Gentle Ramirez- Africana

Gentle Ramirez is an Artist, Poet, Aquarius writer working through healing.

In the summer of 2020, Gentle interned at Kunhardt Films’s Obama: In Pursuit of A More Perfect Union, distributed on HBO. The six-hour documentary series on Barack Obama focuses on the President’s personal story, set against the backdrop of the country’s racial history. Throughout the internship, Gentle completed 15 research projects on Barack Obama’s presidency and evaluated 100 events between 2008-2016 which assessed how implemented healthcare policies affected 30,000,000 Americans. Most impactfully, Gentle crafted 100 alternative ways to document Barack Obama and his policies to weave narratives that center decolonization.

In the Fall of 2021 Gentle focused on repatriation in the context of the Old World, specifically in the lands, we’ve come to comprehend as Florence and Accra. Ultimately, using archival research as a response to an inner/outer/meta calling to a life of Blackness they’ve spent time at NYU thinking through the work of revolutionary comrades domestically and abroad. 

Past research has centered on Black Urban landscapes, sociomusology- tracing the afro sampling and soundscapes through the New World, Black Twitter culture and community projects, double dutch, and determinantal child-rearing practices. 

Gentle’s work also encounters and investigates race and reproduction, maternal-fetal conflict, the politics of Big Data, Ethical Ai, responsible machine learning, and surveillance software development. One of their many passion lies in a self-described riff of the Black Panther Party’s right to self-defense notably described as “Technological Self-Defense.”

Gentle challenges the traditional thought and framework personally and professionally by rewriting the stories of their own origin despite socioeconomic inequalities impact on their sense of self. They determine that they are who they are despite subjugation and struggle, not because of struggle. 

Gentle also disrupts carceral geographies through solidarity with comrades who are incarcerated and unpacking the social construction of news, carceral geographies and the Covid-19 outbreak, sovereignty, discipline and punishment, abolition, and identifying scenes of subjugation in language and linguistics. 

As of Spring 2022, Gentle conducts personal and spiritual research for a senior thesis in ancestor reverence. Revering and invoking your ancestors in a world that wants them forgotten is an act of resistance. Through historical analysis, cultural analysis, and literary frameworks, Gentle answers what spiritual technologies were leveraged by enslaved Africans such that the descendants of enslaved Africans are still alive today? How do they offer us transcendence and salvation? How do we create spaces where black futures are protected, what are the conditions necessary, and what must our imaginations consist of where black future is achieved in our lifetime?  Lastly, they align all of their work from afro-futuristic-inspired imaginations sources Octavia Butler, Dubois, Garvey, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. Gentle uses African American Vernacular English as a source of inspiration, creation, and connection.