BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” is a shade of documentary and passingly autobiographical. There are multiple history lessons in the film. But it’s not a dry lecture. It jostles between the past and future, and a time that has always been imagined in the minds of those who’ve thought deeply about Black life. The film begins simply enough with the intertwining of a memory and a dream: Joseph shares a copy of the Encyclopedia Africana, a gift from his father. The original idea for the book—a history of Black existence—came from W.E.B. Du Bois, who died before he could remotely come close to completing it. With Du Bois’s original intent in mind, Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah published a fully actualized version of that concept in 1999. Joseph then brings us into some of the reference book’s contents, jumping between pages that note everything from Willie Mays to Marcus Garvey to the Million Man March for a potent montage.