black pain
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'I Said I Would Never Play a Slave': Black Actors Discuss the Fatigue Around Portraying Black Pain
As we’ve witnessed throughout the past few months, Hollywood is in the midst of a racial reckoning—or at least, starting to have that conversation on an unprecedented scale. As part of Variety’s #Represent series, Aldis Hodge, Jay Pharoah, Algee Smith, Derek Luke and Chris Chalk got candid about their experiences with racism in Hollywood in…
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Just Don't Forget That Black Pain Isn't All We Have
I don’t know exactly when I decided to stop writing about whiteness and focus purely on blackness. What I do know is that for the past few years I specifically made a decision to write about the celebration of blackness and black culture and whatever comes with it. No more writing about black trauma and…
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Black Mirror: ‘Black Museum’ Reckons With America’s History of Commodifying Black Pain
Who could have imagined that Black Mirror, a British science fiction series, would conclude its fourth season with an analogy that reckons with America’s sordid past? In the episode “Black Museum,” which employs the same format as Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” episode, the anthology within an anthology gives us brief tours into the horrors of…
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Nothing Can Prepare You for How Powerful The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Is
Writers tell stories in hopes that not only are they read but they also come to life. This is what has happened to Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which chronicles the tragic tale of Lacks, a 31-year-old black woman from Clover, Va., whose terminal-cancer diagnosis and undying cells ended up changing…
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My Body, My Pain: Listen to Me and All Black Women
Pain has no color. But for black women, how they are treated—and not treated—for reproductive-health pain resonates deeply with historic roots in slavery and brutality. A new study from the University of Virginia shows a proven racial bias in how medical providers assess black patients’ complaints of pain, guaranteeing that medical providers consistently undertreat black…