Black people are tired. I am tired. We are tired of being told we don’t see what’s happening to us with our own eyes. We are tired of being told not to trust what we’ve experienced for generations. We are being murdered. Whether it’s by the police, ICE, or at the hands of people we considered friends, we are being murdered. Yet this country expects us to become desensitized to it. We are expected to accept whatever narrative is offered to explain away another Black death. We

Nolan Wells was 18 years old. He had recently graduated from high school, committed to playing football at Southwest Mississippi Community College, and spent the Fourth of July on Horn Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast with friends. A few days later, his body was recovered from the water near the island.

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was a state government agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation and monitor civil rights activism during the civil rights era. Following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi officials established the commission under the stated goal of protecting the state’s sovereignty from federal intervention.

Many people assume media became fair once representation improved. Black visibility in television, film, journalism, and social media has undeniably increased over the last several decades. However, visibility alone does not equal structural power. Much of modern media distortion operates through three systems: representation without editorial control, algorithmic amplification, and respectability filtering.