Wesley Morris

A quarantine facial-hair experiment led Wesley Morris to consider his Blackness, maleness, and self.

“Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.”

With essays, poems, timelines, and photography, the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project commemorates the 400th anniversary of American slavery, retelling the story of America’s origins by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center.”

The relationship is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism and the fantastically presumptive leap is, The money doesn’t matter because I like working for you. And if you’re the racist in the relationship: I can’t be horrible because we’re friends now.

Wesley Morris on culture, art, and criticism is essential reading: “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginal. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it. They’ve demanded to be taken seriously, and now that they kind of are, they can’t not act…But as urgent as these correctives, cancellations, pre-emptions and proscriptions may be, they do start to take a toll. It can be hard to tell when we’re consuming art and when we’re conducting H.R.”

New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris writes about his ardor for Annabella Sciorra’s art.

Wesley Morris takes on American culture’s deep, all-abiding fear of the black penis and “America’s dubious assumptions about the sexual prowess of black men.”

Wesley Morris examines the depiction of race and police officers in movies, and juxtaposes it against the shooting in Ferguson.