction , from Morrow, likes to use allegorical bigotry; it teaches empathy by assigning the real wordl oppressed to be the oppressor. She should had mentioned the Birth of Nation , wild black man from south carolina congress. 
27:50 that ends it, good end thoughts

https://www.bookdreamspodcast.com/episodes/2vusxd0zs8hwj30y2o77oooyj3cpt6

My Thoughts on Movies That Move We discussion on Harlem Nights

Eddie did get lucky, and to be blunt, time was of the essence, anumber of comedy movies of that period, like caddyshack united comedians of a certain age who were soon to be deceased. so... in terms of purpose, I think he wanted to do a number of things, be on screen with his elders, do a film with mostly black people in suits, have a cast of black characters that had all the cultural variance often not provided by white led productions. ala same with coming to america. In the end of the day, the monied classes of any community dictate the media. For the black community, not merely in the usa but globally, who don't have a financial elite based on enslavers/murderers/prohibition era gangsters/ or the myriad of others using criminal or illegal financial schemes that the white community has been totally privy too, we have to rely on those who earned their money fairly to be our rockefellers/duponts/jp morgans/carnegies/kennedy . I live in NYC, all those names I just mentioned had a history of criminality/illegality/violence that most black people will say is , doing bad. But, those same names financed the museums/art galleries/opera houses all the arts of NYC. All the arts of NYC was financed by all the rich white people who made their fortunes doing a lot of bad. Black people don't have those people in our community. The largest financial criminals black people get are drug dealers every decade or two with four corners. No way near the volume of pop rockefeller. So, black people have to rely on the black rich who are all from labors. Black athletes/entertainers/singers/small business chain owners like the brother who helped finance MLK jr's activities. But we don't have someone to finance a whole film studio+theater chain+ advertising network from scratch. So, black people like Eddie Murphy/oprah winfrey/poitier/denzel/et cetera , no matter what any think of them , through their attempts in the white owned media industry of the usa, which isn't a rude or mean thing to say, get whites to produce or have enough pennies to produce things like harlem nights, where black people can see a glint of what black owned media would had provided for centuries if possible/allowed.

My thoughts as I read EUgen Bacon's prose, titled, An Earnest Blackness

I Quote Bacon in brackets

<Decades after the ground-breaking work of speculative authors such as Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler, Black speculative fiction is more visible and more thriving than ever. Through invented worlds and technologies, and incursions of the supernatural or the uncanny, more and more Black speculative fiction authors are offering stories of curiosity, diversity and hope, possibilities, probabilities, even dire warnings about our place in the universe. >

Near a century after the work of Zora NEale Hurston, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Langston Hughes or many others,  Black fiction creators are , to paraphrase Hughes, in vogue again. It must be comprehended, the reason why Black fiction is more visible or black fiction creators are thriving more today is not because Black owned media venues are providing the avenues to such growth. It is because of white owned media venues allowing black creators the chance. Never forget, the Nat King Cole show by the standards when it ran was the most listened to program, but the show couldn't find a sponsor. That ends my point about the issue being white media outlet owners changing their views, not black creators doing anything different.
I am happy for Toni Morrison or Octavia Butler or any black artists gaining or growing in fame before or after death. And I comprehend Bacon wants to emphasize the now very much in this prose. 
I will question how eager he is to promote the now with alternative history. I quote him in brackets

< And now, more than ever, people of colour are increasingly adopting Black speculative fiction — in stories of possibility — so they too can surrender to the air, and ride it. >

More than ever? Historically he is by default false. Before the Islamic|Christian|European|White imperial movements against Black people of Africa|Asia|America Black people were emersed in Black cultures. To rephrase bluntly, before white people's imperial agendas enslaved black people's , Black people were totally emersed in Black speculative fiction through the various myths, legends, tales of the various people. 
One of the biggest walls Black fiction creators, moreover all black artists, have to destroy is the wall of black equaling africa. I quote Bacon. 

< Black speculative fiction, often featuring a Black protagonist, gives voice to the complex and varied experiences of African and Afro-descendant peoples. What Africa means above all is diversity, with its 54 countries, its many languages—including Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, Oromo, Hausa, Igbo, Zulu, Shona, and over 2000 more—and its 1.126 billion people. And that’s just on the continent, before you factor in the diaspora, which—as in the African Speculative Fiction Society definition—refers to people whose ancestors migrated or were snatched from the African continent, and includes anyone of African descent in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, the Antarctica, Australia, Oceania and elsewhere. Black speculative fiction confronts the colonial gaze which tries to see only uniformity and sameness.  >

What is black? Black is many things. Concerning race,  Black is a phenotypical label. What is a phenotypical label? it is a label referring to appearance, or how one looks. The Black  protagonists should do more than give voice to african or afro-descended black peoples. why? not all africans are black. Before european conquest not all africans were black. All black people were never african. The Carib of the caribbean, the Cree of the southeastern area of modern day U.S.A., the negrito of south east asia, the aborigine of australia, are black while none are african. His definition above neglects participation by Black people's who are not afro descended or of a diaspora from africa. And don't be cute reader, the progression of humanity before the modern phenotypes began, can not be used; by that reasoning all human beings are not african, all humans beings are ethiopian. So, please. 
Black is greater than african. African is not only black. Said truths are the weapons to get through the wall of black equaling african, a similar wall suggest white equals european. Each artist will relate to said walls in their own work. All I can do is hope Black artists globally cognize the walls exist and use the tools to bust through them. 
Lastly, the word is multiversity, not diversity. Diversity means a thing of two spaces, a dichotomy like white and black. But multiversity means a thing of many spaces, at least two or to infinity. his prose after the quote immediately above prove my point.

Bacon showcases work for the next section of the prose. I fully support anyone buying the work of these various artists:in the story collection tales of Wakanda, Okungbowa whose work I wish Ousmane Sembene could make into film, 
I must say the star trekian prime directive foreign policy of Wakanda, originally written by a white man, is one of the most dysfunctional elements in a fiction work. Why? More than Killmonger's speech of where da Wakandans at... what Black people can watch the black villages right outside their borders, somewhere around the modern day Congo forest, be taken completely by whomever. Wakandan's literally watched all their neighbors taken. More than where the Wakandans at, the question is, how the Wakandans can watch that. Is it like the purge television thing?

The following sector deals with colonialism and its influences. He quotes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I will provide a partial quote in brackets.  You have to read the article for the entire quote.

<We spoke Gĩkũyũ in the fields. We spoke Gĩkũyũ in and outside the home. I can vividly recall those evenings of storytelling around the fireside. It was mostly the grown-ups telling the stories but everybody was interested and involved. We children would re-tell the stories the following day to other children… >

Earlier in my prose I used the word imperial. Colonialism is about the effects of a potential or true empire has on a conquest. The word provence comes from the Roman empire; their first conquest was called the provence, and after that all they dominated had that label. So much so that the word survived after the roman empire , in my view, died with the end of the ottoman empire. 
Why do I say this? I will quote Bacon again in brackets

<wa Thiong’o asks crucial questions and contributes to the fight against colonialism, which robs the colonised of name, language, community and value.   Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind is a firm but earnest conversation many a once-colonised people will understand. Colonialism turns diversity into division and strife (divide and rule is a colonialist dictum), and fosters violent instability. Colonialism operates both in the external world, and in the mind, stripping away language, community and culture, where culture is food, family, clothing, housing, belief, ways of doing, ways of seeing.  > 

When you look at the French people, before the Roman conquest of Gaul they were called the gauls. It would take one of the phase shifts of the roman empire and the commonly called viking community in the Gaul to create the French.  That alone proves the first point, and that is in a european historical context. Let alone, the conglomeration of Black African governments that today are called Cote d'Ivoire or Ivory coast or similar none White or European examples. 
But he makes a second assertion I wish Thiong'o will reply to. Do Empires turn the multiversity in their conquest into multivision or strife? That is a big question. I can safely say that empires will breed strife/segregation/negative integration into potential conquest or current conquest to maintain or have power. BUT, do empires initiate it by default as Bacon suggest Thion'o states? I am not certain. 
Look at Yugoslavia, from the Soviet Empire. When the Soviet empire fell, Yugoslavia broke apart but the truth is, the Yugoslav people were never one people. The Soviet empire chose to call them one people. In the same way, Black or White or Native people in the USA are cheaply called American , as if all three peoples are seamlessly on the same page. Many empires like to suggest multiveristy is oneness, when in truth it isn't and the strife between people's is more inevitable than empire craft.

Bacon ends with a very honest or truthful note. I will only amend, Birth of a Nation from Griffith is speculative fiction too. And like the Black Panther, it proves that entertaining the audience with the storytelling , is more important to the vitality of the artists as a laborer than their cultural presentation. 

https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/06/06/an-earnest-blackness/?fbclid=IwAR1-w81USqJekEqj5sBGdLNA8u0CHyuupUUQtRJl87gH0mTSvm9DLZgwO-I
 

News, Politics and Super Hero Culture From A Black Man's Perspective

https://www.247films.tv/black-daddies-in-space/season:1/videos/black-daddies-take-on-black-lady-sketch-show

if you are not going to pay for 247 then try the facebook

Depending on when you saw this the Eclipse will be between 4:12 am to 9:11 am est or was between 4:!2 am to 9:11 am EST , EST is UTC-5

At the time of this writing motherlands has eight days to go. 
It already made its money  to be produced. You can bid anything from one dollar upward. If you want something physical, or nonelectronic to be precise you need to submit at least 50 dollars. I love the graphics , the video intro. It seems good fun. 
I will link the twitch gameplay or youtube discussion link under their main website which is linked under the kickstarter URL
Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cypheroftyr/into-the-mother-lands-rpg
Diverse games
https://ineeddiversegames.org/
Twitch
https://www.twitch.tv/cypheroftyr
Youtube 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAHfidpOmZk8oP58WptCpNfBAWL-yfFFe

....
...
If you made it this far, I do have a critique with the article linked at the end of my prose. 
I paraphrase the article in brackets
<
B. Dave Walters, the creator of the new setting, and lead designer  ,said : “It is a science fiction universe where there is no colonialism. There is no expansionist rhetoric. That is not the root cause of the action.”

Charlie HAll , Charlie_L_Hall  , the article writer added; DePass did not say the following. 
Instead, the Musalians and Vutoa’s existing populations coexist all around the planet, in high-tech urban centers as well as strange alien landscapes. When conflict does arise, it’s often about two or more groups competing for scarce resources.

B. Dave Walters continued: “We wanted to do something different, where diversity was a foundational idea, ... Black excellence was a foundational idea, so we came up with a premise that would allow lots of different kinds of people of color to have a place where they flourish and are at the center stage rather than being in addition to, or as a ‘noble savage’ or something that was bolted on to the side [of a Euro-centric universe]. It is an expansive sci-fi epic.”
>
The article admits they are using systems that the owner of Dungeons and DRagons use so I imagine , financially a synergy. And , the article reveals other wise financial choices or managements by the black creators of this gaming universe. 
... 
My issue is, if the words from the article are true, a question. If resources are scarce, ala a purpose to competitiveness in the game, then how can colonial or expansionist or anti-multiversity or pro-monoversity be denied or absent? It makes no sense. The article subtitle refer to black panther or star trek. But, Black panther's anti expansionism is , to be blunt silly. I can comprehend Wakanda not feeling the need to expand to cairo or to great zimbabwe. But, when the portuguese were infiltrating the Kongo empire and enslaving the geographic neighbors to wakanda, even in the black written Black Panther Film script, the Wakandan  anti expansionist policies make no sense. When Belgium was given Congo, by the british, explain to me how the highly educated or knowledgeable wakandans didn't think it was wise to expand? tradition. Please. And Star Trek, another  story written by a white person, provides a world with no material need after clone wars or et cetera. So, Star Trek universe didn't achieve the anti imperial stance, from an initial source. But, in Wakanda or Star Trek, at least the issues of colonialism or expansion arise. By what the lead developer said he wanted a game where expansion or colonialism are blockaded as ideas. I don't buy that world honesty, but it is a video game, so PLEASE BUY IT and enjoy. 
Article
https://www.polygon.com/2021/6/10/22528001/mother-lands-afrofuturist-tabletop-rpg-tanya-depass-b-dave-walters-interview?fbclid=IwAR0FSyJ_GsyGz7s5BnJX2rfNTRSBkmvaXb-3__Chjj1GJ_52bYWtj26GcJE
Image info
The city of Malisuuna, founded by the descendants of African Emperor Mansa Musa’s expeditionary fleet. Image: Mother Lands RPG

Based on the articles length, I will preface my much smaller point. One of many thing not said and spoken about the Vietnam War in modernity, modernity meaning the now, is it prove the masses/the majority/the people don't know the truth. Focus on that, the people don't know the truth. The myth in modern media is the people know, the people assume correctly, how many people project certainty in so many arenas. 
How many are certain bernie sanders is a liberal warrior? How many are certain Trump is the antichrist? how many are certain big business is in full control? how many were certain Obama was what the USA needed or was liberal? how many were certain the banks would be saved? 
I am not questioning anyones stance in humanity, their politics, thing of the people. I am questioning all to assume for 5 minutes what they now is not the complete truth and then, what does that mean? 
Enjoy the article

THE PENTAGON PAPERS

The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document
With the Pentagon Papers revelations, the U.S. public’s trust in the government was forever diminished.

This article is part of a special report < https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/the-pentagon-papers >  on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.

Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.

“In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. “You can see the heavy drain.”

That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.”

Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. < https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers > 

By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate. He created a research team to assemble and analyze Defense Department decision-making dating back to 1945. This was either quixotic or arrogant. As secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara was an architect of the war and implicated in the lies that were the bedrock of U.S. policy.

Image
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara addressing reporters at a news conference on Sept. 7, 1967. Two months earlier he had created the task force that would compile and write the Pentagon Papers.Credit...Associated Press

Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst on the study, eventually leaked portions of the report to The New York Times < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/pentagon-papers-neil-sheehan.html > , which published excerpts < https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/vietnam-archive-pentagon-study-traces-3-decades-of-growing-u-s.html >  in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War.

The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today.

Officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” the papers filled 47 volumes, covering the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their 7,000 pages chronicled, in cold, bureaucratic language, how the United States got itself mired in a long, costly war in a small Southeast Asian country of questionable strategic importance.

They are an essential record of the first war the United States lost. For modern historians, they foreshadow the mind-set and miscalculations that led the United States to fight the “forever wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The original sin was the  decision to support the French  rulers in Vietnam. President Harry S. Truman subsidized their effort to take back their Indochina colonies. The Vietnamese nationalists were winning their fight for independence under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, a Communist. Ho had worked with the United States against Japan in World War II, but, in the Cold War, Washington recast him as the stalking horse for Soviet expansionism.

American intelligence officers in the field said that was not the case, that they had found no evidence of a Soviet plot to take over Vietnam, much less Southeast Asia. As one State Department memo put it, “If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly.”

But with an eye on China, where the Communist Mao Zedong had won the civil war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said defeating Vietnam’s Communists was essential “to block further Communist expansion in Asia.” If Vietnam became Communist, then the countries of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes.

This belief in this domino theory was so strong that the United States broke with its European allies and refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords ending the French war. Instead, the United States continued the fight, giving full backing to Ngo Dinh Diem, the autocratic, anti-Communist leader of South Vietnam. Gen. J. Lawton Collins wrote from Vietnam, warning Eisenhower that Diem was an unpopular and incapable leader and should be replaced. If he was not, Gen. Collins wrote, “I recommend re-evaluation of our plans for assisting Southeast Asia.”

Image
In 1957, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, center, visited San Francisco, arriving on U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s private plane. Six and a half years later, the U.S. backed a coup that left Diem dead.Credit...Associated Press

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles disagreed, writing in a cable included in the Pentagon Papers, “We have no other choice but continue our aid to Vietnam and support of Diem.”

Nine years and billions of American dollars later, Diem was still in power, and it fell to President Kennedy to solve the long-predicted problem.

After facing down the Soviet Union in the Berlin crisis, Kennedy wanted to avoid any sign of Cold War fatigue and easily accepted McNamara’s counsel to deepen the U.S. commitment to Saigon. The secretary of defense wrote in one report, “The loss of South Vietnam would make pointless any further discussion about the importance of Southeast Asia to the Free World.”

The president increased U.S. military advisers tenfold and introduced helicopter missions. In return for the support, Kennedy wanted Diem to make democratic reforms. Diem refused.

A popular uprising in South Vietnam, led by Buddhist clerics, followed. Fearful of losing power as well, South Vietnamese generals secretly received American approval to overthrow Diem. Despite official denials, U.S. officials were deeply involved.

“Beginning in August of 1963, we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged the coup efforts …,” the Pentagon Papers revealed. “We maintained clandestine contact with them throughout the planning and execution of the coup and sought to review their operational plans.”

The coup ended with Diem’s killing and a deepening of American involvement in the war. As the authors of the papers concluded, “Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment.”

Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the Vietnam issue fell to President Johnson.

He had officials secretly draft a resolution for Congress to grant him the authority to fight in Vietnam without officially declaring war.

Missing was a pretext, a small-bore “Pearl Harbor” moment. That came on Aug. 4, 1964, when the White House announced that the North Vietnamese had attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. This “attack,” though, was anything but unprovoked aggression. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the head of U.S. forces in Vietnam, had commanded the South Vietnamese military while they staged clandestine raids on North Vietnamese islands. North Vietnamese PT boats fought back and had “mistaken Maddox for a South Vietnamese escort vessel,” according to a report. (Later investigations showed the attack never happened.)

Testifying before the Senate, McNamara lied, denying any American involvement in the Tonkin Gulf attacks: “Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.”

Image
McNamara, center background, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 20, 1966. “We should be proud of what we are doing out there for the people of South Vietnam,” he told the committee.Credit...Henry Griffin/Associated Press

Three days after the announcement of the “incident,” the administration persuaded Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution < https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=98# >  to approve and support “the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” — an expansion of the presidential power to wage war that is still used regularly. Johnson won the 1964 election in a landslide.

Seven months later, he sent combat troops to Vietnam without declaring war, a decision clad in lies. The initial deployment of 20,000 troops was described as “military support forces” under a “change of mission” to “permit their more active use” in Vietnam. Nothing new.

As the Pentagon Papers later showed, the Defense Department also revised its war aims: “70 percent to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat … 20 percent to keep South Vietnam (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands, 10 percent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”

Westmoreland considered the initial troop deployment a stopgap measure and requested 100,000 more. McNamara agreed. On July 20, 1965, he wrote in a memo < https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v03/d67 >  that even though “the U.S. killed-in-action might be in the vicinity of 500 a month by the end of the year,” the general’s overall strategy was “likely to bring about a success in Vietnam.”

As the Pentagon Papers later put it, “Never again while he was secretary of defense would McNamara make so optimistic a statement about Vietnam — except in public.”

Fully disillusioned at last, McNamara argued in a 1967 memo to the president that more of the same — more troops, more bombing — would not win the war. In an about-face, he suggested that the United States declare victory and slowly withdraw.

And in a rare acknowledgment of the suffering of the Vietnamese people, he wrote, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

Johnson was furious and soon approved increasing the U.S. troop commitment to nearly 550,000. By year’s end, he had forced McNamara to resign, but the defense secretary had already commissioned the Pentagon Papers.

In 1968, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election; Vietnam had become his Waterloo. Nixon won the White House on the promise to bring peace to Vietnam. Instead, he expanded the war by invading Cambodia, which convinced Daniel Ellsberg that he had to leak the secret history.

Image
Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Marx, his wife, center, at the Watergate hearings. Nine months before the Watergate break-in, the so-called plumbers had ransacked the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in search of incriminating files.Credit...Mike Lien/The New York Times

After The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, June 13, 1971, the nation was stunned. The response ranged from horror to anger to disbelief. There was furor over the betrayal of national secrets. Opponents of the war felt vindicated. Veterans, especially those who had served multiple tours in Vietnam, were pained to discover that Americans officials knew the war had been a failed proposition nearly from the beginning.

Convinced that Ellsberg posed a threat to Nixon’s re-election campaign, the White House approved an illegal break-in at the Beverly Hills, Calif., office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, hoping to find embarrassing confessions on file. The burglars — known as the Plumbers — found nothing, and got away undetected. The following June, when another such crew broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, they were caught.

The North Vietnamese mounted a final offensive, captured Saigon and won the war in April 1975. Three years later, Vietnam invaded Cambodia — another Communist country — and overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. That was the sole country Communist Vietnam ever invaded, forever undercutting the domino theory — the war’s foundational lie.

Elizabeth Becker is a former New York Times correspondent who began her career covering the Cambodia campaign of the Vietnam War. She is the author, most recently, of “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War.”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/us/pentagon-papers-vietnam-war.html

Well... it is another Friday, another day to love, to Oxum, Oshun, Freya, or Venus, another day to Kizomba!
I must admit, that dress that Flavie has on is great for the beginning to autumn, the routine from manuel and flavie is not their best. Sultry but not exactly exciting. but that dress.

Black + Excellent with Quinta Brunson
We sat down to catch up with Tumblr nerd and Queen of Memes, @thequintab < https://thequintab.tumblr.com/ >  to talk about everything from fostering genuine communication to her new book She Memes Well < https://www.am*zon.com/She-Memes-Well-Quinta-Brunson/dp/1328638987 > , on shelves NOW (SO GO GET IT---- Like frfr!!).