Some stories don't just move you. They give you permission.
That's the only way I can describe what happened when I first sat with BLKNWS.
Not permission to be inspired, that's too small a word for it. Permission to radically imagine. To see myself not as someone who makes things adjacent to culture but as an artist inside of it. To ask a question I'd been circling for years without daring to ask it directly:
What would a Du Bois exhibit look like if we built it? In 2026. With everything we know. With everything we are.
The film is on Amazon Prime now. Go watch it.
Seriously! Close this tab, open Prime, and let it work on you. I'll wait…
BLKNWS is the kind of cultural artifact that earns its place in the conversation. It's sharp and beautiful and it understands something important: that Black people making media, telling stories, building platforms is not a niche act, it is a civilizational one.
There's a moment that I keep returning to. A little less than halfway into the film, the main character Sarah kicks her bags through the doorway of her suite. Across the bottom of the screen briefly, we the audience are shown the following words “Shirley Du Bois Suite”. It didn’t mean much to me at that moment but it’s a moment I’ll never forget looking back.
That image lodged itself in me and became something.
It became Shirley.
When I started designing the VR experience, a reconstruction of Du Bois's 1900 Paris Exposition brought to life with AI scholars and immersive data, I was hyper-focused on Du Bois alone. A few courageous DM’s and email exchanges later, I was meeting with several members of the WEB Du Bois Memorial Foundation to discuss the possibility of building a virtual memorial with their blessing. Though they were highly complimentary, there was one piece of feedback that stuck with me. The archive is incomplete without her.
Shirley Graham Du Bois: writer, activist, composer, the woman who documented his life and was systematically erased from it. So I built her an alcove. A reading room inside the exhibition hall. A desk. A typewriter. A place where her work breathes.
This project has layers I'm still uncovering.
The data notebooks are an attempt to exact Du Bois's measurements, but in the 125 years from the Paris Exposition through 2025. The living archive has 17 of his public domain texts, made searchable and conversational. The lessons are interactive modules for K-12 students who deserve to meet him before college, if they meet him at all.
Where it goes next, I’ll be curious to see.
What I'm building is an answer to what BLKNWS asked.
Not an explicit answer. A parallel act. The film says: we can own our narrative infrastructure. I'm trying to say: we can own our cultural infrastructure. The archive. The scholarship. The experience. The economics.
In 2026, a Du Bois exhibit doesn't have to be dusty. It doesn't have to ask permission from institutions that spent a century ignoring him. It can live in a headset. It can tour HBCUs. It can train African VR creators in Accra, where he is buried.
BLKNWS gave me the nerve to say that out loud.
Go watch the film. Share it with someone who needs permission to imagine. And then come back here, there's a lot more to build.
— Mike Spade