Beyond Beauty 

Where is Lilo's face? Disney marketing sends a chilling signal: that even in 2025, an alien is more palatable and marketable than a brown girl.

In Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986), we follow the love life of powerful female protagonist Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and explore the relationship dynamics she has with her partners. She sees three men simultaneously: Greer Childs, (John Canada Terrell) Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee), and Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks). Though an 80’s film, She’s Gotta Have It is surprisingly progressive with its themes of female sexuality, although at some points in the film it is handled clumsily. Overall Nola is an incredibly compelling character especially for modern women, as we as a society acknowledge female sensuality more and more without the negative stigma.

In the film adaptation, director Jon M. Chu turns each musical number into a massive show stopper, with grand set pieces and a wealth of diverse dancers. Yet, in this attempt to show reverence for the people of the Washington Heights barrio, Chu, or maybe more specifically those in charge of casting, left out a crucial part of the community, Afro-Latinos.

Dead Poets Society relies on patriarchal tropes such as overbearing fathers, contrived brotherhood, and faux-individuality in order to portray its straight white male characters as oppressed.

Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, a part of Netflix's Black Lives Matter Collection, features different social experiments showcasing the larger state of race relations in our society.