Whitney houston

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.

The mob waged war on the Whitney Museum and won. The scalp this time belongs to Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies, and who, until his resignation last week, was a vice-chairman at the Museum. Kanders’s great crime was that his company manufactures tear gas, a non-lethal weapon which has been used — in my view most unfortunately — at the southern border. However you feel about the border crisis — and I’ve been quite clear on my outrage here — most reasonable people should admit that in almost all cases, the use of tear gas makes it likely that lethal crowd-control tactics will not be used. This story is not really about Warren Kanders or his company, and that’s precisely the problem.