![]() ![]() Hearing Tate’s words, she says, as she peers at me from behind thin, gold-framed glasses, “I feel so seen.” Nineties hip-hop thrums from the speakers in the sparsely populated bistro as we discuss the power of film and the dynamics of Blackness over cups of black tea poured from a sturdy metallic pot. It’s a cool, gray October morning in Crown Heights, the kind when it seems a torrent of rain could burst forth from the sky at any moment. The black intellectual, that star-crossed figure on the American scene forever charged with explaining Black folks to white folks and with explaining Black people to themselves - often from the perspectives of a distance refracted by double alienation,” writes the late critic Greg Tate in his seminal essay about Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” When I read the quote to writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, we’re huddled in a corner of the French Senegalese restaurant Cafe Rue Dix, one of her favorite spots in the city.
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