The real-life horrors of being Black are ever-apparent. Are you watching?
What do a haunted hayride, a White celebrity wedding and the NICU have in common?
Welcome to the weekly dispatch, SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.
This week’s dispatch comes on a Sunday, because I had a few ideas in the pipeline that could have been polished up by the usual Thursday or Friday send date. But despite the critical acclaim of those movies — which I will be reviewing, anyway, soon — I didn’t feel inspired by them this week.
I knew I needed a few extra days to marinate on what I really wanted to say, because the truth bubbling up from my throat is painful:
The real-life horrors of being Black were on display threefold this week, if social media discourse is any indication.
American Horror Story: Nottoway Plantation
Let’s start on a positive note: By May 16, 2025, the so-called largest “antebellum mansion” (read: plantation) in the South had officially burned down. I don’t think I’d be this gleeful if people had been hurt in the process, but since no one was harmed, I couldn’t help but crack open a metaphorical cold one to celebrate.
The blaze burned bright in Louisiana, but myriad plantations that are long overdue for demolition still sprawl across the American South. And it’s not like White Americans preserve these locations to learn from their history.
For example, while Germans aren’t a monolith and also have the capacity to be politically imperfect,1 I marveled at all of Berlin. As someone who has grown up in Georgia and South Carolina, I am used to White supremacist history being romanticized and glamorized.
At my Catholic high school, girls could meet the disciplinarian for rolling their skirts, but boys could accessorize their uniforms with Confederate belt buckles, no problem. One of the popular “misfits” in my high school participated in a Civil War re-enactment as a part of her Girl Scout troop. Guess which side they were playing.
So when I visited Berlin several years ago — including a bus ride to a concentration camp just outside of the city — I was stunned to see the way crumbling wooden houses, energetically dense jail cells, and sordid gas chambers were preserved with a solemn caveat.
Displaying the swastika isn’t just frowned upon in Germany: It’s generally illegal under German criminal code.
In the United States, sure, some plantations are held up as places of history. When I went to grade school in Maryland, I, just like everyone else in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia school districts, visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation.
But much as I hate to say this, I have voluntarily visited a plantation. Especially in the deep South, plantations are a viable venue option for any large-scale activity you can imagine.
Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens, one of the most famous Southern plantations that is right up there with the now-singed Nottoway and Jefferson’s Monticello, most famously hosted Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ wedding. I was hanging out there that same year, I’m pretty sure.
As a goth teenager obsessed with films like Donnie Darko, of course I begged my parents to take me to the local “fright night” in Charleston, SC. Apart from general Black Baby Boomer/Gen X skepticism,2 I can understand my parents’ trepidation:" It always took place at Boone Hall plantation.
The normalized existence of the plantation wasn’t too much of an affront: My mom and I regularly got our hair done by a Shauntay whose salon was right down the road from Boone Hall.
Walking distance from a place where my ancestors — probably directly, since my dad is from South Carolina — were beaten, raped and slaughtered, two Black women and their kids slurped chocolate-chip frappuccinos, listened to Anita Baker and Erykah Badu, and half-watched heartfelt little dramas on TVOne, just trying to forget about it all.3
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My first time feeling fear and lust intertwined — scaroused, a phrase I heard for the first time this week in a Black girl thread about Bill Skarsgård, by the way — happened at Boone Hall. I was in line for the “killer clown” experience at Boone Hall, facing toward my fellow emo friends and away from the entrance.
The panicked squeals of my friends and the feeling of warmth behind caused me to turn, and be face to face with a killer clown. He was tall and masked, with a fake knife in hand. But instead of his languid, aggressive movements coming off as menacing, they turned on. I can only imagine my sparkly-eyed, shit-eating grin when I said, “Oh, hey, what’s up?”
As a burgeoning comic book fan and someone with a Dark Knight hyperfixation, I ended up reading damn-near every Heath Ledger!Joker reader insert on FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own and Tumblr over the course of my high school years.
Safe to say, I was no fun for a haunted house employee. The clown moved on quickly.
Fictional, sexy evil has always been my playground. Because the truth I’ve always known, as a Black person, is that Spirit Halloween clowns and drugstore vampires pale in comparison to the real evil that is White supremacy.
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Along with corn mazes and house installations, the Halloween experience at Boone Hall also included a hayride.
Similar to Field of Screams in Maryland, which I visited in Halloween. 2023, or Arx Mortis in Alabama, which I visited during Halloween 2020, the forest portion of the fright night is half scary due to the dark and half scary due to the installations the organizers set up.
Some scenes on the Boone Hall haunted hayride were silly, but nothing about the haunted cottage scenes felt funny. It wasn’t hard to imagine my ancestors out there in the dark, doing the best they could with what they had — haunted by the ghosts of what took place down the road.
The slave cabins at Boone Hall still stand today.
American Horror Story: Megan Thee Stallion, Halle Bailey, Cassie Ventura
Out of respect for survivors, I am not going to spend time detailing the allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs, but I am going to lift Cassie Ventura, among others, in. prayer.
This got me thinking about how Tory Lanez getting stabbed is somehow Megan Thee Stallion’s fault, with Lanez fans back to flooding Meg’s social media in an attempt to overshadow her accomplishments.
And as the pile-on for one domestic violence survivor contines, Halle Bailey has also been ridiculed by the same ashy misogynists after a judge granted her sole legal and physical custody of her son due to her ex-boyfriend’s abuse.
And so, the most disrespected person in America continues to be a Black woman.
American Horror Story: Adriana Smith
In the ultimate act of anti-Black dehumanization, Adriana Smith, a pregnant Black woman who was declared legally dead in February 2025, has been kept on life support for the past three months due to Georgia’s stringent anti-abortion “heartbeat” law.
Because removing the breathing tubes and other devices would probably kill the fetus, Smith apparently has to be kept on life support for the next three months to bring the baby to term. Even though the family wants to help Smith move on, Emory University Hospital won’t let them.
Still, as one bioethicist told AP, Georgia isn’t one of the states that has legal limitations on the removal of treatment for brain-dead people. Another bioethicist and lawyer interviewed by AP agreed, while also acknowledging the legal grey area, thanks to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.
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2023 data4 from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention institute, shows that for every 100,000 live births, about 50 Black women die. Compare that metric to the approximately 14 White women, 12 Hispanic women and 11 Asian women that die on average per 100,000 live births.
Moreover, between 2022 and 2023, the rate of maternal deaths decreased for Asian women, Hispanic women and White women. Black women comprised the only ethnic group whose maternal deaths went up year-over year.
Using the World Health Organization’s definition, a CDC considers a maternal death to be “any death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and the site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.”
In a country where the Black maternal mortality rate is disproportionately hight, the state of affairs regarding Adriana Smith is, in fact, absolutely horrifying.
Even when slavery is lifted, even when Jim Crow is dissolved, even with the Civil Rights Act passed, White and non-Black people in the United States find fresh and intricate ways to contribute to Black people’s oppression.
And this sticky issue of racism grows more complicated when it comes at the hand of other Black people.
And this sticky issue of racism grows more complicated at the intersection of race and gender.
Never mind how I identify: I live in this world as a Black woman every day. It’s an inextricable part of my lived experience. And because of my identity — because of weeks like this one, where it all comes to the main stage — I carry so much anger.
I think of Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”:
My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal and co-option.
That anger brings me here to you, today — but it’s a lot to carry every day.
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My personal solution for not going insane is engaging with any kind of art where I seen — as a person, but especially a Black person.
You got the light, count it all joy
You got the right to be mad
But when you carry it alone you find it only getting in the way
They say you gotta let it go
In the short term, I have been absolutely cackling over all of the posts about the plantation burning down — and how Black folks have threaded the needle between this divine retribution and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
Long-term solutions look like an outlet5 such as SENSUAL TERRORS. I have long felt like the catharsis of fictional horror is so valuable.
Horror teaches me how to deal with the “unthinkable” in a way that is measured, contained, digestible.
Regarding racial trauma, as I said in February during Black History Month, and last monthin my review of Opus, Black people are the real-life “final girls” every damn day. We have had no option but to be resilient, in an attempt to survive.
Post-credits scene 1: Does the Black body ever get to rest?
I needed a few extra days this week to ruminate on what to explore for SENSUAL TERRORS, which is my contribution to the horror critics canon, but also an extension of my daily creative practice.
I also needed a few extra days because I’m currently in the process of moving — while working overtime in my neat little corporate life, as well as working on my first IRL event for SENSUAL TERRORS. 🧿
More details to come — if you’re in the DMV, keep your eye out for sure.
Post-credits scene 2: Black maternal health resources
Looking at that same NVSS data from 2023, the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health had a few key recommendations:
The federal and state governments should pour my cash money into teaching and developing Black and brown obstetricians.
State licensing and certification boards should have mandatory testing for cultural competency and bias.
Insurance companies should better report provider demographics.
Insurance companies should ensure the providers in their network actually align demographically with the population they serve.
More research can be done on community-based organizations (CBOs) and learning networks.
And ultimately, Congress should pass the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act.
You can read more about Black Maternal Health Week, which takes place every April, from The Center for Reproductive Rights, March of the Dimes, and the Black Mamas Matter Alliance.
When I visited the concentration camp just outside of Berlin in 2017, part of it was being restored because neo-Nazis had vandalized it. Big sigh.
Ask a Black person if they like haunted houses and the phrase “IDK what if they have a real knife?” always comes up. It’s hilarious and if you think about it, it’s totally a trauma response.
For what it’s worth, as complicated as the legacy of the place may be, there seems to be programming around preserving Gullah Geechee culture there, as a part of the plantation’s museum function.
This is the most recent data put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Who knows if we’re going to get more research on something like maternal mortality by race… Wait, I know! The answer is “no,” because we keep gutting every governmental STEM organization and just… every governmental organization in general. Under President Donald Trump, the National Institutes of Health is withholding grant money from higher education institutes with DEI programs — that should tell you everything you need to know.
I use this word intentionally: SENSUAL TERRORS isn’t just an “outlet” as in a “publication,” but an “outlet” as in a space to explore difficult emotions and realities, and release them and learn from them.
last week on the internet was a hellscape. sending u sm love
incredible writing as always. i always found it odd that boone hall was so sensationalized for its fright nights when its real history is far more scary and haunting (but largely ignored!) thanks for bringing attention to this issue and for your introspection!!