AWI Voices With Impact presents: Black Belonging
Angela Davis famously said, “We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.” This tendency toward amnesia has two natural consequences for Black representation in media. On one hand, in order to encourage the general public to wake up and remember our collective past, Black humans must be regularly retraumatized through the rewatching of shameful episodes from our history including slavery, hate crimes, jim crow, and the prison industrial complex. On the other hand, Black stories are ignored altogether. There is rarely a “middle ground” in which Black characters are fully developed, with depictions of the full range of complexity, beauty, and contradictions that define the human experience. In this session, filmmakers Campbell X, Jameelah Nrudin, and Sideah Alladice used their short films as jumping off points to explore and discuss various ways in which Black people are told (explicitly and implicitly) that they don’t belong.
Watch the screen recording below, or download it here.
Featured National Resources:
Crisis Text Line
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Trans Lifeline
The Trevor Project
Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM)
Black Mental Health Alliance
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