Rae Sremmurd’s “Come Get Her” lyrically indulges in the seduction, intoxication, and submission of an unidentified woman then placed into use for sexual exploitation. The song immediately begins with the male figure’s identification of the woman as sexually appealing, one of the rap duo stating “Somebody come to the floor, it feels like we’ve met…
Author: William Provost
Cocaine
On page 122 of Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo, Cypress speaks the following line of verse: “dancin is…laced wit poppies n coca leaves…” Cypress loves to dance; it is the missing puzzle piece to her soul that when placed inside, moves her soul and fills the emptiness inside of it. This is known…
Death Bed Identity
Waring Cuney, one of the contributors of poetry to the October-31st-published issue of FIRE!!, speaks in “The Death Bed” of a black man’s thoughts as his life is coming to a close, upon the bed the title deems his death bed. Upon their deathbeds, it is common for individuals to reflect upon their identities, molded…
The Beauty of Truth and Right: Du Bois on Black Art and Justice
In “Criteria of Negro Art”, W. E. B. Du Bois acclaims the development of black art alongside the continuing fight for racial equality in the United States, condemning both those who cannot understand its development, considering their understanding that a people cannot at the same time be fighting and creating art, and those who are…
Value of Black Women in “Value”: Glover’s Critique
In Episode 6 of Season 1 of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, titled “Value”, Jayde (Aubin Wise) and Vanessa Marks (Zazie Beetz) are seated at the table of an upscale Thai restaurant in Atlanta. The two are clearly friends, and the meal is a reunion between the two before Jayde takes a vacation to London with an…
A Cordial Letter, from Slave Master to Slave?
In Chapter XXXIV, titled “The Old Enemy Again”, Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent) recounts the arrival of a letter from Dr. Flint, the man who presently holds claim to her, while in New York staying in the Bruce household after escaping from the Flint plantation. The letter is peculiar in itself as it is a formal…
Color between Art: A Critique of Glover’s in “Juneteenth”
In the ninth episode of the first season of Atlanta (created, written, and produced by Donald Glover), titled “Juneteenth”, Earnest “Earn” Marks (Donald Glover), Vanessa Marks (Zazie Beets), and Lisa (Joan Q. Scott), a playwright, are seated together in a casual living room setting in the house of Craig (Rick Holmes) and Monique (Cassandra Freedman). …
The Twilight Zone: Galactic Obscurity and Objectification of Blackness
One: Science fiction often centralizes upon the consideration of the benefits and consequences of acquiring a means of superior technology possessed by a technologically superior species. Regarding the latter (consequences), the genre often depicts humanity deliberating moral questions in order to determine if whether or not a sacrifice needed to be made by their species…
The Snobbcraft and Buggerie of Woodrow Wilson
President of Princeton University and the United States (though not simultaneously) Woodrow Wilson was born to Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Minister Joseph Ruggles Wilson and his wife Janet Woodrow Wilson in a homestead in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856 (Cooper; Ambar: “Life Before”). His father a chaplain in the Confederate Army during his boyhood years, Wilson…
Young, Free, and Meek?
In paragraph one of page 30 of Chapter II of The Souls of Black Folk,Du Bois employs the archetypal phrase “the meek shall inherit the earth” in order to convey a stark message on the reality of the young freedman to live up to his youth and the “free” in his title. Such phrase is…
Black Matter 