Donnell Alexander

“Sucks” isn’t pejorative enough to describe Americans’ relationship to their country’s racial history. The strategy that the right calls Critical Race Theory Opposition is our moment's mind-blowing example of flight from legacy facts, and living through it sucks. How did we land here, with millions all-in on not knowing settled U.S. history? Were America’s racialized life even reasonably reflected, this red meat end run wouldn’t have a base to stand on.

Learning happens outside of classrooms enough that not just faulty textbooks and faulty politicians alone cannot be blamed for incubating ignorance. As much as school, if not more so, we learn who we are through popular media — seeing ourselves in movies, especially.

Since deep in Hollywood’s origin story festers Birth of A Nation — the explicitly white supremacist history lesson from 1915 — it should not surprise that institutional Hollywood suppressed a Black masterwork that might have nudged awake the nation like no pop art before it. ...

With Opening Day nearing, old-school Major League Baseball fans are now focused on their probably doomed squads' chances of winning the World Series.

Meanwhile, fans around the planet — and leading-edge Americans — are experiencing the World Baseball Classic as the game’s version of soccer’s World Cup.

In tonight’s World Baseball Classic final, the United States takes on Japan, concluding a tsunami of sport....

For me, Hollywood isn’t a state of mind. It’s the place where, 30 years ago, “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” rented me my first Los Angeles apartment. It’s where Brad Pitt's weed guy came to the crib off LaBrea with a briefcase full of selections; cannabis swag like I’d never seen. Until the COVID-19 shutdown, I could see “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” skits being crafted on the way to my subway stop.

That’s why the 2022 Oscars, where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, has me watching network television tonight. When the big local industry’s self-fellation fest gets marred by violence, it hits me where I live. The Academy Awards show is a social institution worth millions of dollars a year to ABC. Hundreds of career arcs are at stake. While awards for art don’t make sense to me, I fully appreciate that the Oscars matter.

Will Smith’s violence, and distinguished Black people fighting, is not what obsesses me. Here’s what does: After Smith turned himself into the worst Ayahuasca spokesman ever, the 323’s cinema elite sat for a half hour or so, digested what it had just seen-and decided to applaud the Black movie star who had assaulted a smaller Black celebrity on stage. Totally embarrassing, like trying to explain L.A.’s volume of houselessness to visiting relatives who fear you have lost your soul....

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave...

Should you have the kind of entertainment compass that allows you to divine what’s special on Apple TV, you’ll have found Super League: The War for Football.

The new documentary series has as its protagonists professional-league owners and executives who guide the sport as though it’s part of the public trust. But the “football” under consideration here is European soccer — not the National Football League’s brand of American football.

What if professional football in America actually was a public trust where true accountability and enhancing community were foundational to the NFL experience — and domination by the game's monied overlords, closed consortium of owners and a subservient media ended? ...