Danielle Jackson

“‘It’s Little Dixie,’ Little told me. When he was driving down from Chicago with his father and uncle to start his master’s program, he said his uncle told him: ‘Stay away from white women down there.’ Little figured this was mostly a joke, but he knew there was some seriousness behind his uncle’s words. ‘I […]

“Ranky Tanky is an ancestral funk band. Their members are variously jazz and gospel trained, but as a collective, ancestral funk is their genre. I know because they start Ranky Tanky, their first album, with horns on the three and four, but Good Time, their second one, released in July, with bass on the one.”

“At Hackensack High School in New Jersey, where her family later moved, [Melina] Matsoukas was into photography and hip-hop. At home, she watched the films of Mira Nair, The Color Purple, All About My Mother, The Royal Tenenbaums, West Side Story, Belly, and her absolute favorite, Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust, an impressionistic movie about three generations of […]

“Regardless of what it’s called—’climate gentrification’ by academics and activists,  ‘regular gentrification’ by some community members and city officials or ‘smart planning’ by developers and urban planners —there is an increasing push to build on high-ground in [Miami]. ”

“My grandmother was a refugee. She prized community over property. By cleaning the homes of white people — by dusting their bookshelves and scrubbing their toilets down on her knees — she was able to raise her three children in Michigan. They all lived well into old age. She ensured their survival by running. This […]

“We have forgotten that black gospel music was fashioned by the courageous inventiveness of black migrants from Southern states to places like Chicago and Detroit. The style they created had within it a political and economic critique of racial capitalism: One need only peruse the lyrical content about joblessness, motherlessness, despair, to see it. But […]

“Dimitrov and Lasky [the Astro Poets] think of the signs formally, as ‘poetic constraints,’ and imagine them interacting like characters in a novel.

“Houstonians call I-610 the Loop. It divides the city into two parts: inside the Loop and outside the Loop. The city circumference is marked by Beltway 8, the last buffer before you hit the suburbs. When I was a kid, I lived a neighborhood cluster beyond Beltway 8, west of the city. If you want […]

“People tend to speak of South Central Los Angeles as a homogenous neighborhood, an undifferentiated community of African Americans wracked by poverty, gang violence, drug use, and general social disorder. In actuality, South Central is not a neighborhood at all, but a massive swath of the city settled by black migrants in the 20th century. […]