Black Girls Should Matter, Too In a classroom at the University of Pennsylvania, more than a dozen black girls and women gather on a recent Saturday afternoon. A simple game begins as an icebreaker for the workshop. “Stand up if your racial identity ever made anyone doubt your abilities,” the session’s leader says. Everyone stands. “Stand up if you’ve ever been told to act like a lady.” Everyone stands again. Across generations—from high-school students to professionals with salt-and-pepper hair—a common reality appears. With a tone of resignation, Horton recalled a counselor who she said doubted her aptitude for an honors biology course. A mounting body of evidence suggests that black students across the country face daunting odds in their quest for an equitable education. Given the growing recognition that race and poverty hinder educational opportunity and outcomes, leaders ranging from policymakers to businesspeople have committed to tackling this crisis. The president’s crusade is spreading across the country.
Black intellectuals, white audiences: searching for tales of authentic blackness | Books Sometime last fall, I received an email from a Harvard colleague inviting me to join a reading group of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. “I just had an image this morning of a room full of white people discussing the book,” she wrote, before clarifying in the next line: “I certainly don’t mean to say, ‘come explain what it’s like to be black to us.’” But of course, in some way, that is precisely what she meant. Amid protests against racialized police violence and debates over the limits of free speech on increasingly diverse college campuses, a good many (often, white) progressives have been left scratching their heads. Where does this belief in, and demand for, racially authentic explanations of black life come from? The 1960s marked a turning point in the position of black intellectuals with respect to white progressives, Matlin argues. On the Corner opens during the Harlem riot of 1964. But there were costs, too. But Clark would later grow disillusioned.
Why Junot Diaz urges you to read more promiscuously - Home | q In a rich and wide-ranging interview, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Junot Diaz joins Shad to discuss his ongoing push for real diversity in the largely-white worlds of Western academia and literature. The Dominican-American author also comments on the importance of idealism in young people, why there's always a struggle when you come from the margins, and why — in a world packed with advice for writers — he offers his advice to readers. "Drop down out of Instagram time, out of Facebook time. Drop down into a much more human rhythm," says Diaz, adding that, for the sake of our culture and our future, we all have to learn to slow down. "To read a book is to be in the slow zone of the human." Forget advice for writers.
How It Feels To Conquer Your Shame - BuzzFeed News Cornel West's Rise and Fall by Michael Eric Dyson | The New Republic Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” is the best-known line from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride. But I’m concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in more universal terms: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.” Even an angry Almighty can’t compete with mortals whose love turns to hate. Cornel West’s rage against President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. West’s animus is longstanding, and only intermittently broken by bouts of calculated love. Despite West’s disapproval of Obama, he eventually embraced the political phenom, crossing the country as a surrogate and touting his Oval Office bona fides. Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses. Yet West is, in my estimation, the most exciting black American scholar ever. It was that sense of scholarly excitement that drew me to West after I read his first book, Prophesy Deliverance! Hiroko Masuike / Getty Images
“You can’t do that! Stories have to be about White people” – Media Diversified Young Writers of Colour by Darren Chetty I’ve spent almost two decades teaching in English primary schools, which serve multiracial, multicultural, multifaith communities. 1) Almost without exception, whenever children are asked to write a story in school, children of colour will write a story featuring white characters with ‘traditional’ English names who speak English as a first language. 2) Teachers do not discuss this phenomenon. Furthermore, simply pointing these two things out can lead to some angry responses in my experience. Why are you making an issue of race when children are colourblind?” is an example of the sort of question that sometimes gets asked. Well let’s look at that. But, surely you are not arguing that teachers are telling them to do this?” I’m not. A few years ago, I taught a Year 2 class in East London. “You can’t do that! I just hadn’t realised what I was up against. What do I mean? This isn’t confined at children’s literature of course. Then they wrote. Bang! Mrs.
Most Prisoners Are Mentally Ill — The Atlantic Occasionally policymakers and activists will talk about how the justice system needs to keep mentally ill people out of prisons. If it did that, prisons would be very empty indeed. A new Urban Institute report points out that more than half of all inmates in jails and state prisons have a mental illness of some kind: Percent of Inmates Who Have Mental or Mood Issues The most common problem is depression, followed by bipolar disorder. Types of Mental Issues Among State and Federal Inmates The numbers are even more stark when parsed by gender: 55 percent of male inmates in state prisons are mentally ill, but 73 percent of female inmates are. An increasingly popular program might help thin the ranks of these sick, untreated inmates. For example, just last week Northampton County in eastern Pennsylvania saw its first case processed in its newly created mental-health court. The courts aren't a cure-all: Two-thirds of them use jail time to punish noncompliance with treatment.
Cult of Pedagogy ‘A Conversation With My Black Son’ Continue reading the main story Video Op-Docs By GEETA GANDBHIR and BLAIR FOSTER For generations, parents of black boys across the United States have rehearsed, dreaded and postponed “The Conversation.” But when their boys become teenagers, parents must choose whether or not to expose their sons to what it means to be a black man here. To keep him safe, they may have to tell the child they love that he risks being targeted by the police, simply because of the color of his skin. This Op-Doc video is our attempt to explore this quandary, by listening to a variety of parents and the different ways they handle these sensitive discussions. We intend “A Conversation With My Black Son” to be the first in a series of videos that will foster discussions about the state of race relations in America. Op-Docs By GEETA GANDBHIR and BLAIR FOSTER For generations, parents of black boys across the United States have rehearsed, dreaded and postponed “The Conversation.”
What the Data Really Says About Police and Racial Bias As the nation reels from a series of high-profile fatal shootings of black men by police officers, many have decried the lack of readily available data on how racial bias factors into American policing. But while it’s true that there is no adequate federal database of fatal police shootings (F.B.I. director James Comey has described the lack of data as “embarrassing and ridiculous”), there exists a wealth of academic research, official and media investigations, and court rulings on the topic of race and law enforcement. The Hive has collected 18 such findings below. This list is not exhaustive, and does not purport to comment on the work of all police officers. It is, rather, merely a digest of the information available at present. Sometimes, studies and investigations reveal evidence of intentional bias; other studies point to broader societal and institutional factors that lead to implicit bias. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.