A Night of Black Creativity

May 6, 2025

Hey there, Meteor readers,

Hearty congratulations are in order for Meteor collective members Dawn Porter and Tanya Selvaratnam, both of whom are nominated for News and Documentary Emmys this year: Porter for The Sing Sing Chronicles and Documenting Police Use of Force; and Selvaratnam for Love to the Max. Watch if you haven’t!

In today’s newsletter, we’re strolling down the blue carpet of last night’s Met Gala with Julianne Escobedo Shepherd—and taking a moment to celebrate midwives.

Still thinking about this,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

CARDI B AND HALLE BERRY. NO NOTES. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Fashion’s dandiest night: Whatever your feelings about the Met Gala, this year’s theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, was an important one. It was selected by Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton last year after he read the 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by Barnard professor Monica L. Miller, now chair of the college’s Africana Studies Department. Inspired by its deeply researched history of the way formerly enslaved Black people reclaimed the frippery they were forced to wear into their own distinct style, Bolton asked Miller to become the Costume Institute’s first guest curator in his ten-year tenure.

The exhibit itself lasts for nearly half a year, long after the last bit of carpet is rolled up. Superfine looks at the lineage of Black style in “the Atlantic diaspora,” and cites Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an essay from 1934. “The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression,” Hurston wrote. “Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator.” In other words: Black fashion evolved as a form of resistance against the way white culture expects Black people to be, but it doesn’t matter whether the clothes please anyone but the wearer.

Aesthetically speaking, this year contained the best fashion at the Gala in years, its “tailored for you” dress code encouraging attendees to show up and show out as themselves. Co-chair Teyana Taylor wore a long red cape embroidered with the words “Harlem Rose,” created by costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who in 2018 became the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Costume Design, for Black Panther. Rihanna donned a deconstructed suit—part jacket, part bustle, part waist-as-lapel—its regal pinstripes channeling the spirit of Ida B. Wells, assuredly strutting into her newspaper job at the New York Age in the 1890s.

DO WE THINK SHE’S HIDING R9 UNDER THAT HAT? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

While the glitter of the Met Gala may seem out of touch in these violent times, it feels significant that Black creativity was celebrated at such a major institutional event, in a moment when institutions are being all but purged of Black people and other people of color. We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s blatantly white supremacist agenda has affected the Kennedy Center, all cabinet-level departments, and state universities; he has promised to next come for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, PBS, and other government-funded institutions that bring alive the history of Black and brown people. Those institutions have only just begun to help this country grapple with its historical atrocities; now, thanks to the administration’s war on what it derisively refers to as “DEI,” the small progress that’s been made is being literally erased.

Don’t just talk about it, be about it, goes a common phrase in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The long national project of what that means politically is being cut off at the knees, thanks to these attacks on Black history in classrooms, libraries, government websites, and museums. So it’s huge that “fashion’s biggest night” at the country’s most renowned art institution was about Black history and Black people reveling in Black fashion as resistance. It was emphasized across every major publication, every tabloid and blog, and all over every social feed—Black fashion history everywhere. As Professor Miller put it to Lala Anthony in an interview on the carpet last night: “I’ve never had such a big classroom.”

–Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

AND:

Yesterday was International Day of the Midwife, and this year’s theme was “Midwives: Critical in Every Crisis.” According to the United Nations Population Fund, midwives are often the first and only responders providing care to pregnant women during conflicts or humanitarian disasters (care that’s threatened by the shuttering of USAID). And in the U.S., midwifery is essential in a climate where pregnancy is criminalized and maternal health outcomes are getting worse. In fact, research shows that midwife care improves birth outcomes and can help address health disparities. Shafia Monroe, a veteran midwife and activist in Portland, Ore., sees Black midwives as “the first line of defense” for protecting the health of Black mothers, who are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. “The deaths of Black women are often due to not being listened to by doctors and hospitals,” Monroe says. “A Black midwife is going to listen to you.” (For more on why midwifery is so key to Black women’s reproductive justice, check out our video on the subject.) Monroe finds hope in the “slow but sure resurgence” of her profession: Even though our country’s medical system sought to marginalize midwives–and especially Black midwives–in the 20th century, midwives now attend 11% of births in the U.S., as opposed to only 1% in 1980.
Immigration advocates are calling for renewed investigations into inhumane conditions at detention centers after three more immigrants died in April, bringing the total to seven deaths in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration. Detention centers are overrun as the administration denies bond to immigrants who are trying to appeal their deportations. ICE claims that it is providing appropriate medical attention to all those who need it, but Katie Blankenship of Sanctuary of the South tells Truthout, “They are putting lipstick on a pig to get the press off their back.”
And another high five! Over the last few years, the outlet ProPublica has been doing the difficult and necessary work of exposing the extreme consequences of abortion bans. Yesterday, it received a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for public service for Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, and Cassandra Jaramillo’s series “Life of the Mother,” which, among other things, examined two preventable deaths of pregnant women in Georgia and analyzed the impact of Texas’s abortion ban when the state neglected to. Reporting matters.
When Maine governor Janet Mills refused to comply with Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, the administration fired back by freezing funding for nutrition programs, including free school lunches. Instead of acquiescing, Mills and the state’s AG took the administration court and won. You love to see it.