Hanif Abdurraqib is a music critic, essayist, and poet who uses popular music to examine culture in the U.S. His historical and musical critique and analysis serves to help the reader to understand how performance and music tell the story of race, class, politics and the state of current culture. 

His most recent book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance looks at Black performance starting with the story of William Henry Lane, a nineteenth-century minstrel dancer who performed for White audiences in blackface. He goes all the way up to Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl appearance and includes the groundbreaking television show Soul Train to analyze Blackness and Black identity. 

Abdurraqib uses personal experiences and performances he’s attended to consider ideas surrounding the entertainment industry’s long history of exploiting and abusing Black artists.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is an attorney and a poet. His work seeks to advocate for the rights of people who are or have ever been incarcerated. When Betts was 16, he was tried as an adult for carjacking. This experience has shaped his understanding of how the lives and experiences of people affected by incarceration are too often ignored and overlooked.  

Now, he’s an attorney and In his legal practice, Betts fights for clemency and parole for individuals facing lengthy sentences. He also works to eliminate the practice of sending juveniles to adult prisons. He recently launched the nonprofit Freedom Reads to give incarcerated people access to the power of literature.

Jordan Casteel is a painter whose visually captivating pieces of art depict in almost life-sized reality the intimacy between artist and subject that invite the viewer to commune with her work.  The subjects and their family members participate in museum exhibitions that bear their names as titles so that they are recognized as collaborators of each painting. 

Casteel’s Visible Man series aimed to redirect and refocus the usual depiction of Black men in media, choosing instead to showcase their individual humanity through the canvas. Casteel shares her commitment to broadening whose images are on display in most museum and gallery spaces. 

Dr. Ibrahim Cissé is a biological physicist whose work has been instrumental in deepening the understanding of how genes can produce proteins in cells. His research may be critical to better understand neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s.

He’s currently the director of the Department of Biological Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany and holds an undergraduate degree from North Carolina Central University.

Dr. Nicole Fleetwood is an art historian, curator and exhibitor whose elevation of the art of incarcerated people speaks to how we can better understand and honor the humanity of the artists.  

Her book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and museum exhibition investigates the significance of incarcerated people’s art and its meaning to larger society, culture and policy. Fleetwood’s work reckons with the human costs the U.S. criminal justice system extracts on people’s lives.

Dr. Ibrahm X. Kendi, who wrote the best-selling book, “How to Be an Antiracist” has been in the public eye challenging people to correct the structures that allow and perpetuate racism in this country. 

He founded and directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and is renowned for challenging anti-Black racism and bringing to light possibilities for accountability and repair. As part of the work, Kendi has joined with the Boston Globe to launch The Emancipator, a multimedia platform that aims to reframe the national conversation on race through journalism and commentary.

He holds an undergraduate degree from Florida A&M University.

Daniel Lind-Ramos is a sculptor and painter whose imagining of the lives and traditions of Afro-Puerto Rican life illustrates the connections between Afro-Caribbean and diasporic peoples. Drawing upon Yoruba and Christian belief systems, the resistance to racism, colonialism and even natural disasters, Lind-Ramos transforms common objects into sculptures and artworks that celebrates the place Black Puerto Ricans hold in the island’s cultural and communal identity.

Dr. Safiya Noble is a scholar of race, gender and digital media. Her work explores the way that artificial intelligence and algorithms we use each day have negative impacts on the women and girls of color. Her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism demands the need for greater accountability and regulation of tech companies. Noble also works with engineers, executives, artists, and policymakers through her organization, The Equity Engine, to examine how technology is built and used.

Dr. Jacqueline Stewart is a film scholar and curator who has highlighted the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and film watchers have made to the development of cinema as an art form. She hosts Silent Sunday Nights on the Turner Classic Movies network, where she presents the cultural significance and historical context of silent films. Last year she was appointed chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an historian and writer whose scholarship addresses issues of race and economic precarity, police violence, and the role of social movements in transforming society. The Princeton University professor is an author and leading authority on the way in which government rules and predatory economic practices surrounding home ownership have not narrowed the Black/White wealth gap in the United States.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is a choreographer and dance entrepreneur who founded the performance ensemble Urban Bush Women (UBW), in 1984. Her work  explores the culture of African Americans and the African diaspora. She has created a sustainable movement and organization that centers the perspectives of Black women. An innovator who uses African and African-American cultural storytelling traditions, her works often include spoken or sung text to help address contemporary issues of place, identity and equity.

Desmond Meade 

MacArthur Genius Award honoree Desmond Meade is a civil rights activist working to make it so that people convicted of felonies in the state of Florida are able to vote.  His activism also seeks to eliminate the restrictions against people who have served time in housing, education, and financial assistance as well.  He’s the executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and himself was once incarcerated. Meade spoke with BET.com about the honor.  

RELATED: Desmond Meade’s Organization Is Restoring Voting Rights To The Formerly Incarcerated In Florida

Meade remains optimistic that eventually people who have been imprisoned for felony charges will be able to vote, saying, “I don't know if it’ll happen in my lifetime, but I'm definitely striving to see that it does. In receiving this honor, I'm appreciative of the fact that it gives other people hope that folks can see that a guy who was once homeless and addicted to drugs and incarcerated and arrested several times could elevate to a position such as this.”

Meade also believes that while he’s in Florida and much of his activism is centered on the Sunshine State, he recognizes that this is a national issue, and he hopes his advocacy will spread beyond his location. 

“I do think that there is a holistic approach to even the work that we're doing here in Florida that can be applied broadly on a national level right and it basically emerges from this concept. If our cities, if our state, If this country is to be greater than what it is now we have to empower those among us who have been most weakened.  And there's no other group of people in this country that has been weakened as much as people who've been impacted by the criminal justice system.”

Meade says it just makes good sense. “When I'm allowed access to good jobs, safe and affordable housing and education, I'm able now to contribute to the economy. I'm able now to pay my fair share of taxes and relieve some of the tax burden on everybody else. And I'm able to stimulate the economy.”

Nationwide, disenfranchisement affects more than six million citizens with felony convictions, and in Florida, Jim Crow–era laws permanently denied such citizens the right to vote or hold public office. Meade’s work restored voting rights to more than 1.5 million of Florida’s disenfranchised citizens.  He successfully obtained 700,000 petition signatures required for placement of a constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot.  The Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative passed with 64 percent of the vote and resulted in the largest expansion of voting rights in the country in the last 50 years.