WINSTON DUKE AS M’BAKU IN BLACK PANTHER 

• Florida passed Amendment 2, which will raise minimum wage to $15/hour by 2026
• South Dakota, Montana, Arizona and New Jersey all passed an amendment that legalized marijuana 
• Utah will now be removing gendered language in the Utah Constitution and will replace it with gender-neutral language
• California passed Prop 17, which restores voting rights to previously imprisoned citizens
• Delaware elected Sarah McBride, the first ever openly trans state senator
• Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones are the first ever openly gay black members of congress
• Cori Bush is the first ever woman of color to win a seat in Congress in Missouri
• Mauree Turner became the first non-binary state lawmaker in America and the first Muslim member of the Oklahoma state house
• Oregon has become the first state to decriminalize all drugs (small amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs will have lesser punishments, similar to traffic tickets, and no jail time.)
• Kim Jackson is the first out LGBTQ+ state senator in Georgia

• Shevrin D. Jones is Florida’s first opnely LGBTQ+ state senator
• Jabari Brisport became New York’s first gay Black member of the house
• Arizona flipped blue for the first time in 24 years
• Michele Rayner-Goolsby became the first Black LGBTQ woman in the Florida Legislature
• Voters in Colorado overwhelmingly rejected Prop 115, a state ballot measure that would have banned abortions after a fetus reaches 22 weeks gestational age. In rejecting the initiative, Colorado remains one of the most progressive states in the country on reproductive rights
• Arizona will now send two Democrats to the Senate for the first time since 1951, thanks to the win of ex-astronaut Captain Mark Kelly.
• Democrats have flipped the senate seat in Colorado, with the win of former Gov. John Hickenlooper
• Mississippi is removing the confederate flag from their symbology
• Marie Newman, who has been titled ‘a leader of the pro-choice movement’, will now represent Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District in Congress
• Nevada became the first state to protect same-sex marriage in it’s constitution
• Immigrant rights activist and former public defender José Garza won the race for District Attorney of Travis County, Texas
• Michigan passed Proposal 20-2, which requires police to have a search warrant to access a person’s electronic data and electronic communications.

• Washington approved Referendum 90, which requires all school districts to provide age appropriate, comprehensive sex ed at all grade levels
• Colorado passed the first paid family/ medical leave program
• Mississippi passed an ammendment that legalized medical marijuana
• Denver overwhelmingly voted to pass Ballot Measure 2J. which lifts the city’s more than 30-year-old ban on pit bulls
• New Mexico became the first state to elect all women of color to our House delegation
• Vermont elected the state’s first openly transgender legislator, Taylor Small
• Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all won re-election in the House
• Nebraska passed a constitutional amendment to the state constitution that closes the loophole of the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment that allowed slavery as a punishment for crimes
• Rhode Island passed a measure to rename the state, officially naming it Rhode Island and not The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, due to connections to slavery
• Oregon passed measure 109, the first state to legalize psilocybin (mushrooms) for mental heath treatments
• Hawai’i elected native Hawaiian Kaiali’i “Kai” Kahele, a Democrat, to the House of Representatives. He is one of 6 Native members of the House who will be sworn in in January
• Utah passed legislation that removes language from the state constitution that allows the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments (no more prison labor!)
• Multnomah county, where most of Portland sits, just voted for tuition-free preschool for everybody ages 4-5 

“I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me.”

“Being on my own movie set, and just putting a movie together and then having a DP show up and having everyone look to that person for assurance because they’re a man. But also, it was gnarly making that movie. It was not hidden. I mean, surviving River of Grass, the shooting of it, I was like, “Oh my God, this is happening because I’m a woman.” And then I think the distribution had so many sexist elements to it. And then trying to get a film made afterwards where you go to meetings and people go, “Well, we’re not doing women’s films.” People were not shy about it. I was trying to get a film made starring Alfre Woodard and they’d be like, “a woman director and then a Black woman lead, you’re starting in such a hole.” Also, just going to Sundance and watching my male counterparts get the budget I still haven’t gotten on their second films and feeling like, "Wow, a decade lost”—watching all those guys that I am in the same age of, watching their careers.”

It’s been 20 years since New Line Cinema released Gina Prince-Bythewood’s feature directorial debut, “Love & Basketball,” and the writer-director said that film — now a classic, especially among African American audiences — allowed her a kind of freedom she hasn’t seen since.

Produced by Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and Mule Filmworks, the film starred Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan as Quincy McCall and Monica Wright, childhood friends who fall in love as adults and share another all-consuming passion: basketball. Told largely from Monica’s perspective, this career-versus-love story continues to resonate.

“I have never had the kind of freedom I had on ‘Love and Basketball,‘” she said in a candid and long-ranging interview with IndieWire. Since then, she’s made just three films, including HBO’s Terry McMillan adaptation “Disappearing Acts” (2000);  “The Secret Life of Bees” (2008) for Fox Searchlight; and Relativity Media’s “Beyond the Lights” (2014), starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker.