Jonathan W. Gray
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elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Jonathan W. Gray
@elmcitytree.blacksky.app
41K followers 1.4K following 8.3K posts
Professor at CUNY, scholar of Blackness, comics, music, & popular culture writ large, leftist & left handed. 🇰🇳 🇺🇸 🇵🇸 🏳️‍⚧️

I maintain the Blackademics feed, the scholarly side of #Blacksky

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7

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elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Same energy
A screenshot of a POLITICO article from 2014 detailing the NYT questionable headline N.Y. Times defends calling Michael Brown 'no angel' By HADAS GOLD | 08/25/2014 01:08 PM EDT The New York Times is defending its characterization of Michael Brown as "no angel" in an article ahead of his burial on Monday. "Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life," the story reads.
November 14, 2025 at 1:50 AM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
I’ll be chatting with Adam Shatz on Friday @cunyenglish.bsky.social about his comprehensive biography of Fanon, specifically his continuing influence on Black radical thought. Come through if you’re in NYC.
THE LIVES OF FRANTZ FANON with Adam Shatz ADAM SHATZ THE REBEL'S CLINIC THE REVOLUTIONARY LIVES OF FRANTZ FANON Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinc: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, will speak on Fanon's archive, the role that he plays in the Black American Radical tradition, and his ever-evolving reception since his death. With respondents Ujjwal Prasai, Malachi Davidson, and Dr. Jonathan Gray FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 at 4PM in 4406
November 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Thank you so much for this article. It helps me understand this comic, which is about a middle class Black family in Queens that hires Luke to protect them from their neighbors.
The cover to Luke Cage, Power Man #32 which features Luke’s attacking a white arsonist in Queens called WildFire.
November 5, 2025 at 4:38 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
This is the tuition of Platner’s private boarding HS. He is a scion of wealth, like Eric and Don Jr.
Making Hotchkiss Affordable says the bottom of the screenshot. But given that yearly tuition is $77K, I’m not sure how attainable that claim is to normal people
October 29, 2025 at 6:08 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
You mean the school that asks families to pay THIS in order to go there? But how could the family of a simple oysterman possibly afford that?

Unless…
A screenshot from the Hotchkiss website detailing their tuition! It’s a whole fucking LOT!!!
October 29, 2025 at 5:56 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Reagan's ruthless exploitation of that gasp--his ceaseless pushing of the lie of the welfare queen, and the media's instance on putting white feelings above object fact--led to the election of 1984. This map STILL makes old school Dems still wake up crying in the middle of the night.
A map of the 1984 Presidential election. This really happened.
October 28, 2025 at 5:58 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
I mean, this exchange occurs 3/4th of the way through the interview. After several nonsensical interactions. My gawd.
I. Chotiner making an observation: I'm not trying to discount what you're saying about Harris, but Biden is not an L.G.B.T.Q. Black woman, and you have the same feelings about how he was treated. This is what you keep going back to in the book. Sometimes I worry about losing sight of the fact that we're dealing with a Presidential election here, and the feelings of Joe Biden are less important than the fate of the country. The incredible exchange that follows. Jean-Pierre: You're telling me about the feelings of Joe Biden, blah, blah, blah, but Joe Biden is out of the picture. He's out of the picture. Chotiner: Yeah, he sure is. Jean-Pierre: He's out of the picture now and we lost. Chotiner: This is what you wrote your book about. I am not bringing this up randomly.
October 27, 2025 at 8:55 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Here’s an example. I was saying that I don’t understand how the same people who went to No Kings protest also went to Kamala book events to yell at her. This was his response:
Not going to dignify this unhinged raving with a proper summary. This person sucks.
October 25, 2025 at 9:13 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Look who I ran into at #nycc
A picture of me and a guy cosplaying as Luigi Mangione. He’s carrying a Koopa with delay deny depose written on it.
October 11, 2025 at 10:20 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Every year at #NYCC there’s one cosplayer that takes the cake, the cookies AND the pie. It’s only Friday but I think I found the one.
October 11, 2025 at 1:52 AM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Every paragraph is a banger. I’m so happy right now. Sometimes you find a piece of writing just when you need it.
Sobe it. We cannot awaken this sleper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else's profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly-and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
October 5, 2025 at 5:35 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
My goodness, Baldwin could had written this last week.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps-for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
October 5, 2025 at 5:26 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
James Baldwin to Angela Davis in 1970, discussing white Americans:
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness— for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps-they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of-and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
October 5, 2025 at 5:19 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
This framing sucks. But it reasserts the idea that only Republicans are real Americans

That the rest of us hate this seem immaterial
A NYT screenshot of the headline that reads After Volatile Summer, Trump's Approval Remains Low but Stable, Poll Finds A new Times/Siena survey shows the president retaining the support of nine out of 10 G.O.P. voters, even as the government races toward a shutdown on Wednesday.
October 1, 2025 at 1:53 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Jinn Harbaugh on the sidelines
A picture of a Jinn
September 30, 2025 at 12:55 AM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
I’m on the subway and these ads are as creepy and off putting as the product itself.
A Subway banner ad that reads “I’ll ride the subway with you.” Friend.com You’re paying for company to surveil you!!! Another banner ad on the subway that reads “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.” Friend.com. Of course you won’t! You’re not a person nor are you my friend.
September 26, 2025 at 3:33 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Here’s a literary palate cleanser: the first page of Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year. It’s a book about community & vulnerability & resilience. It’s the best thing I’ve read this year.
THERE'S ALWAYS THIS YEAR 5:00 You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together by talking about our enemies. I say our enemies and know that in the many worlds beyond these pages, we are not beholden to each other in whatever rage we do or do not share, but if you will, please, imagine with me. You are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting one free hand atop yours, and I am saying to you that I would like to commiserate, here and now, about our enemies. And you will know, then, that at least for the next few pages, my enemies are your enemies. But there's another reality: to talk about our enemies is also to talk about our beloveds. To take a windowless room and paint a single window, through which the width and breadth of affection can be observed. To walk to that window, together, if you will allow it, and say to each other How could anyone cast any ill on this. And we will know then, collectively, that anyone who does is one of our enemies. And so I've already led us astray. You will surely forgive me if I promised we would talk about our enemies when what I meant was that I want to begin this brief time we have together by talking about love, and you will surely forgive me if an enemy stumbles their way into the architecture of affection from time to time. It is inevitable, after all. But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.
September 21, 2025 at 1:49 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
FYI
A screenshot that’s explains how to block messaging on Spotify
September 21, 2025 at 3:54 AM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
Got my updated Covid shot today from the pharmacy down the street. They still have a newsstand by the door. This is the cover of the Post. Amazing.
The Sept 15 edition of the post with the headline Comrade Kathy: Cowardly gov backs defund police & antisemitic socialist Mamdani for mayor The cover includes an illustration of Kathy Houchul looking like Che Guevara.
September 15, 2025 at 3:42 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
I’ll Take My Stand (1930), the Southern Agrarian manifesto was explicitly about defending the white South from any form of criticism. Contributors included Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren.
A book cover that reads I'LL TAKE MY STAND: THE SOUTH AND THE AGRARIAN TRADITION BY 12 SOUTHERNERS DONALD DAVIDSON • JOHN GOULD FLETCHER• H. B. KLINE • LYLE H. LANIER • STARK YOUNG ALLEN TATE • ANDREW NELSON LYTLE • H. C. NIXON • F. L. OWSLEY • JOHN CROWE RANSOM JOHN DONALD WADE • ROBERT PENN WARREN • • • • NEW PREFACE BY LOUIS D. RUBIN
September 8, 2025 at 9:57 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
If you see this, reskeet with a vampire that is not Dracula.

(shoutout to @weredawgz.bsky.social for developing Brielle)
brielle brooks blade daughter in the comic Bloodline
September 5, 2025 at 10:48 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
I just received this out of pocket political text! I don’t know who this conspiratorial BS is meant to persuade but it won’t be me. Adams is a bribe taking 🤡 who should keep Mayor Dinkins name out of his mouth.
Text Message • SMS Today 17:06 THEY stopped Gov. Patterson, THEY humiliated Mayor Dinkins and now THEY are trying to destroy Mayor Adams? "Why won't THEY let black men stay in power? " Reply to this message with the number 1 if you think THEY should be stopped See clip on Cuomo's Past Uncensored Use of the N-word https://youtu.be/yp7jT7S8FS8 Watch ERIC ADAMS TRAILER https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=-V-uzhiUCms Paid for by Empower NYC, whose CEO is Abe George. Top three donors: Scott Lynn, Etoiles Trust & Gary Barnett. Not expressly or otherwise authorized or requested by any candidate or the candidate's committee or agent. For more information, visit nyc.gov/FollowTheMoney. Stop2End The sender is not in your contact list. Report Junk
August 27, 2025 at 9:25 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
They treated ME like a human says the person who looks like this about Nazis who want free marketing from the NYT. I wonder if you & I showed up with questions how things would go.
The NYT real estate reporter who was allowed into a white supremacist compound. I wonder why she got a good reception???
August 21, 2025 at 4:58 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
The architect @rudyfraser.com holding forth about the potential of #Blacksky at a @communia.bsky.social panel

You love to see it.
Rudy Fraser talking about the ways that Blacksky enhances the user experience by community based moderation.
August 20, 2025 at 10:48 PM
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
The NYT sent their real estate reporter to interview these racists and write this story. I wonder why they chose her instead of an expert on right wing extremism? Although I suppose it is a story about property.
A picture of NYT real estate reporter Debra Kamin
August 19, 2025 at 2:10 PM