To
@priyankachopra
@Usher
@juliannehough
with love and respect, a thread:
There are those who have dedicated their lives and assumed the necessary sacrifices to refer to themselves as activists - artists who court the profits of capitalism are not among them.
Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough will host competition series ‘The Activist’.
Activists go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes, with their success measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input.
()
That’s a wrap everyone, I hope you loved season 2 as much as I did!
Head over to my IG
@rafaelcasal
for some words of gratitude for the amazing team who put it all together.
Blindspotting the series truly is an homage to everyone the Bay. Written, created, scored and populated by people from Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward, San Francisco, Richmond, Alameda, Vallejo, Antioch, Pinole, Daily City, Pittsburg, San Leandro and more. A celebration of our home.
LOGIC ANGER, MIGHT DELETE LATER:
If it’s so easy to confuse your gun for your taser, how come we never hear about cops accidentally tasing people they meant to shoot? Wouldn’t the accident happen in the other direction too?
Stand true in your complicated identities, mi gente. Don’t let anyone simplify the nuance of your being to satisfy their impatience. You are a multi-hyphenated soul, worthy of a great many words that don’t need to match.
Disqualifying this woman is the most short-sighted, regrettable thing the
@Olympics
could do. What do they think weed did, sped her up? If she had tested positive for whiskey would we care? Anti marijuana laws are rooted in American racism, let Richardson run! She’s a champion!
Sha’Carri Richardson (
@itskerrii
), the US Women’s 100-meter champion who dominated the Olympic trials, tested positive for marijuana following that race, throwing her Olympic future in doubt.
With love/ I hope
@Usher
@priyankachopra
will sit with some activist elders and re-think the choice to make a competition activist tv show. This is poison in the well of meaningful progress by rewarding performative activism with celebrity.
Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough will host competition series ‘The Activist’.
Activists go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes, with their success measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input.
()
Us, who lack the courage for such sacrifices can only hope to be, at best, advocates for the causes of activists. Support staff. Thus, we are in no position to judge, qualify, or validate the merits of activist work. And most certainly are in no position to profit from it.
No doubt you have already shot this show, but you do still have the power to remove yourselves from giving it the power you have acquired courting the mob.
I hope you will consider the difficult good this requires, as many activists have done in their own work.
Listen to the man who taught us as children to read, taught us about history and then went into the future and taught us what it could be like.
Yes - read the very books they hope to ban, that is where the truth is. Thank you
@levarburton
!
On the push to ban some children’s books,
@levarburton
tells
#TheView
, “I’ll be absolutely candid and honest. It’s embarrassing that we are banning books in this country; in this culture; in this day and age.”
“Read the books they’re banning. That’s where the good stuff is!”
decriminalization of sex work activism is, by your lack of inclusion, being deemed less relevant or controversial next to the “safer” activism you are promoting, then you have indeed harmed the movements through your calculated omission. You are the authoritative resistance.
The attempt to do so requires that one must consider the commercial appeal of some activist movements and deny the validity of others. And the reality is that the areas our society most desperately in need of activism are often
Worse, you confuse a mass audience who is not privy to that work, about what it means to dedicate your life to meaningful change. In short, your show will change how people define what an activist should be, and that is not worth whatever you think the upside is.
the ones that are the least commercially profitable or marketable. That is the challenge of those causes - to find a way to make them the discussion of our society, when there is authoritative resistance. But if, for example, Black Lives Matter activism or
By creating mass audience input & judgement & leveraging that mass audience to become the authority on what is and isn’t valid or worthy activism, you disrupt the work of generations of activists who have already laid that path out -to speak TO that mob, not court their approval.
Well, he WAS kidnapped, had his memories erased, then forced to be a killing machine supersoldier for an inter-dimensional madman for hundreds of years, then found out it was all a lie, escaped, became a successful actor only to be recaptured by that same company.
#freebrad
and that is not a argument to consider expanding your acceptable causes, because full inclusion in your show is similarly harmful. Activist work is a deeply philosophical grassroot pursuit by community leaders, held accountable by the communities they speak on the behalf of.
challenge the very ideas we have made mainstream. And in its success, your show may become the most powerful tool of corruption and confusion around activist work ever presented on the main stage of our society.
How pathetic of man to think we fathom the value of life more than the ones who conjure that life from their own flesh. That indeed brought us too.
How barbaric have some men managed to remain. What rituals of power must we kill to save ourselves from this villainous audacity.
Look - I too am often skeptical of accusations about the harmfulness of entertainment, often it is a wild exaggeration of the consequences a piece of art will have on society. But this show does at its core, seek to celebritize and mainstream the activist work that is meant to
And in its ultimate success, which is what a network is aiming for, may be replicated around the world like other competition shows, negatively impacting the potency of the work activists are doing there as well.
Look y’all we are a little baby half hour sitcom about the BAY and we do a lot of things in this show that tv isn’t supposed to do, and the bay is sometimes hard to understand. This is so crazy. S/o
@DaveedDiggs
Young homies - It is kind of you to grow, to get wiser, to leave old, outdated mentalities & lifestyles behind. You revising yourself is a huge step of awareness and accountability for a younger you, that is no more. And it is far kinder than the alternative of staying the same.
What else can you find on the streets of
#Oakland
? A couple pulled up next to me at the red light and said, “I’ll sell you that boat for $50.” We had a common laugh at the expense of my favorite city. My hometown. How do we fix something so broken? Crying inside.
I hope you have loved this season, we put our whole foot in that thang and I couldn’t be more proud of the 270+ people who worked through a pandemic to bring this from the Bay to the WORLD. Fingers crossed for a season 2, but until then - thank you for joining us!!
In 1964 Eliza Dolittle in MY FAIR LADY marries a linguistics doctor, Higgins, who 3 years later is also DR. DOLITTLE.
My fan theory: Higgins ended his extreme sexist ways, took her last name, mastered human language & moved on to animal languages. ITS THE SAME MAN. carry on.
Miles: This time last year, your company posted so many promises to stand with Black Lives Matter and make changes internally, and you did NOTHING! JUST A CULTURAL SENSITIVITY TRAINING! & BOUGHT YOUR STAFF ‘WHITE FRAGILITY’! ITS BEEN A YEAR!
Collin: bruh, they were lying.
Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough will host competition series ‘The Activist’.
Activists go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes, with their success measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input.
()
I knew when
@DaveedDiggs
did that web series over a decade ago, that a particular slow motion shot of him ripping open his shirt while operating a copier would definitely be coming back around. And it did, on this cake from
#sweetnothingscakeshop
But if you don’t have the numbers - and you don’t - then that’s the end of this excuse.
They killed Oscar Grant with this story in 2009, and got away with it. Not again.
#DaunteWright
Justice. Justice.
It’s been six years, I’ve watched this movie at LEAST twenty times, and you’re telling me I just noticed that the yellow is in fact Rafa and not just a background?
On a lighter note, this week’s
@TedLasso
was fantastic. A masterclass in storytelling and punchline writing, and got me right in the feels a FEW times.
@jasonsudeikis
and team, bravo and thank you.
"In a slightly sinister way, the fuck-up confirms or affirms some people’s unsavory thoughts about why the film was awarded Best Picture." Barry Jenkins shuts down the belief that
#Moonlight
only won Best Picture because it's a Black film: