The robes changed. The masks changed. The slogans changed. But the ideology of white supremacy has persisted across blood lines.

White folks seeking to intimidate others often conceal their identities behind masks & positions of power. A hood. A badge. A robe. A title. An elected office. A medical degree. A law license. Different uniforms. Same abuse of authority when power is used to deny another person’s humanity.

On July 4, 1776, the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. The centuries that followed would see generations of Black Americans and people across the African diaspora continue the unfinished work of expanding the meaning of freedom, citizenship, and self-determination.

The Canyon of Heroes with its bronze plaques deciding which triumphs get written into the pavement. A presidential center deciding how a story gets told and in what order. Juneteenth itself — the holiday of the delayed predicate. Three acts of public memory, one weekend.

Black Excellence!

“It is a terrible thing to be born in a country which has decided that you are not a human being, and it keeps inviting you to decide, in yourself, not to be.” - James Baldwin Go Stand in Jackson Park on Juneteenth, look up at all that stone, and you are looking at the answer - to be! /n

Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells published a pamphlet on exactly that: “The reason the colored American was not in the World's Columbian Exposition.” Sit with the contrast. The White City was white, plaster, & made to disappear. What rises on that ground now is Black, granite & made to remain. /2

The Obama Presidential Center rises out of Jackson Park. In 1893, this same Jackson Park hosted the World's Columbian Exposition — the White City. A fairground of white plaster palaces, raised to announce America as an empire. It was temporary, built for a season & built to leave us out. /1🧵

2026: Crosby paints them for the Obama Foundation. Their building. The Obamalisk. They don’t need the Smithsonian’s frame they built their own house & hung the portrait in a free lobby on Juneteenth! First they entered the master’s house. Then they built their own & put it in South Side Chicago. /2

2018: Wiley & Sherald become the first Black artists to paint official presidential portraits for the Smithsonian. That was infiltration — walking Black figures into the official national archive & forcing the existing canon to make room. The institution was the country’s; they cracked it open. /1 🧵

Crosby’s signature: the figure is painted, the world is transferred. Face, hands — living paint, singular and sovereign. Suit, dress, floor — the diasporic archive, collaged. The person is never dissolved into their people. You stand wrapped in the archive, held up by it. The face stays yours.

“Everywhere I've gone since high school, it's always been 'Jalen Brunson's good, but...' Always that 'but' like they're going to say something negative. Too slow, not athletic enough, too small, all those things that don't measure heart. That's what I have!” -Jalen Brunson 💙🧡 #NYKnicks #MVP #History

Knicks in 5! 💙🧡

David Hockney’s work is cited as a major influence on Njideka Akunyili Crosby. She frequently references Hockney’s aesthetic in her depictions of domestic spaces in Los Angeles (where she lives and works). She transforms these LA rooms by imprinting them w/her Nigerian heritage. #DavidHockney #RIP

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By connecting The Wild Party to Harlem’s Black Renaissance, Lili-Anne Brown turns it into a mirror for 2026: who is centered, who is consumed, who gets the keys, and who only gets to perform. Only a director with deep musical-theatre intelligence & Black cultural literacy, could pull this off! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you keep honoring Black work in Screenplay but never in Director, you can praise the art without fully redistributing power, budgets, or precedent. /3

Coogler’s Sinners deal gives him final cut, first‑dollar gross & ownership after 25 yrs—terms almost never given to anyone, let alone a Black director. A BD win on top of that would be the Academy saying, “Yes, this model—Black authorship + long‑term ownership—is not just allowed but celebrated,” /2

From “I AM A MAN” to “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES,” from Memphis sanitation workers to a Black congressman standing in a chamber full of people pretending this history is behind us. This is the practice of Black History Month: see the pattern, refuse to look away & honor the courage in real time! ✊🏾

Under Jim Crow & its afterlives, white women - denied many forms of male power, were granted authority over racial boundaries in schools, neighborhoods & “moral” life. Meaning, they could be marginalized by patriarchy & still wield power over Black people’s bodies. Different era. Same function.

Rev Jesse Jackson’s Holiday Greeting Card (1987) - a moment where Black political life and Black social life met in the language of elegance and possibility. Not casual. Not ironic. Intentional. Aspirational. Almost ceremonial. The way we were. It’s nostalgia, pride, grief & history all at once.

Rev. Jackson was never just a person to me. He was part of the soundtrack of the world I was raised in. If you grew up Black in America in the late 20th century, his voice lived in your nervous system. His cadence. His refusal to shrink his imagination about who we could be. He spoke in futures.

Kendrick & Bad Bunny use the flag to diagnose two different faces of the same empire. Kendrick shows the flag as broken from within; Bad Bunny shows the flag as contested from the outside—two performances that make “patriotism” impossible to read as innocent when the political ground is empire.

Bad Bunny’s sugarcane staging isn’t “tropical” scenery—it’s plantation architecture: monocrop extraction made visible. Like Wifredo Lam’s La Jungla, the cane turns “nature” into a colonial system that encloses bodies and memory, then gets repurposed as critique and declaration. 1/3

She stands as a counter-narrative to erasure: a Black woman not erased, but celebrated. Not silenced, but amplified. Not merely surviving on the margins—but dominating in a space never designed for her. Happy Black History Month! #ErinJackson

Haiti is a case study in how the powers that be will never cease punishing you for fighting & winning your freedom. Power punishes freedom because freedom shifts the frame. It refuses charity & demands change. And when we do that—whether through art, policy, data, or food—the backlash always comes.

Terence Crawford got mistaken for Kendrick Lamar on live TV, then went on to retire as an undefeated 3x undisputed boxing legend. Now Kendrick breaks the Grammys record in a custom Chanel tux w/ a taped fighter’s hand, knocking out legends in his own arena. Art imitating life imitating art. #BHM

Black history exposes the lie that progress is inevitable and reminds us instead that justice is built—deliberately, collectively, and often by those pushed furthest to the margins. #HappyBlackHistoryMonth

These men are building something together, document by document, subscriber by subscriber. Du Bois recognizes what Schomburg is finding—epoch-making—and immediately wants to amplify it through The Crisis. Schomburg is doing the archaeological work; Du Bois is providing the platform. 2/3