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*Dear White People Narrator Voice* From Wakanda to Winchester, the Black peoples have long found themselves yearning for media representation which highlights the multiplicity of their identities.
We must first begin in Menlo Park, West Orange, New Jersey 1897. Thomas Edison and the white men working at his eponymous laboratory steal the design and technology of France's the Lumiere Brothers', cinematograph. As the duo is more famously known in Paris, Edison, seeing the promise of wealth and infamy this invention would bring, become the first to patent this design and rename it Edison's Kinetoscope. You see, Thomas Edison - falling dutifully in line with the long history of cunning American white men successfully running a long con - would eventually use this as a modus operandi for most all of his...'discoveries'. As for the Lumiere Brothers? Though they continue to break ground in Europe, history has all but ironed them into its creases.
And Edison's Kinetoscope eventually evolves 'his' Kinetograph, grandfather to the camera we knew and use today.
Gif via sseurki
Inevitable stop in history lesson by fourth wall break of potentially all-female student cluster posing for a sorority group picture on an iPhone while Sam and Joelle exchange perfectly timed snarky responses to the inanity of the situation. One of them, most likely Joelle, will begin a spiel on the fact that Thomas Edison was A SCAMMER! A LIAR! A MESSY BITCH WHO LIVED FOR DRAMA! This will inevitable devolve into a conversation about the whitewashing and dampening of history by the American public education system, plagiarism, creative theft and other conversations that kind of, sort of sound like exchanges on Gilmore Girls coming out of Black people's mouths because:
*Sam White voice takes over*
Dear White People.
