Every so often, I hear an artist speak about being overlooked with such intensity that it reveals something deeper than disappointment. It reveals a kind of dependence, not on the work itself, but on being affirmed for the work, on being named, on being celebrated in real time, on being publicly recognized as worthy.

I understand that longing because I understand what it means to labor in public and private, to give years to something exacting and uncertain, to shape a life around a gift that does not always return anything immediate or tangible.

I understand wanting to be seen, wanting the work to travel, wanting the people whose opinions seem to matter to reflect something back to you that confirms your devotion has not gone unnoticed.

And while I understand that longing, I also recognize it is one of the great spiritual dangers of a creative life.

If recognition is the thing sustaining you, what happens when it doesn’t come? What happens when the room goes quiet? What happens when the peers you hoped would champion you remain silent, when the institutions you hoped would validate you turn their attention elsewhere, when the culture does not reflect back to you what you believe you have earned?

That question matters because, more and more, I find myself wondering whether some artists are truly devoted to the work, or whether they are devoted to being seen doing the work. Those are not the same devotion. One can carry you through a lifetime. The other collapses the moment attention shifts.

Support, community, and encouragement matters, because none of us are beyond the human need to be witnessed. We want to know that our labor is landing somewhere, that the years we have given to craft and discipline and study and becoming are not simply vanishing into air. There is nothing shameful about wanting resonance, and for your work to reach beyond you.

But if your deepest orientation is toward applause, then your practice will never be stable. You will be governed by weather, by trends, by access, by who called, by who posted, by who included you, by who failed to, and you will begin to confuse visibility with value, attention with alignment, and mainstream recognition with truth. That confusion can distort an entire life.

I was an independent filmmaker for fifteen years before I entered television, and fifteen years is a long time to remain committed to something that does not always reward you in obvious ways. Yes, I had support, yes, and an audience. Yes, there were people who saw me, but if I had measured the worth of my life and my work by who was publicly celebrating me, by whether the right gatekeepers were naming me, by whether the larger culture had decided to place me somewhere visible, I would have abandoned myself long before anything shifted professionally.

There is a saying that if it is not in the mainstream, it is not in your bloodstream, and I understand what that phrase is trying to name, which is the seductive power of visibility, the way artists can begin to feel that if the wider machine has not acknowledged them, then somehow they do not fully exist, as though obscurity were proof of insufficiency, as though delay were a verdict, as though the work had no pulse until the culture certified it.

But the mainstream has never been the sole keeper of what is true, and it has certainly never been the sole keeper of what is excellent. Often it is simply the keeper of what is visible in a given moment, and visibility is not the same thing as depth, not the same thing as rigor, not the same thing as calling, not the same thing as devotion.

Being from New Orleans teaches you that in your bones. This is a city where art is not some decorative attachment to life. It is life. It is breath. It is inheritance. It is ritual. It is labor. It is survival. It is joy.

It is the old man who has been playing his horn for decades with a depth the world may never properly reward. It is the musicians who have given their whole lives to sound, who have played in clubs and on corners and in parades and funeral processions and sanctified spaces, who have shaped the atmosphere of a city and never once been given the kind of mainstream spotlight people elsewhere treat as the final measure of significance. It is the culture bearer who keeps showing up, not because the cameras came, not because a magazine called, not because an industry machine anointed them, but because the art itself is the calling.

In New Orleans you see, if you are paying attention, that there are people who live and die in service of the gift, and whether recognition finds them or not does not alter the sacredness of what they have given. The work is still the work. The devotion is still the devotion. The beauty is still the beauty.

That matters to me because it reminds me that some of the purest artistic lives are being lived far from whatever the mainstream is looking at that week. They are being lived in neighborhoods, in churches, in rehearsal rooms, in social aid and pleasure clubs, in traditions passed hand to hand, body to body, breath to breath. They are being lived by people whose names may never be widely known and whose commitment is no less profound for it. If you come from a place like this, if you have watched people offer themselves to the art with that kind of steadiness, then you understand something early that the culture often learns too late, which is that applause is not the same thing as purpose, and being witnessed at scale is not the same thing as being in right relationship with your calling.

As Black artists, we should know this in an even deeper way because we come from lineages of brilliance that were not properly recorded, not properly rewarded, not properly protected. We come from people whose gifts were undeniable and whose names were still made vulnerable to erasure.

Black singers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, storytellers, image makers, performers of every kind, people who shaped the very language of American culture while being denied the dignity of full humanity, people who entered through back doors and still transformed the room, people who stood under lights while being dishonored, people whose genius was consumed while their personhood was treated as disposable.

So when I think about success, I cannot think about it only in the language of awards, lists, followers, invitations, and press. I think about those who made work inside conditions designed to diminish them. I think about those who remained devoted while being excluded, who kept refining while being denied, who kept making beauty while the world refused to name them equal to what they had made. That history should humble us. It should also deepen us,.

It can suggest that the artist believes the journey should have unfolded according to their preferred design, that the unfolding itself is somehow in error because it has not yet arrived at the image they had in mind. But an artistic life does not obey our vanity. It asks for discipline, for surrender, for patience, for a relationship to process that is deeper than ego and more enduring than disappointment. It asks us to remain present while the thing is still being built, even when we cannot yet see its final shape. It asks us to trust what is taking form in us before the world confirms it, and that kind of trust is not passive, it is rigorous, it is mature, it is spiritual work.

Not everyone is rooting for you, and you have to be okay with that. Not everyone will be happy for you or understand what your life is becoming. Some people will grow quiet when your work begins to gather attention. Some will want proximity to your light but feel no real reverence for the labor that produced it.

Some will celebrate you publicly and resent you privately. Some will only know how to relate to you when they feel superior to you, necessary to you, or reflected favorably by your success. You have to make peace with that, and more than that, you have to stop taking it personally.

What others cannot extend has absolutely nothing to do with your deserving and everything to do with the condition of their own spirit. It is difficult for a person at war with themselves to be fully at peace with another person’s becoming. It is difficult for someone estranged from their own joy to rejoice without complication in the joy of someone else.

You cannot organize your life around trying to extract wholeheartedness from people who do not possess it.

You also cannot afford to become spiritually disordered in response. Envy and resentment has consequences. So does the quiet belief that what has opened for someone else should have opened for you first. Those energies do not sharpen the artist, they corrode the vessel. They interrupt gratitude, and distort perception. They make it difficult to receive your own life because you are too busy keeping score of somebody else’s.

And desperation has its own distortion. There is a quality of desperation that repels, not because desire is wrong, but because panic alters presence. It narrows the artist. It makes every interaction feel weighted with need, every opportunity feel like rescue, every delay feel catastrophic.

This is why I believe so deeply in artists building lives that can hold them. Do what you need to do to sustain yourself. Protect your livelihood, your dignity and your nervous system. There is nothing honorable about living in such a state of depletion that the work becomes contaminated by fear. The work asks for openness and steadiness. It asks for devotion that is not frantic. It asks for gratitude, not the shallow performative kind, but the real kind, the kind that allows you to recognize what is already here, the kind that understands that the process itself is not a detour from the blessing, it is the blessing.

My why has never been reducible to ambition.

But my why is also larger than self expression. It is bound up in lineage, in inheritance, in Black womanhood, in all of the women whose inner lives were never permitted the same horizon of possibility, women whose gifts had to live in the margins of duty, women who were asked to mother, to serve, to endure, to hold families and worlds together, while the deeper call inside them went unnamed or unanswered.

I am a mother, and one of the blessings of my life is that I have been able to mother without relinquishing the deepest truth of myself. I did not have to abandon the work in order to love my child. I did not have to disappear in order to nurture.

But many women, in ways large and small, have been made to believe that their calling and their caretaking could not coexist, that their own becoming was indulgent, that their gifts belonged behind something else.

I think often about my grandmother, Lela May Malbrough - a talented tap dancer who danced with the Nicholas Brothers, and I think about what might have unfolded in her life had she been permitted a wider freedom, a fuller selfhood, a life less constrained by the imposed architecture of womanhood. I think about who she might have become if she had been allowed to live more audibly inside her gifts, more fully inside her longing, more freely inside her own sense of possibility. And so yes, I do this for her.

I do it for the women whose names history did not bother to keep. I do it for the Black women artists whose brilliance remained local, private, interrupted, unarchived. I do it because, as Black people, as African people, as descendants of a tradition in which memory, story, music, gesture, and witness are sacred, we come from the lineage of the griot, from people for whom storytelling was never merely ornamental. It was how we carried ourselves forward. It was how we remembered what the world tried to erase. It was how spirit remained intact.

I do it for the artists who stood on stages under humiliation and still gave the audience everything. I do it for the musicians who played because the music itself was holy, whether fame ever arrived or not. I do it for the people who knew that the calling was reason enough. I do it for the ones who entered through the back door and still transformed the room. I do it because to make art, to tell stories, to shape image and feeling and meaning for a living, is an honor.

Recognition, applause, and awards are beautiful. I do not reject any of those things. I am grateful for every flower that has come my way. But not long ago, someone said something about me that moved me more deeply than any award ever has.

They said that I am one of television's most trusted visual storytellers.

That word, trusted, stayed with me because to be trusted is to be known not only for talent, but for integrity.

And perhaps that is the deeper question every artist must eventually ask, not only what do you want, but what are you in service to. Are you seeking to be admired, or are you seeking to be in right relationship with the work you have been called to do. Are you building a life around attention, or around truth. Are you chasing recognition, or are you answering an assignment.

Your why must be larger than your desire to be seen. It must be older than your ambition. It must be strong enough to survive silence, envy, delay, misunderstanding, even success itself.

Do the work because it is yours to do. Do it because something in you would be diminished without it. Do it because you are in conversation with those who came before you, with those who were denied room, denied freedom, denied witness, and still found a way to make beauty.

Do it because the gift is sacred. Do it because there is honor in answering what called you here. Do it because, long before the world decided what to celebrate, there were people making holy things in small rooms, on street corners, in churches, in clubs, in kitchens, in rehearsal halls, in neighborhoods like the ones that raised us, and they understood something that many artists still have to learn, which is that the work does not become real when the world applauds it. The work is real because you have given your life to telling the truth through it.

And that, in the end, has to be enough.

About the Author

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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New Orleans asks to be loved quickly. The music makes its case before you have time to think, the old houses lean into the light like they have known how to survive a hundred lives, and on certain evenings the air itself feels staged, as if the city knows exactly how to seduce you. A brass band turns the corner, somebody is laughing loud outside a bar on Frenchmen, tourists drift toward the romance they were promised, and the neighborhood performs what it has been taught the world wants from it, beauty, freedom, pleasure, rhythm, a kind of holy improvisation. But if you live here long enough, if you walk slowly enough, if you learn to look down, another truth begins to rise.

That is one of the deepest truths of New Orleans. The city can enchant you before it tells you what it cost. It can offer atmosphere before it offers history, beauty before it offers truth. And maybe that is part of what it means to be here honestly, to live here honestly, to visit here honestly, to walk these blocks with your eyes open. Beneath so much of what is marketed as charm, romance, architecture, and culture is another story, one the ground has never stopped holding.

In my neighborhood, near the edge of all this music and movement, there is a plaque set into the sidewalk. You could miss it if you were distracted, and most people probably do. It does not announce itself with the scale of the violence it names. It just sits there in bronze, low to the ground, holding the memory of a slave trading compound operated by Franklin and Armfield, one of the largest slave trading firms in American history. At that site, in this neighborhood, in the 1830s, enslaved Africans were held, inspected, sold, and folded into the machinery of a market that turned Black life into profit with such efficiency that the men who ran it became unimaginably wealthy. What stands here now is an empty lot, a chain-link fence, passing cars, ordinary light. What stood here then was another architecture entirely, one built not only from wood and iron but from appetite, calculation, and the belief that Black people could be handled like inventory.

That is the real terror of it, not only that it happened, but that it happened here, inside the living body of the city, inside the geography people now move through casually, drink through casually, inherit casually. Near Royal and Esplanade, near the Quarter, near the routes of celebration, there once stood one of the places where this nation practiced one of its most enduring skills, making commerce out of cruelty, and calling it business.

Franklin and Armfield were not merely traders in the informal sense, not men operating in the shadows of the economy. They were the economy. They helped industrialize the domestic slave trade, moving enslaved people from the Upper South into the Deep South with the precision of businessmen who understood exactly what the market demanded. Their wealth was not incidental to the violence. It was produced by it. Every sale, every family severed, every woman trafficked, every captive body held in a pen until purchase, all of it fed a system that made men like Isaac Franklin and John Armfield powerful, respectable, and rich beyond moral comprehension. New Orleans was one of the central theaters of that exchange, a city where human beings were caged, displayed, priced, and sold into the expanding appetite of plantation capitalism.

Even now, the language strains against the truth. Slave pen. Compound. Office. Sales. The nouns can sound almost administrative until you stop and ask what they are hiding. A pen is where people were confined. A compound is where they were processed. An office is where someone recorded the profit. Sales means someone’s child was taken, someone’s husband vanished, someone’s mother was pushed farther south, someone’s body became an entry in a ledger, someone’s terror became another man’s gain. The restraint of historical language can sometimes feel like its own kind of silence. What happened in these places was not abstract and it was not clean. The trade was full of disease, sexual violence, forced transport, degradation, and death. Bodies broke under it. Families disappeared into it. Creeks and gullies received what the market could no longer use.

What does it mean to know this and still walk home past restaurants, corner stores, porch lights, and tourists with daiquiris in hand. What does it mean that one of the most storied neighborhoods in America is also one of the landscapes of the slave trade, that so much of what gets sold as atmosphere was built in a city where Black life was bought and sold with ruthless regularity. New Orleans has always known how to dress itself in beauty. That is part of its genius, and part of its danger.

I live close enough to this marker to understand that history here is not sealed off behind museum glass. It sits underfoot. It interrupts the lie that the past is past. The French Quarter, the Marigny, Frenchmen Street, these are not separate from the story of slavery. They are inside it. The music, the architecture, the cuisine, the language, the very texture of New Orleans life bear the imprint of Black people, yes, but also the imprint of the system that brutalized Black people while extracting our labor, our culture, our bodies, and then calling the city’s brilliance its own inheritance.

And that is part of what makes New Orleans so difficult and so singular. There is something almost too perfect, too New Orleans about the contradiction, that a place so saturated with Black creation could also be so saturated with anti-Black violence, that a city with one of the largest free Black communities in the country could also be one of the nation’s great engines of slave commerce. New Orleans has always held beauty and brutality in the same hand. That is part of what makes it singular, and part of what makes it impossible to romanticize honestly once you know. The French Quarter, the Marigny, the streets around Esplanade and Chartres and Royal, these are not just charming historic districts. They are part of the geography where Black people were caged, trafficked, separated, displayed, and sold.

Maybe that is part of what it means to live here honestly, to refuse the version of New Orleans that asks only to be adored and to insist on the version that must also be witnessed. To understand that beneath the music there is memory, beneath the romance there is terror, beneath the sidewalk there are the remains of a marketplace that treated Black life as raw material for wealth. The plaque does not redeem that history. It cannot. It does not even fully contain it. But it does mark the ground, and sometimes that is where truth begins, not in the stories a city tells about itself, but in the places where the earth keeps refusing to forget.

There are places in New Orleans where the dead are remembered with brass bands and flowers and ritual. And then there are places where the dead remain under sidewalks, under streets, under renovated beauty, under the ongoing appetite of a city that still profits from its own mythology. The other day my daughter and I were walking and saying what the moment demanded, which was simply this, we are walking on sacred ground. I do not mean sacred in some polished or marketable sense. I mean sacred because of what was endured here, what was buried here, what was desecrated here, what remains spiritually unaccounted for here. Sacred because there are lives beneath our feet that were never properly mourned.

That is what I feel living here now. I love this neighborhood. I love this house. I love the beauty of this side of Esplanade, the way the evening settles here, the feeling of being near the music and still inside a residential quiet. But I also find myself asking what happened right here, on this block, in the ground beneath the house, beneath the sidewalks, beneath the life we are making now. My daughter and I have walked these streets before reading the plaques, talking about the slave pens, talking about the fact that so much of this neighborhood was once organized around the captivity and sale of Black people, and saying almost in passing, what would it be like to live over here. Now we do.

My daughter and I have done this for years, walked through parts of New Orleans and imagined ourselves there. We did it near Dumaine and Chartres before we ever lived there, talking about the cathedral view, the beauty of that pocket of the Quarter, what it might feel like to wake up inside that history. And then, years later, we were there. We did it again over here, reading the plaques, talking about this neighborhood with that mix of awe and ache New Orleans so often demands, and saying again, what would it be like to live over here. Now here we are, on the Frenchmen side of Esplanade for the first time, in a beautiful home, in a part of the city we genuinely love, and the question has changed. It is no longer only what would it be like to live here. It is what does it mean to live here, knowing what here is.

Maybe this is part of what it means to return home as an artist. Not just to come back to what you missed, but to come back to what has been waiting for you to see it clearly. I left New Orleans and lived in Washington, DC, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. I came back in 2020, during the pandemic, thinking in part about home, about grounding, about where I wanted to build a life and keep making work. And New Orleans, for all its beauty and complexity, remains one of the most creatively inspiring places I know. But home can trick you. What is most familiar can become background. What formed you can become so embedded in your body that you forget to name it. Then one day you look down at a plaque in the sidewalk, or stand on a corner you have passed before, or read the history of a block where people now sip cocktails and listen to music, and you realize that inspiration here is inseparable from reckoning.

New Orleans is home in the deepest sense. Brooklyn is the only other place that has ever felt close, a second home, but New Orleans is the place I return to, the place I chose again, the place I leave for work and come back to, the place that continues to make demands on my spirit and my art. There is something different about creating in the city that formed your first eye. Especially when that city is this layered, this wounded, this alive.

As a writer, as a director, as someone always trying to understand what an image carries and what a place remembers, I do not think that is accidental. I think artists are often called back into landscapes that still have something to say through them. Not because we are special, but because the work requires listening. Sometimes the assignment is not to invent, but to witness more deeply. To document what remains. To notice what has been paved over. To ask what the city is still trying to tell us through its beauty, through its silences, through the contradictions it places in our path again and again.

Maybe that is part of my work here, not only to love New Orleans, and not only to critique it, but to keep listening to it. To live inside its beauty without surrendering to its amnesia. To let the city remain complicated, holy, wounded, and unfinished. To understand that the same streets that inspire image, rhythm, character, dialogue, and feeling are also streets thick with memory, some of it celebrated, some of it buried, some of it still asking to be named. I think about what it means to write from here, to direct from here, to raise children and make meaning from here, to walk these blocks and know that the ground is not mute. Perhaps that is what the ancestors are asking of us, not performance, not sentiment, but attention. A deeper attention. The kind that changes how you live, how you make art, how you tell the truth.

Because this is what it means to walk here: not just to admire the city, but to witness it, not just to inherit its beauty, but to reckon with what lies beneath it, not just to call this place inspiring, but to understand what it is asking of you in return.

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Watching Aldis Hodge and Isaiah Mustafa move through scenes with that kind of grounded brotherhood, and seeing that same level of commitment from Samantha Walkes, Alona Tal, and Johnny Ray Gill, is a reminder that the strength of the work is always tied to the people carrying it. Everyone shows up prepared, present, and deeply invested in telling the story well.

That kind of environment does not happen by accident. It is shaped by leadership. Creator / Showrunner, Ben Watkins has built something that honors both the craft and the people inside of it, and you feel that in every department, in every interaction, in the way the work is approached day in and day out.

What has made this experience especially meaningful is that the strength of the material has been matched by the spirit of the people making it. Some of the best scripts I’ve had the opportunity to direct have been on this show, and doing that work alongside a cast and crew so talented, so energetically aligned, and so deeply committed to the process has been a genuine gift.

There is a kind of ease that comes when people are in right relationship with the work and with one another. You can feel when a set is in rhythm, when the energy is right, when people are coming to the work with clarity and intention. Cross has been that kind of experience for me.

I’m grateful to be part of a show, a set, and a storytelling culture like this.

Season 3. Let’s go.

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I am releasing this essay on a Sunday for a reason.

In most American cities, Sunday is quiet, reserved, obedient to a certain idea of Sabbath. But in New Orleans, Sunday has always been something else.

From nineteenth-century gatherings in Congo Square to today’s second line parades and Mardi Gras Indian Super Sundays, this city’s Sabbath has never been silent.

Here, Sunday is rhythmic, communal. African in both structure and intention.

So it feels appropriate to say this on a Sunday.

Everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people.

The phrase has circulated through the city for some time now, brought to light by the artist Ryan “Phlegm” Gilbert.

It appears on walls, on shirts, in conversation. People call it a slogan or a provocation. But it isn’t. It’s a literal inventory.

Nearly every bit of “magic” found in this crescent of land - the way the air feels like a song, the way the food tastes like home even to strangers. That is Black genius. Plain and simple.

The hands that turned water into miracles belonged to us.

I am a Daughter of New Orleans

Raised Uptown. Carrollton. 17th Ward. Pigeon Town. Jeanette Street between Joliet and Leonidas, to be precise.

I grew up in the marrow of the city, in places tourists rarely saw back then.

Our days moved to a steady neighborhood rhythm. Saturdays meant Harrell Park and walks to McKenzie’s and K&B with my granny. Sundays were church and Piccadilly’s, a heartbeat that held our world together.

Mardi Gras wasn’t a spectacle to us; it was an inheritance.

We woke up early for Zulu, loading folding chairs and coolers packed the night before. We’d meet cousins on the parade route, I’d perch on my uncle’s shoulders as the floats drifted by, hollering for coconuts and beads.

Mardi Gras at school was its own ritual, woven into everyday life.

From kindergarten through sixth grade at The Learning Academy Elementary on Louisiana Avenue Parkway, I’d stand in line with classmates, eager for a slice of King Cake.

If you found the plastic baby in your piece, you brought the next cake. That was the way, community and accountability wrapped in sugar and icing.

Looking back, I see those were my first lessons. They taught me what it means to know your people and to belong to a place without ever having to prove yourself.

We Built This City

By the mid 1800s, New Orleans was the largest center of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Between the early nineteenth century and the Civil War, an estimated 135,000 enslaved people were bought and sold here. They called it the “slave market of the South.” That was not a metaphor. It was inventory.

There were more than fifty documented selling sites across the city: hotels, pens, and auction houses. Trading was concentrated along corridors people still walk today, Esplanade Avenue, St. Louis Street, and the central business district.

The quaint courtyards where people sip cocktails now were open-air pens where Black families were stripped of their children and sold like cattle.

The city’s wealth was built on our backs. The shipping. The sugar. The cotton. The expansion of plantations across the lower Mississippi Valley. The economy did not merely benefit from slavery. It was intertwined with trafficking itself. Enslaved Africans were collateral. Black bodies were currency.

We were the labor that made the entire machine move.

We built the levees that keep the water at bay. We paved the streets. We loaded the cotton and the sugar that made the merchant class “New Orleans royalty.” We were the hands beneath the beauty, the force beneath the profit, the bodies beneath the myth.

And we were still making a way.

On Sunday afternoons, the law allowed enslaved people to gather for a few hours at a patch of ground called Congo Square. Those drums weren’t noise. They were heartbeats pretending to be pastimes. A people preserving itself in plain sight.

That is why Sundays mean what they mean here.

From Congo Square to the city streets, Sunday was never just a day of rest. It was a return, a restoration of rhythm and belonging. It was the act of holding the community together when everything else tried to tear it apart.

Even after freedom arrived on paper, we still had to build the rest with our own hands.

We created Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs because we needed a way to bury our dead with dignity and care for our sick when hospitals turned us away.

That’s where the Second Line was born. It was never meant to entertain tourists; it began as a funeral procession, a public act of dignity. The Second Line was our way of saying: you may have worked this person to the bone in life, but we will dance them into the next world on our own terms. It turns grief into motion, sorrow into rhythm, and transforms call-and-response from mere sound into a way of living.

Mardi Gras and the Myth of Neutral Celebration

Mardi Gras was never a neutral celebration.

The Mistick Krewe of Comus began parading in 1857; explicitly white, explicitly elite, deeply rooted in Confederate ideology. Carnival, as formally organized, was a pageant of white supremacy.

Black people were excluded from these krewes from the start.

In 1992, the city finally required krewes to certify that they did not discriminate by race in order to use public streets.

Several of the oldest white krewes chose to stop parading rather than comply.

That moment exposed a hard truth: the gumbo myth cracked. For many, celebration was only possible if the old hierarchy endured.

Black New Orleanians never waited for inclusion. We built our own Carnival. A parallel tradition with its own rules, its own style, its own moral center.

Even as we created that world, we remained present in the so-called mainstream parades; on the sidewalks, in the crowds, watching riders look past us, watching throws reach around us. We knew, as we always have, that our labor and joy were welcome, but our full belonging was negotiable.

In 2026, the mask slipped again.

Bananas were tossed from a float. In another parade, a white rider dangled a Black Barbie doll from beads tied in a noose. A little Black girl caught one. Riders were removed for hurling beads at Black spectators with violent force.

None of this is surprising if you know the origin.

Access without Inheritance

Black people are communal, generous, and inclusive. We make room. We let people in. We feed strangers. We turn sidewalks into family. That openness is part of our genius. It is cultural. It is ancestral.

Yet that very openness is often used as a shield to avoid hard truths.

Now, whiteness appears in Zulu, in blackface, in Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, in Baby Dolls.

Some call it progress. Some call it integration.

I call it access without inheritance.

These institutions were born from necessity, sustained by historical memory and ancestral duty.

They were never meant as entertainment. They were created as mutual aid, as refuge, as ceremony, as a way to exist publicly with dignity in a city determined to deny us that dignity.

When people without that ancestral and historical inheritance enter casually, something shifts.

Rhythms are reduced to mimicry. Regalia becomes costume. Meaning turns into mere performance.

This is not about who gets to dance in the street. The real question is whether Black New Orleans is allowed to remain sacred to itself.

The Industry of Extraction

There is a specific kind of violence in loving a sound but hating the hands that make it.

We see it in the way the city markets the image of a brass band to tourists, even as it passes ordinances limiting where those same musicians can stand and play. We see it in the city’s math.

New Orleans is a multi-billion-dollar engine fueled by the labor and imagination of Black people. Our music, our food, our cadence, and our ceremonies are the primary attractions for a global audience. Yet the wealth generated from that cultural capital rarely circulates back into the wards that produced it.

The extraction is systemic.

Families of musicians and cultural bearers who spent lifetimes sustaining the spirit of this city often have to raise money to cover funeral expenses when those elders pass. After decades of service to the culture, dignity at death should not depend on community fundraising.

The money exists. It exists in hotels. In corporate developments. In luxury renovations. In tourism campaigns built on Black imagery. But that money is not structured to flow back into the hands of those who made the city magnetic.

This is not accidental. It is an arrangement.

The Lens and the Birthright

As a director, my work is an act of reclamation.

When I stand behind the camera, I am not searching for beauty that needs validation. I am documenting a beauty that already belongs to us.

We do not have to earn the right to define ourselves. We do not need permission to own our stories. Those rights are ours by birth.

The only reason this conversation exists is because someone, somewhere, profits from our erasure.

So we must ask directly: Who gains when Black New Orleanians are displaced? Who benefits when our culture is marketed as a product, but our communities are treated as barriers to development?

My responsibility is not to romanticize the culture or make it palatable for others. My responsibility is to honor the source, to show the labor, the lineage, the living people. To create work that lifts up the music and the musician, the story and the storyteller.

If the Music Stopped

Consider, for a moment, the what if.

Imagine if the music stopped. Imagine if the Black Masking Indians decided the cost was too high and stopped showing the world what true majesty looks like. Imagine if the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs stopped parading. If the Second Liners stopped dancing. If the brass bands put down their horns.

What would be left of New Orleans?

Without Black culture, this city would be a hollowed-out museum of architecture and humidity. There would be no rhythm in the air. No pulse in the streets. No procession to gather behind.

There would be no one to lead those sanitized wedding processions down the street.

And that is the quiet truth underneath all of this.

The Record

There is a persistent pattern in American history. Black labor constructs. Black creativity enlivens. Black suffering is absorbed, and the nation advances as if none of it demanded a body. New Orleans is no exception.

The cost has always been human. Generations lost to enslavement. Generations constrained by segregation. Generations displaced by policy and profit. Yet the culture endures, not because oppression is poetic, but because someone always refuses to let the drum fall silent.

That refusal is not metaphorical. It is work. It is the elder passing down cadence to a child too young to know what the rhythm is safeguarding. It is the Big Chief sewing all year, because the suit is not a costume; it is governance. It is the club gathering what it can—not for tradition’s sake, but out of necessity. In a city that has always found ways to monetize us, the very systems that profit from our culture still fail to sustain the people who create it.

Beneath the city’s shine and the blare of the horn, past the sensation of a place “coming alive,” lies a reality rarely seen. What lies beneath is discipline: the rules, the reverence, the ancestral inheritance carried in muscle memory. It is the ongoing negotiation required to keep culture whole in a place where the appetite to consume it knows no bounds.

When the city sells the image but neglects its people, it is not accidental—it is intentional. This is an extraction-based business model, a familiar exploitation merely cloaked in the language of tradition.

When we say everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people, we are not romanticizing resilience, we are naming a debt. The problem is not celebration; it is amnesia. And amnesia, left unchecked, becomes policy.

Loving New Orleans is not enough.

Sustaining Black New Orleans is the work.

Because without Black New Orleans, there is no New Orleans.

About the Author

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

About the Photographer

Select images in this essay are captured by Kai Nadirah, a New Orleans-born photographer / artist whose lens functions as a sacred archive. Her work is a profound testimony of Black life, documenting the light, the lineage, and the textures of the city with a gaze that is both intimate and ancestral. Kai does not just take photographs; she honors the spirit of those who sustain the culture. Discover more of her vision at kainadirahphotography.com.

The Coming Reckoning

Next week, I will be sharing a second essay on New Orleans titled “Under the Concrete Canopy: The Ghost of Claiborne Avenue.” We will look at the heavy cost of the interstate that tore through the heart of the Seventh Ward, systematically dismantling what was once the most prosperous Black business corridor in the South. We will honor the ghosts of those hundreds of lost businesses and the families who were displaced, even as we explore how we turned that shade into a cathedral for our Second Lines and our sovereignty.

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Cross is streaming on Prime. The first three episodes are up now, including Episode 3, my first episode this season.

Episode 4 dropped today. It stands alone this week, and I’m incredibly proud of it.

First, gratitude.

To our cast. To our crew. To the department heads who show up prepared and sharp. To the DP, the operators, the grips, the costume team, the ADs holding the day together. To the writers who build the spine. To the editors shaping the final rhythm.

Television is collective precision. And this episode is the result of that discipline.

This is also my fourth episode of television working with Aldis Hodge.

And that matters.

Directing the lead of a series is not just about blocking scenes or calibrating tone. It’s about trust and alignment. It’s about knowing how far you can push and when and how to protect.

Aldis carries an enormous responsibility on Cross. He is the face of the show. The emotional center. An executive producer. The gravitational pull of the ensemble.

That kind of position can harden people.

He is the opposite.

He is generous. He is prepared. He is rigorous. He is playful. He listens. He cares. He asks questions. He is vulnerable when the work demands it. He does not hide behind authority.

That makes directing him a joy.

There is something rare about building a working rhythm over multiple episodes. By the time you reach a fourth collaboration, you are no longer explaining tone. You are refining it. You are not searching for emotional access. You are shaping nuance.

At Essence Festival, Aldis spoke about what it feels like to work with a Black woman director. The difference in energy, in depth, in understanding.

In his words: “So having a black female director is truly integral to the narrative when it comes to being well rounded because it gives us a different perspective on what love is, what hope is, what are we fighting for, and how we fight, how we love, how we do things, and how we understand each other.”

Below, he talks about that experience and about our collaboration specifically.

When directing a Black lead, interior understanding is not optional. It is foundational.

There are notes you do not have to over explain because the context is already in the room. There are behaviors you can name with precision without translating them. There is an emotional language that moves faster because it is carried in the body, not just the words.

You recognize when confidence is armor. You recognize when silence is strategy. You recognize when humor is a shield and when anger is grief with nowhere to land. You understand what it looks like to keep composure because you were never afforded the luxury of collapse. You can speak directly to what is moving underneath the line, underneath the posture, underneath the pause.

That kind of understanding does not replace craft. It sharpens it. It clears the path so the actor can arrive at the truth with fewer detours, less explanation, and more trust.

And when the work asks a Black character to hold power, tenderness, consequence, and survival in the same frame, that foundation matters.

Directing Cross is not about making a man look powerful. It is about protecting his interior life while he carries that power.

That is a delicate line.

Working with Aldis makes that possible because he understands that power does not need to shout.

That’s where the work lives.

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Four Chairs

There’s a photograph I keep returning to.

Four producer / director chairs on the set of Harlem. Four Black women holding authorship in a space that has not always imagined us there.

Tracy Oliver, creator and executive producer, the architect of the world.

Britt Matt, executive producer, helping protect the tone and the engine of the series.

Tasha Smith, director, actor-forward and instinctive, with a style that is unmistakably her own.

And me, Stacey Muhammad, director across all three seasons who eventually stepped into the role of producing director and co-executive producer, helping hold the show’s continuity and vision while continuing to direct.

We talk a lot about representation, on screen and behind it. This image is about concentrated authorship. Black women positioned to shape the language, protect the story, and make the calls.

That image isn’t symbolic to me. It is structural.

My first collaboration with Tracy was on First Wives Club, where I directed two episodes. That working relationship deepened into Harlem, a series that quickly became my creative home.

That progression was not accidental. It was the result of years of craft, discipline, and being prepared long before the moment arrives.

Harlem itself was joy. Bold, funny, intimate, grown. A show centered on Black women’s friendship, ambition, desire, contradiction. We shot in New York City, in Harlem and Brooklyn and elsewhere, and the city felt alive in the frame. Meagan Good was an incredible anchor for the ensemble, grounded and luminous at once. Across all three seasons, my cinematographer Matt Edwards and I built a visual language that felt bright, intimate, and emotionally present.

Tasha Smith came on board, and it felt like family walking into an already strong space. Tasha is one of my closest friends, and she is also a deeply intuitive episodic director with a powerful actor-forward style. Working alongside her was alignment. Two directors who respect one another’s craft, watching each other work, holding the same world from different angles. There is something grounding about that kind of shared authorship between Black women who have earned their chairs independently and bring their own language to the frame.

And then there is what the image means beyond the logistics.

As Black women in this industry, we understand the distance between aspiration and infrastructure.

We understand how long it can take to move from being invited into rooms to shaping them. To look up and see four Black women occupying those chairs at once on a show about Black women, telling stories about Black interior lives, is not just gratifying. It is clarifying.

The industry still has a long distance to travel. That is real. But this image reflects something tangible: Black women not only present in the frame, but structuring it. Not only visible, but responsible.

Four chairs.

Not symbolic.

Structural.

And I am proud of the years of discipline, study, and calling that positioned me to sit in mine.

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There are artists whose work arrives loudly, demanding recognition through volume, spectacle, or ubiquity. And then there are artists whose work circulates differently. It moves through rooms quietly. It stays. It reveals itself over time.

James Fauntleroy belongs to the second category.

I came to his music through my daughter, Kai. Not incidentally. Intentionally.

She has an ear that listens past trend and surface. She hears structure. She hears harmony. She hears intention. She can sit at a piano and find her way into a song without asking permission from sheet music or expectation. She listens to old records and new ones with the same seriousness. Music has been one of the deepest languages we share, one of the ways we recognize each other across generations.

One day she said, You need to listen to this. And she meant it.

She introduced me to James Fauntleroy the same way she introduced me to Alex Isley, The Internet, Mac Ayres. With care. With specificity. With the confidence of someone who knows when something is built to last.

She later took classes at 1500 Academy, the school James built with his collaborators to train the next generation of young Black artists. That mattered to me. It placed his work not only in sound, but in stewardship.

I pay attention to this kind of work because long before images, music taught me how stories move.

James Fauntleroy writes songs the way some people write letters they never intend to send.

They are intimate without being small. Precise without being cold. His music understands restraint. It understands longing. It understands how to let a feeling arrive without forcing it into performance.

Like Summer (My favorite) is one of those songs that seems to know exactly what it is doing. It does not announce itself. It does not chase climax. It unfolds. It breathes. It trusts the listener.

Like Summer - James Fauntleroy

That trust is rare.

What James understands, instinctively, is something I spend my life studying across film and television. Meaning does not need to be overstated to be felt. In fact, the most powerful work often withholds. It allows space. It assumes the audience is capable of listening.

His songwriting carries narrative without exposition. You know who the speaker is without being told. You know what is at stake without it being named. You feel the weight of memory without flashback. This is craft. And it is calling.

But because his work knows itself. It does not reach for validation. It does not over explain its purpose. It is grounded in feeling, in structure, in discipline.

There is a reason his music lives so comfortably inside film and television. There is a reason it lingers. Music, like cinema, teaches us how to feel before we know what we are feeling. It shapes interior life. It prepares the body for meaning.

Score is not background. It is instruction.

Sound tells us when to trust a moment. When to brace. When to soften. James’s work understands this without spectacle.

His songs move like scenes that do not need coverage. They are already framed.

This is why he belongs in this space. Not as content. Not as trend. But as lineage.

The Director’s Notebook exists to study work like this. Work where craft and calling are inseparable. Where intention is not announced but embedded. Where discipline is felt, not explained.

That through line runs from music to film to television. From song to image to silence.

James Fauntleroy’s work reminds us that excellence does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it arrives steady. Sometimes it arrives faithful to itself. Sometimes it arrives exactly when you are ready to hear it.

He belongs to a lineage of Black artists who understand craft not as a ladder, but as a calling.

Artists who are less interested in being seen than in being true. Who build bodies of work that don’t chase the moment, but outlast it.

And maybe that’s why his music felt so right to receive through my daughter, through someone younger, sharper, already attuned to what matters beyond the algorithm.

It reminded me that craft is a kind of devotion, that what lasts rarely announces itself, and that the work begins in listening and making space.

The Director’s Notebook is where I write about craft, calling, and the discipline of making meaning across film, television, music, and image. You’re welcome to stay and subscribe.

There is a specific kind of silence that precedes a storm, a heavy and humid expectation that sits in the back of the throat. In the world of cinema, we often rush to fill that silence. We lean on the crutch of music or the safety of a wide shot to tell the audience where they are.

But in the opening of Malcolm X, Spike Lee, one of the greatest directors to ever command the medium, does something different. He doesn’t offer us a map; he offers us a mirror. And then, with the steady hand of a cinematic prophet who has seen the ghost and refused to blink, he sets that mirror on fire.

The Liturgy of the Image

The first 2 minutes and 46 seconds of Malcolm X is not a narrative introduction. It is a trial.

Spike isn’t just introducing a character; he is establishing a moral and philosophical charge. Before we see a face, we hear a voice, a disembodied, ancient authority that sounds like it was pulled from the very soil of our collective memory. Denzel’s voice, carrying the weight of Malcolm’s spirit, enters the room not as dialogue, but as liturgy.

“I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on earth.”

By keeping the physical form off-screen for nearly three minutes, Spike allows the spirit of the word to fill the theater first. He forces us to listen before we are allowed to look.

In this choice, he is establishing the calling before the craft.

He understands that the word is the seed and the image is the harvest. He is putting the institution on trial before the story begins.

The visual of the American flag burning is a masterclass in semiotics. The flag is shot in a tight and high-contrast close-up. We see the institution itself dissolving. As the fire licks the stars and stripes, it does not just destroy. It transforms. The flag is re-shaped into the letter X, a reclamation of identity through the fire of American history. It is a visual translation of a people who have been stripped of a name and forced to forge a new one in the heat of resistance.

By layering the 1991 Rodney King footage over this burning icon, Spike performs a terrifying act of cinematic collapse. He is telling us that the then and the now are the same. As a filmmaker, this is a masterclass in how to use the archive as a weapon. He is not using the footage for historical context. He is using it as the living consequence of the flag. He collapses time until it becomes a jagged and eternal present. It is a reminder that the blood on the pavement is the direct result of the ideology symbolized in the fabric.

We must give Spike Lee his flowers for the sheer and uncompromising audacity of this specific moment.

Consider the climate of 1992. Consider the white-walled boardrooms where budgets are signed into existence. There is a politeness often expected of the Black filmmaker, a suggestion that we should soften our edges so our truths are more digestible for the many. Spike Lee was under immense pressure from both the studio and cultural gatekeepers to make a highlights reel of a leader’s life. Instead, he chose a fearless act of resistance.

He refused to be safe. This opening was a declaration that this would not be a standard biopic. It would be an unflinching examination of the American soul.

It takes a director of singular and uncompromising vision to start a major studio film by putting the state under judgment.

It is quite simply one of the greatest film openings in the history of cinema. It is the work of a master who understands that the camera is not just a tool for observation, but a tool for justice.

Spike Lee’s boldness is a reminder that we do not owe the world a soft landing. We owe the work the truth of its environment. We owe the ancestors the dignity of our rage and the precision of our sight.

He did not just move the camera. He moved the weight of history onto the screen. He dared to start by telling the world that this would not be comfortable. This would not be easy. But it would be true.

The Director’s Notebook is a space designed for the study of the craft and the calling. This is where we slow the work down to understand the responsibility of the images we bring into the world. If this meditation on the weight of the frame resonates with you, I invite you to join this community.

If you know a filmmaker, a writer, or a student of culture who should be in this room with us, please share this post.

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Stacey Muhammad is a New Orleans-born writer, director, and world-builder whose work lives at the intersection of craft and calling.

A Note Before We Begin

Before releasing the first lecture, I want to pause.

For Black people, the distance between study and lived reality is never wide. Questions of power, narrative control, and who is permitted to bear witness are not abstract exercises. They are daily facts. What shifts, at times, is how close the risk comes to the body.

I’ve been thinking about this over the last day.

Years ago, I was on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri, covering the protests surrounding the killing of Michael Brown. I was there as a filmmaker and as a witness, reporting for BET alongside my producing partner, Marc Lamont Hill. It was the first time I was positioned directly on the front lines of a national uprising, watching journalists do their work under real and present threat.

During that time, Don was also there. Marc and I walked through the press village with him, moving between cameras, producers, and reporters as the situation shifted, for the worse, hour by hour.

I remember a moment of gallows humor between us , Don wearing his bulletproof vest, while ours was somewhere in a producer’s trunk. A small joke that barely masked the reality beneath it. That the work required protection. That truth-telling comes with physical risk. That the body is always on the line.

What I witnessed firsthand was not just reporting. It was resistance. Journalists who insist on documenting reality as it is, especially in moments of state violence, function as revolutionaries and freedom fighters. They disrupt the narrative order. They refuse erasure. And for that, they are often targeted.

The recent arrest of journalists, including Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, in the course of their work is part of a long and familiar pattern. Those who tell the truth are rarely welcomed by power. They are tolerated only so long as they do not expose too much, connect too many dots, or make the invisible visible.

The Director’s Notebook exists to study how meaning is constructed, how authority is framed, and how images teach us who to trust, who to fear, and whose voices are allowed to circulate. This work has never been separate from the world. Moments like this remind us why visual literacy, narrative awareness, and ethical responsibility matter far beyond the screen.

The recent arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, along with Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with reporting on public protest only underscores how much is at stake when truth-telling is treated as a threat rather than a public service.

Free Em All!

We pause not to abandon the work, but to honor what it is in service of.

The lecture will follow shortly.

In craft and in truth,
Stacey Muhammad

In New Orleans, we have a word for something extra.

Lagniappe.

The word comes to us layered through time and tongue, Quechua at its root, carried through Spanish and French, settled into the everyday language of Louisiana. It means to add to. To receive more than what was expected, something unexpected arriving just beyond what had already been accounted for.

Lagniappe is not an abstraction. It is not symbolic. It names an excess, what shows up beyond the stated measure, beyond what history has allowed you to reasonably anticipate, beyond the limits that were put in place long before you arrived.

For Black artists, that distinction matters.

Our relationship to craft has never been transactional. We did not rely on recognition to sustain us. We relied on the work itself, lived in it, bled for it, returned to it when there were no guarantees of safety, longevity, or reward. The making. The shaping. The holding of memory inside form. This has been less a profession than a means of endurance.

The work has always been the calling.

Not because it promised return, but because it offered orientation. Because it gave shape to interior life. Because it allowed us to remain in relationship with ourselves, with our people, and with a lineage of artists who understood that truth would not always be met with protection.

Recognition, when it comes, arrives as lagniappe. Not because the system has been generous. Not because justice has been satisfied. But because something extra has appeared where absence has long been the norm. Because what was historically withheld has, in this instance, surfaced.

It does not settle the account.
It does not resolve the imbalance.

It simply marks a moment when the excess becomes visible.

Sinners arrives in such a moment.

When Sinners received more Academy Award nominations than any film in the history of the ceremony, the headlines framed it as a breakthrough. A turning point. Evidence of progress. But for those paying attention, the excellence itself was never the surprise.

Ryan Coogler has long demonstrated a rigorous commitment to craft, a clarity of vision paired with a deep respect for history, character, and collective labor. Sinners is not a departure from that lineage of work. It is an accumulation of it. A film shaped with patience, intention, and moral seriousness. A film that understands spectacle without being seduced by it, and scale without abandoning intimacy.

What Sinners accomplishes formally is matched by what it accomplishes relationally. It trusts Black interior life. It invests in place. It relies on collaboration rather than domination. It makes room not only for performance, but for atmosphere, texture, and memory. These are not accidents. They are the result of sustained devotion to the work.

From that perspective, recognition reads less like surprise and more like overdue acknowledgment. Not a sudden awakening, but a belated alignment.

And still, milestones do not erase memory.
They sit inside it.

What makes this moment particularly meaningful is not only that Sinners was recognized, but how the film was made. The care is visible on screen. The patience. The refusal to rush meaning or flatten character. This is a film that understands that craft is not a matter of accumulation, but of attention.

Sinners bears the marks of a director who works in relationship. Relationship to place. Relationship to people. Relationship to history. Though set in Mississippi, the film was shot entirely in Louisiana, bringing sustained employment to local film professionals across New Orleans and surrounding parishes. Crews, production assistants, grips, lighting technicians, background artists, and performers from the region were integral to the making of the film. New Orleans is not a backdrop. It is a collaborator.

This is what it looks like when calling shapes process. When the work is not extracted from community, but built with it. When scale does not require erasure, and recognition does not come at the cost of integrity.

This, too, is part of the story Sinners tells.

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