Box of delight

In addition to recognizing the civil rights movement, teachers can use Black History Month to call attention to the achievements of Black Americans in other areas.

George Floyd’s murder while under arrest for allegedly passing a counterfeit bill of small denomination sparked massive worldwide demonstrations against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter.

It also led to the abrupt cancellation of television’s recent hit, Live PD, and its longest-running reality show, Cops.

Getting history across to young students is challenging enough, but what should a teacher do when actual history-making events happen on their watch? They have to be acknowledged, but to what extent do they have to be explained, even "taught"? Of the teachers who have turned history-in-the-making into a lesson, perhaps the most famous is Jane Elliott of Riceville, Iowa. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, she divided her classroom of third-graders along color lines: blue-eyed and brown-eyed. On the first day she granted the brown-eyed students such special privileges as desks in the front rows, second helpings at lunch, and five extra minutes of recess. The next day she reversed the situation, and the blue-eyed kids had the perks.

IIt may well be a truism to say that American music is African American music, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And when we reduce truths down to truisms they lose the granular detail that makes them interesting and relevant. Everyone knows, for example, that there would be no rock and roll without Robert Johnson at the crossroads and Little Richard in his sequined jacket and pompadour. But how many people know that without North Carolina-born Lesley Riddle, A.P. Carter’s onetime musical partner, folk and country music as we know it might not exist?

A new report details the negative consequences suffered by black women and girls when people perceive them as older than their white peers.

Researchers at Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality reported their findings Wednesday after speaking to groups of black girls and women across the country about whether their real-life experiences reflected what the same researchers found in 2017: the “adultification” of black girls. The women and girls said they did.

Why journalist Dani McClain wrote a book about the politics of black motherhood—and what it means to both raise your own children and connect with the needs of other families.

Issue No. 23Mothers

 

IN JULY 2016, reporter Dani McClain watched as the Mothers of the Movement—black women who have lost children to gun violence—took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to support candidate Hillary Clinton.

Personal experiences with racial discrimination are common for black Americans. But certain segments within this group – most notably, those who are college educated or male – are more likely to say they’ve faced certain situations because of their race, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The “Operation Varsity Blues” bribery scandal led to an outpouring of conversation on privilege, merit, and fairness in higher education. African-American scholars were quick to point out the hypocrisy the scandal revealed. As Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, put it, “I have been told by people at times, ‘You stole a spot because you’re here.’ Now, who stole what from who?”

In the wake of the scandal, The Chronicle Review asked graduate students, junior professors, and senior scholars what it’s like to be an African-American academic today. We asked respondents to speak to themes raised by the admissions-bribery scandal. Here’s what they told us.

In 1896, Thomas Edison produced The Kiss. One of the first films ever commercially screened, it adapts the then-popular musical The Widow Jones — or at least it adapts about twenty seconds of it, a kiss that happens in the very last scene. Two years later came the equally short but differently ground breaking Something Good – Negro Kiss, a version of The Kiss starring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of University of Southern California archivist Dino Everett and University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies professor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received proper recognition as the first such kiss on film.

“During the last three decades of legal slavery in America,” writes Lucinda MacKethan at the National Humanities Center, “African American writers perfected one of the nation’s first truly indigenous genres of written literature: the North American slave narrative.” These heavily mediated memoirs were the only real firsthand accounts of slavery most Americans outside the South encountered. Their authors were urged by abolitionist publishers to adopt conventions of the sentimental novel, and to feature showy introductions by white editors to validate their authenticity.

But racism isn't new; the current conflict has been on its way for a very long time. How long? Anti-racist scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi, author of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning, would say from the country’s earliest settlement and enslavement of African people. “For nearly six centuries,” he writes, “antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist,” Kendi wrote during the protests in Ferguson and other U.S. cities.

The United States of America's national parks have been inspiring artists even before they were officially declared national parks. That goes not just for American artists such as the master landscape photographer Ansel Adams, but foreign artists as well. Take the Austrian painter Heinrich C. Berann, described by his official web site as "the father of the modern panorama map," a distinctive form that allowed him to hybridize "old European painting tradition with modern cartography."

The first thing I notice about Kendra Allen through reading her new book, “When You Learn the Alphabet,” and in subsequently interviewing her, is that she is incredibly blunt. Blunt not only in the way her essays divulge deeply personal – often troubling – life experiences, but in her introspection of herself and the way her experiences have shaped her. Her essays don’t always end cleanly with a resolution, something expected in most writing regardless of genre. Her writing doesn’t typically adhere to the standard character or story arc, recognizing that as with life, our experiences don’t end neatly with falling action, that our individual traumatic experiences aren’t packaged up and separated from ourselves as life lessons, free from new consequences. Allen’s essays tie together her individual experiences and thoughts on race, mental illness, sexuality, gender, and familial relations that speak to how our personal traumas are inherited through generations, and how the spreading of that trauma contributes to a social epidemic. 

As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, and as companies from Wall Street to Silicon Valley grapple with how to build workforces that reflect these changing demographics, Americans have a complicated, even contradictory, set of views about the impact of diversity and the best way to achieve it. Most say it’s a good thing that the country has a diverse population, but many also say this introduces its own set of challenges. And while a majority values workplace diversity, few endorse the idea of taking race or ethnicity into consideration in hiring and promotions, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Children’s books are big business. And the market has never been more competitive. Bestselling, character-driven series spawn their own TV shows. Candy-colored readers feature kids’ favorite comic and cartoon characters. But kids’ books can also be fine art—a venue for well-written, finely-illustrated literature. And they are a serious subject of scholarship, offering insights into the histories of book publishing, education, and the social roles children were taught to play throughout modern history.

We have a huge problem in our businesses. Women are disappearing from the workplace. Over the years we have created a corporate world in which women fall behind early and keep losing ground with every step on the career ladder. This is unjust, unfair and unethical.

If we look (for example) at the stats in the 2016 version of the Women in the Workplace study of McKinsey, we conclude that women are disappearing from the workplace faster than snow in the sunshine.

Some two decades before The Jetsons brought their animated vision of the future to the small screen, the cinemagazine Pathetone Weekly ran a featurette in which the “most famous" fashion designers in the U.S. predicted what the well-dressed woman would find herself wearing in the year 2000.

In a 1995 interview with Linton Weeks of the Washington Post, [1]the Howard University librarian, collector, and self-described “bibliomaniac” Dorothy Porter (1905–95) reflected on the focus of her 43-year career: “The only rewarding thing for me is to bring to light information that no one knows. What’s the point of rehashing the same old thing?” For Porter, this mission involved not only collecting and preserving a wide range of materials related to the global Black experience, but also addressing how these works demanded new and specific qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to collect, assess, and catalog them.