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A post-Trump society wracked by Covid-19 and economic recession, America is experiencing radical and constant change. On May 25, 2020, Mister (sic) George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who suffocated Floyd as bystanders pleaded with him to relent. Protests immediately erupted and the city of Minneapolis went up in flames, as the murder sparked a firestorm of national and international protest.
Minneapolis now had the world’s attention, yet in the same week, in the same city, a young black trans teenager named Iyanna Dior was brutally attacked following an altercation in a convenience store parking lot. As Iyanna was viciously beaten by a mob of young black men and women screaming homophobic slurs, a few blocks away black Americans were chanting that ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Given Iyanna’s experience, it appeared that actually not all Black lives matter. Or do they only matter if you’re Black and heterosexual?
BLACK AS U R poses to Black America a highly confrontational and much-avoided question. Why do we as a people protest against racial injustice but disregard the injustices experienced by black queer people? After all, we are just as black as you are. In this incendiary documentary, filmmaker Micheal Rice takes the audience on a journey through the homophobia that characterizes many black spaces, both contemporarily and via an autobiographic look into his own upbringing in the south.
BLACK AS U R is the first step in confronting the African American community about queerphobia, via the seering stories of queer black people. from www.blackasur.com
Join us at the Free Screening of "BLACK AS U R" on Saturday, September 10th at the Reva and David Logan Center at the University of Chicago.
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