The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (Postmillennial Pop) (9781479800650): Ebony Elizabeth Thomas: Books People keep finding late loved ones on Google Maps For years, Google Maps has offered Street View, which stitches together panoramic camera images to recreate a digital facsimile of physical spaces in the real world that you can explore online. Some people are discovering that if they scroll through the platform long enough and use a time travel feature, they just might find the image of a late loved one captured by one of Google’s cameras — and seemingly saved in Google Maps forever. In the past few days, several posts announcing these discoveries have gone viral. This is hardly the first time people have used the time travel feature in Street View to go searching for the departed on Google Maps — or to share the experience on social media. This effect suggests that the creation of these 360-degree views of the world requires momentary surveillance. Again, people have been discovering images of late loved ones on Street View for a while. But there’s more to the story than viral content.
Reparations for slavery Reparations for slavery is the idea that some form of compensatory payment needs to be made to the American descendants of slaves who had been enslaved as part of the slave trade. The most notable demands for reparations have been made in the United Kingdom and in the United States. The land that is now known as America, including the Caribbean, and also African states from which slaves were taken are owed these reparations. These reparations are speculative; that is, they have never been paid. United States[edit] Slavery ended in the United States with the end of the American Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which declared that, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".[1] At this time, there were an estimated four million African Americans that were set free.[2] Support for reparations[edit]
Let Harvard Be Harvard, Only Bigger – Bloomberg View As Harvard’s defense of its admissions practices continues in a Boston courtroom, the university faces one main obstacle: It’s guilty as charged, as the Vox writer Matt Yglesias recently tweeted. Harvard policy does discriminate against Asian-Americans. So the next step is to arrive at a deeper understanding of how both America and Harvard got to this point. Like Matt, I attended Harvard (for my doctorate in economics), and most of the people there are as well-meaning as any you might find in Idaho or West Virginia. Step back from the emotions of the current debate and start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. One Harvard strategy, common among top universities, is to give preference to descendants of alumni. Another Harvard strategy has been to support affirmative action and related practices to make the university more welcoming to African-American and Latino applicants. Well, maybe those really are the best schools.
In The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas asks what is really happening in fantasy worlds, and finds a mirror to our own | Penn GSE Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is a professor who studies and teaches how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, film, and television — and how those portrayals shape our culture. Her book exploring these issues, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, has just been published. Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas But nearly two decades ago, she was a school teacher in her native Detroit during a snowy winter, opening a Harry Potter book for the first time. “I was supposed to be disavowing childhood and I ended up just falling straight into it,” Thomas told the Office Hours podcast. “I had always been drawn to speculative fiction and narratives, but I just didn't have anyone to talk to about my obsessions, or how much I loved these stories, and how much I would rather live in the wizarding world, or be a citizen of the United Federation of Planets instead of being a young Black woman in Detroit.
New 'Museums for Digital Learning' Site for K-12 Educators Launches New 'Museums for Digital Learning' Site for K-12 Educators LaunchesMuseums Across U.S. Invited to Contribute Content Washington, DC—The Institute of Museum and Library Services is pleased to announce the launch of a new online resource center featuring dynamic digital museum content for K-12 educators searchable by subject and grade. Originally funded as a pilot project through an FY 2018 National Leadership Grant to the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Museums for Digital Learning (MDL) is a collaboration of IMLS, Newfields, the Field Museum, and History Colorado. Over the course of the last two and a half years, the MDL team designed a platform that would build and strengthen the capacity of our nation’s museums to serve the larger K-12 education community. With the website’s official launch, hundreds of museums have the opportunity to contribute to MDL, making it a rich resource for K-12.
‘Better Is Good’: Barack Obama's Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic Coates: So it didn’t surprise you at all? Obama: No. I think, and look, Ta-Nehisi, I don’t want to discount those criticisms, but offsetting those criticisms is that I have 90 percent or 95 percent support in the African American community and it’s not sort of “Well, he’s black, so it’s okay. We’re not going to say anything even though we’re seething.” And I hang out with a lot of middle-aged black women, and they’re not casual in their support of me. Coates: So perhaps more substantive than that early-on critique, for instance—and Valerie [Jarrett] and I talked a little bit about this—when you attempted to bring in some of the Black Lives Matter activists and folks refused. Obama: Oh, I absolutely could comprehend it. Coates: Are you serious? Obama: Absolutely. Coates: How did he respond? Obama: Like a 21-year-old would, which is sort of a mixture of defiance and uncertainty and embarrassment. Coates: So it didn’t surprise you at all? Obama: No. Coates: Are you serious? Obama: Absolutely.
Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow Who loses? Nearly everyone. A recent analysis by a Brookings Institution fellow found that “efforts to reduce recidivism through intensive supervision are not working.” Reducing the requirements and burdens of community supervision, so that people can more easily hold jobs, care for children and escape the stigma of criminality “would be a good first step toward breaking the vicious incarceration cycle,” the report said. Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell. If you asked slaves if they would rather live with their families and raise their own children, albeit subject to “whites only signs,” legal discrimination and Jim Crow segregation, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take Jim Crow. Some insist that e-carceration is “a step in the right direction.”
Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students (Language and Literacy Series) (9780807763056): Carlin Borsheim-Black, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, Timothy J. Lensmire: Books Racial Wealth Gap Learning Simulation | Bread for the World What is the Racial Wealth Gap Learning Simulation? The simulation is an interactive tool that helps people understand the connections among racial equity, hunger, poverty, and wealth. It is a good first step for people unaware of structural inequality, a support tool for those who want a deeper understanding of structural inequality, and a source of information for experts who want to know the quantifiable economic impact of each policy that has widened today’s racial hunger, income, and wealth divides. In the simulation, participants learn how federal policies created structural inequalities—property ownership and education are just two among many areas affected—and how these policies increase hunger and poverty in communities of color. The simulation guides participants to an understanding of why racial equity is so important to ending hunger and poverty in the United States. How does the simulation break down barriers? There are many ways of talking or thinking about race.
Slavery compensation Leaders of more than a dozen Caribbean countries are launching a united effort to seek compensation from three European nations for what they say is the lingering legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, has taken up the cause of compensation for slavery and the genocide of native peoples and is preparing for what would likely be a drawn-out battle with the governments of Britain, France and the Netherlands. It has engaged the British law firm of Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for compensation for hundreds of Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government during the so-called Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s. Lawyer Martyn Day said his first step would probably be to seek a negotiated settlement with the governments of France, Britain and Netherlands along the lines of the British agreement in June to issue a statement of regret and award compensation of £19.9m to the surviving Kenyans.
Why Do Asian-Americans Remain Largely Unseen in Film and Television? Yet elsewhere in the arts, Asian-Americans have flourished: as poets, writers, directors, photographers, fashion designers, architects, interior decorators and visual artists. The creative offerings of Asian-Americans — from Vera Wang’s fantasy wedding dresses to the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri to the haunting cinematography of Hiro Murai, the director of Donald Glover’s television show “Atlanta” — aren’t just accepted but celebrated. Only in the representational arts do Asians remain unseen — mostly in film and television, but in music, too, and, to a lesser degree, on the runway. In other words: It is only when we are hidden that we are allowed to succeed. Which leads to a more troubling but inevitable conclusion: that there is something about the very physiognomy of the Asian face that American audiences still cannot or will not accept. EXOTIC, OPPORTUNISTIC prostitutes. Their arrival was called the Yellow Peril. Inscrutable. Her mother was a housewife.
What It’s Like to See ‘Slave Play’ as a Black Person Still, some black people have felt a “recklessness or boldness to what I’m putting onstage in front of white people,” Mr. Harris, who began writing “Slave Play” during his first year as a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, told me. A not-uncommon critique of the play is that most of the audience will be white, or that he wrote it with a white gaze in mind. “The main audience for this play was, and always has been, me,” he said. This dilemma is something most, if not all, black artists have had to wrestle with. Cast members from the original 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” recalled white audience members laughing throughout the drama. “You must understand, an audience comes to own a play,” he said, adding that they responded to the protagonist’s mother controlling “her son’s rage. I know the prospect of seeing slavery depicted in this way is a turn off for many black people — their hesitation and dubiousness is understandable.
Maya Angelou, Sally Ride to Be Among First Women Featured on U.S. Quarters The majority of the United States’ circulating coins depict men, from former presidents to civil rights advocate Frederick Douglass to naturalist John Muir. Aside from the allegorical Lady Liberty, however, American women have largely been relegated to collectible and commemorative coins. Of the denominations currently accepted as legal tender, just three feature actual female figures: the Susan B. Anthony dollar, the Sacagawea dollar and the Alabama state quarter (which depicts Alabama native Helen Keller). Come next year, at least two new faces are set to join these women’s ranks. Between 2022 and 2025, the Mint plans to release up to 20 quarters (up to five each year) recognizing women “from a wide spectrum of fields, including, but not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space and the arts,” according to a statement. “I wanted to make sure that women would be honored, and their images and names be lifted up on our coins.