The Mistake 

I have talked with founder of Red Nation Television Network, Joanelle Romero, and the future of Indigenous representation looks bright.

The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor. 

White audiences saw Peola’s mixed-race passing as a Black woman’s struggle to be white. Black audiences saw it as the rebellion of a Black woman trying to gain privileges only given to white people.

Growing up without a dad, I got a lot of my fatherly advice from the prototypes I saw on the silver screen. It’s these characters and films that gave me a glimpse into a dynamic I had never known but also made me realize that I was missing out. Here are my top 10 paternal films.

True crime media is notoriously obsessed with the “missing white woman” trope, and yet the vast majority of American murder victims are male, and well over half are people of color.