"It's the Golden Arches and Kanye, Right?"
Another sneak peek at an interview with an incredible social historian that I interviewed for the forthcoming piece!
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m not sure exactly when my big piece will be published — sometime later this month or maybe early August — but it relates to the Kimye Brand and the Disney conglomerate. This deep dive required some conversations with social historians about the American nuclear family, media representations of black fathers, and the storied history of Walt Disney himself.
So now, as we await the main event, I’m sharing some takeaway from my interviews with four different experts. I couldn’t bear to leave them on the cutting room floor!
Mychal Denzel Smith is a writer, cultural commentator, fellow at Type Media Center, and writer-in-residence at Hunter College. He is the author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching and Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream, and countless articles. It was an honor to speak with him, and he also generously offered me some words of wisdom about writing a book! (the main one being “don’t do it!!!!!” but jokingly, obviously!)
On Media Representations of Black Fathers: We can look at stuff [like] Good Times, right, the idea very early on is that the father is present. So you're getting a realistic depiction of what it is to be poor in 1970s Chicago, in the Cabrini-Green projects, but it's a family unit that's all together. And then because of off-screen contract disputes, that father disappears, and they kill him off. So suddenly, it becomes a different show, and what you have is an audience reaction to this. People being like, "Well, we had this opportunity to explore what it means for a black father to be at home. Now, it's being taken away from us."