My family never identified as Creole. We always identified as Black. Creole was an integral aspect of our lives, but we embraced it as a way of life; we didn't identify as it. As I create this work my thoughts are circling around my Creole ties and notions of bloodlines and legacy.

In writer-director Spike Jonze’s Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays the man some of us might turn out to be in twenty or thirty years. Burdened...