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This video goes in depth on Marsha and the way she affected the lives of those in the past and current trans activists.

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Laverne Cox, Candis Cayne & More on Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera | Trailblazer Honors | Logo

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She was a multi-faceted queer person of color, this article shares information about her, her life, and legacy.

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Marsha “Pay it no Mind” Johnson · Challenging Gender Boundaries: A Trans Biography Project by Students of Catherine Jacquet · OutHistory

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Willi was a choreographer and the grandfather of vouging, a dance style that mimics a model on the catwalk.

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Willi Ninja: Voguing Butch Queen · Challenging Gender Boundaries: A Trans Biography Project · outhistory.org

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The drag ball scene in Harlem was not simply a product of the LGBTQ subculture of New York City. In its own right, the drag queens operated as a wide-ranging community of gay men, trans men and women, lesbian women, and queers. It was a reflection of many gender nonconforming people in society.

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She was a trans Latina woman who fought for homeless trans youth, and was close friends with Marsha P Johnson.

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Sylvia Rivera would always be quick to redress those who thought she threw the first Molotov cocktail at the historic Stonewall riot on June 28, 1969. "I have been given the credit for throwing the first Molotov cocktail by many historians, but I always like to correct it," she said in 2001. "I threw the second one. I did not throw the first one!"

Today, Rivera is revered as a legendary transgender activist. She vehemently fought for early legislation banning gender discrimination; sought to create safe spaces for queer homeless youth; and spoke loudly and powerfully that her community of transgender individuals, homeless and incarcerated among them, be fought for in the move toward equality. At the time, though, many gay rights activists regarded her as a mere troublemaker.

By the time Rivera became a full-fledged activist, spurred on by the Stonewall riots, she had been fighting for much of her life. She was born in the Bronx to a Venezuelan mother and Puerto Rican father, but her father had abandoned her and her mother had committed suicide. She was being taken care of by her grandmother, who would often beat her for her effeminacy. She shaved her eyebrows and wore makeup to school beginning in fourth grade, and by the time she was 10 years old left home and began life as a sex worker, hustling near Times Square. In a community she had found of street queens - as poor trans youth, some of whom performed sex work and/or were homeless, then identified themselves - she gave herself the name "Sylvia Rivera" in a ceremony attended by some fifty of her friends and peers. She also referred to herself as a drag queen, and later in life as transgender.

It was, by all accounts, an arduous life: Rivera and her peers were regularly beaten up by cops, johns, or even each other. Rivera would eventually serve 90 days on Riker's Island, sent to a cellblock kept for perpetrators of "gay crimes," as scholar, activist, and author Jessi Gan noted in 2007.

When Rivera threw that second Molotov cocktail at Stonewall, she was only 17. She was no stranger to demonstrations at that time, having also protested against Vietnam, for women's rights and civil rights. But Stonewall incited a fervor in Rivera to keep going, to keep fighting for voices marginalized within the gay rights space. She became involved with the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF, and the Gay Activists' Alliance, GAA, and challenged the way the predominantly white gay and lesbian community approached activism from a middle class perspective. Rivera wanted their activism to be more progressive, to include in their fight the rights of transgender individuals, including people of color, the homeless, and the incarcerated. But she challenged multiple communities through her activism, also working with Puerto Rican activist organization the Young Lords, hoping the Puerto Rican and Latinx communities would acknowledge the reality of gay and transgender people, says Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women's Studies.

But some other activists didn't like the way she pushed. She was banned from New York's Gay and Lesbian Community Center, for example, after she destroyed a desk in the lobby, enraged because she felt the center did not address the needs of transgender homeless youths who slept in front of it. At a gay pride rally in 1973, she got onstage amidst boos from the crowd. "I had to fight my way up on that stage...people that I called my comrades in the movement literally beat the shit out of me," Rivera would say later. She stopped working with the GLF and GAA and the gay rights movement in general after three or four years because the organizations began to both publicly denounce and ignore her. She would return some 20 years later for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, asked to participate by the pride parade's organizing body. "The movement had put me on the shelf, but they took me down and dusted me off," she said in 1995. "Still, it was beautiful. I walked down 58th Street and the young ones were calling from the sidewalk, 'Sylvia, Sylvia, thank you, we know what you did.' After that I went back on the shelf. It would be wonderful if the movement took care of its own."

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Sylvia Rivera Changed Queer and Trans Activism Forever

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Sylvia Rivera would always be quick to redress those who thought she threw the first Molotov cocktail at the historic Stonewall riot on June 28, 1969. "I have been given the credit for throwing the first Molotov cocktail by many historians, but I always like to correct it," she said in 2001.

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They were one of the most influential members of the disco era. They paved the way for future musicians that wanted to be out of the norm,

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This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem.
Dick Clark couldn't get his American Bandstand crowd to stop cheering. It was early December, 1978, around the peak of disco's popularity - and Clark's studio audience had just heard Sylvester and his backup singers, Two Tons O' Fun, perform their first hit, " Dance (Disco Heat)".

After Clark got the crowd to pipe down and conducted an awkward interview, the gender-bending singer - wearing makeup, a loose kimono and leather pants - performed his follow-up single. The song, " You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," hit the top of Billboard's dance chart that year. Forty years later, its greater legacy is as an LGBTQ anthem.

"It's a song of freedom," says Joshua Gamson, Sylvester's biographer. In his book The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco, Gamson makes the case that the artist became a kind of folk hero for many young LGBTQ people, because his life was theirs.

"You've come out of the closet. It's been difficult," he says. "Many people [at the time] have moved out of their homes of origin, their families of origin, with great pain, and moved to a more liberated place, like San Francisco. And then ... this person comes out into public life that sounds like what you were feeling when you made yourself free.

"For him to be celebrated for all of his strangeness and all of the ways he inhabited who he wanted to be - who he felt himself to be - felt like you being celebrated for that."

And it wasn't just how Sylvester looked and sounded. The song's lyrics openly celebrated that liberation:

When we're out there dancing on the floor, darlin'
And I feel like I need some more
And I feel your body close to mine
And I know, my love, it's about that time
Make me feel mighty real

"You've got the words of a person who is just matter-of-fact about their sexual desires, about the freedom to do with their bodies and their desires whatever they want to do," Gamson says. "And you can dance to it!"

Sylvester James grew up singing in a Pentecostal church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His mother was a devout member of the church and couldn't accept the early signs of her son's sexuality.

"When I was little, I used to dress up, right? And my mother said, 'You can't dress up,' " Sylvester told Joan Rivers when he appeared on The Tonight Show in 1986. " 'You gotta wear these pants and these shoes. And you have to, like, drink beer and play football.' And I said, 'No I don't!' And she said, 'You're very strange.' And I said, 'That's OK!' "

"The [Pentecostal] church was oppressive," says singer Jeanie Tracy, who shared Sylvester's religious background and became his friend and collaborator. "They just didn't tolerate gayness. They didn't tolerate a lot of things. They didn't allow you to wear makeup. You couldn't wear toeless shoes or sleeveless dresses. It was just real ... controlled."

Too much so for Sylvester. At 13, he left the church. Two years later, he left home. He lived with friends and his grandmother, who accepted him as he was.

In his early 20s, Sylvester moved to San Francisco to join an avant-garde theatre troupe called The Cockettes, whose fans included Truman Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt. But he left the group soon after - to front his own act. Jeanie Tracy remembers being introduced to him by friends in the music industry.

"They said, 'Oh, Jeanie, this is Sylvester,'" she says. "And I said, 'Sylvester? I thought you were a woman.' And then I said, 'Oops! I'm sorry!' He goes, 'Oh, no, girl, that's okay!'"

When guitarist and songwriter James Wirrick saw the singer for the first time, Sylvester was backed by a tight three-piece band and flanked by two drag queens - "in full drag, with full neck-beards," he laughs.

Wirrick became Sylvester's bandmate and collaborator a few months later. By then, the drag queens had been replaced by backup singers Izora Rhodes and Martha Wash, aka Two Tons O' Fun. (They went on to record another anthem - "It's Raining Men" - as The Weather Girls.) Wirrick and Sylvester wrote "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" together. Getting the rest of the band on board was a challenge.

"At first the band didn't wanna play it as a dance tune," Wirrick says. "They were kinda snotty about it. 'We don't really wanna do that,' y'know? And Sylvester and I kept saying, 'No, you have to do that because that's what's on the radio.' "

More than on the radio, the song was a huge it in discos - and its falsetto vocals, four-on-the-floor beat and bouncing synthesizer influenced generations of electronic dance music producers to follow. Eleven years after the original came out, vocalist Jimmy Sommerville of the British band Bronski Beat paid tribute with a cover. The following decade, Chicago House vocalist Byron Stingily's version once again took the song to the top of the U.S. dance chart.

The song also went on to become the centerpiece of a 2014 off-Broadway musical that tells Sylvester's life story. It's appeared in ads, films, and TV shows. So far this year, James Wirrick says he's gotten eight requests for permission to use the song he co-wrote: a video game, three television commercials, three movies and an episode of The Simpsons.

Sylvester never had a mainstream hit after "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". A year after it came out, Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl made "Disco sucks!" a rallying cry with his "Disco Demolition" promotion between the games of a White Sox doubleheader; the ensuing melee forced the Sox to forfeit the second game.

Joshua Gamson says the event was a reaction by straight white fans of classic rock against a music that they saw as too black and too queer - and that that backlash is partly why he missed the anthem's power when it first came out.

"In a way, if I had felt that earlier, I'd have come out earlier," he says. "Embracing who you are, celebrating who you are, being as fabulous as you could possibly be, I think that's the message that he's preaching in the song. And I could've used a dose of that as a teenager."

But Sylvester remained popular among dance music fans, and he leveraged that popularity to raise AIDS awareness. He played benefit shows and distributed safe-sex information to his audiences. When he appeared on The Tonight Show, he thanked Joan Rivers and guest Charles Nelson Reilly for their early support of what was becoming a movement. "I was there trying to do whatever we could at the time to get it together. And now it's like a national thing to do," Sylvester said. "I want to thank you myself."

Less than 10 years after "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" came out, Sylvester's husband died of complications from AIDS. The singer was never tested for HIV - he told friends there was no point, because he knew he had the virus. Within a few months, his own health was deteriorating. But, Jeanie Tracy says, his senses of style and humor stayed intact, even as he was planning his own funeral. "He looked at me and he says, 'I wanna be buried in a pearl-colored casket,' " she recalls. " 'Don't bury me in a white casket, 'cause I don't wanna look like I'm lyin' in a white refrigerator!'"

A few months before he died, Sylvester appeared in the 1988 gay pride parade in San Francisco. He was emaciated and weak and rode in a wheelchair. But he didn't want to hide, Gamson says - he wanted the crowds along Castro Street to see him.
Tom Cole contributed to the radio version of this story.
"It was part of the same almost philosophy of realness - like, this, this is being real," Gamson says. "This is mighty real, to be marching in the Gay Freedom parade looking, like, 40 years older than you are. And people, knowing that they've seen this icon of their freedom, they see him [as] a symbol of the devastation that AIDS took on the community."

Sylvester made sure to champion that community even after he died. In his will, he left his share of future royalties for "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" to two San Francisco nonprofits: the AIDS Emergency Fund and the meals program Project Open Hand.

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Bigger Than Disco, 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)' Is A Celebration Of Self

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This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem . Dick Clark couldn't get his American Bandstand crowd to stop cheering.

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This article gives a list of times black people “stole” music from white people. In all of these examples however because of the era these songs were recorded, no music was stolen only bought or asked for.

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Last week, Onion A.V. Club writer Noel Murray complained about the trend of people rejecting things - food, films, music - as being " for white people." "The 'white people are square and bland' gag is an old one, and for the most part, it's both harmless and healthy," Murray wrote. "But increasingly, people aren't sniping about 'whiteness' to be funny, or even defiant - at least not entirely. They're using the term as a form of criticism, meant to be dismissive. ... 'That sounds like music for white people,' is another way of saying, 'That can't be any good.' And I do have a problem with that."

To some degree, we trio of black people agrees with Murray - white people aren't always lame. In fact, studies show that only about 35 percent of the white population is hopelessly uncool, compared to 27 percent of the black population.

To promote a more perfect harmony between blacks and whites, we've put together a list of music taken by black musicians from white musicians. While we're confident this list won't eliminate all the racial tension currently dividing America, we hope it lends some credence to Murray's protestations about white stuff being written off as boring. As you can tell from looking below, that's simply not the case. White people: Frequently not as dull as you might think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRPVcWKrqy0 MY FAVORITE THINGS
Cord Jefferson, Aminatou Sow and Shani Hilton are friends with a lot of white people in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, where they live and work. Sound Of Music To John Coltrane

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The Definitive List Of White Music Stolen By Black People

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Last week, Onion A.V. Club writer Noel Murray complained about the trend of people rejecting things - food, films, music - as being " for white people." "The 'white people are square and bland' gag is an old one, and for the most part, it's both harmless and healthy," Murray wrote.

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Charles was a highly educated black man whose research and innovation dubbed him "Father of the Blood Bank"

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Charles Richard Drew - American Chemical Society

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American Chemical Society: Chemistry for Life.

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She was a inventor and creator. She created a brand of hair care for African American people and is one of the first black, female millionaires.

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Annie Turnbo Malone lived and developed her first hair care products in Brooklyn, Illinois. Brooklynites who made great social constributions in education, music, sports, inventions, inovative ideas and creations....

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He was a brilliant inventor that created the gas mask, and the first traffic light.

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Garrett Morgan blazed a trail for African-American inventors with his patents, including those for a hair-straightening product, a breathing device, a revamped sewing machine and an improved traffic signal.

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Often times, white actors are assigned to play roles that are meant for people of color. This is always unnecessary. This article lists different examples of this occurring.

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Paramount Studio's 2017 live-action adaptation of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell opens to the soundtrack of a haunting chant in Japanese while surreal images of cybernetic body parts coalesce into a naked female form. As the artificial body emerges from its womb-like incubator, the outer encasement peels away to reveal the face of a black-wigged Scarlett Johansson as the film's protagonist, Major - eventually revealed to be the cyberized reincarnation of a young Japanese girl named Motoko Kusanagi.

For defenders of Ghost in the Shell, deft screenwriting enabled Johansson - who is not Japanese - to play the lead role of a Japanese woman. But, for many Asian-Americans, Johansson's casting was just the latest in a long pattern of Hollywood selecting white actors in Asian roles to make Asian characters more palatable for white audiences. Some Asian-American protesters felt the film was an example of yellowface - a term referencing when a white actor dons "Asian-esque" stage makeup and costuming to play an Asian character. Others lambasted the film for how the script adapted its Japanese source material to allow for a white actor to play the role of Ghost in the Shell's iconic Japanese protagonist - a process termed " whitewashing " by its critics.

Keith Chow - founder of pop culture blog The Nerds of Color, which co-organized protests on social media against Johansson's casting in Ghost in the Shell - believes that both yellowface and whitewashing were evident in that film. He sees whitewashing as a contemporary revival of historic yellowface: a practice related to American traditions of blackface and, like blackface, popularized in early American theater and cinema.

"It's all connected," Chow tells Teen Vogue. "It all results in the dehumanization of people of color; and, in the specific case of yellowface, in the dehumanization of Asian people."

One of the earliest documented examples of yellowface is the mid-18th-century production of The Orphan of China, adapted from the 13th-century Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao. Critics of the production later remarked that the show's popularity was due to the production's "Oriental" setting and its liberal use of Chinoiserie (the imitation of Chinese motifs and techniques in Western art) and white actors in yellowface. This yellowface predates the earliest landing of Chinese immigrants on American soil by nearly a century. The Orphan of China was thus not a realistic portrayal of China; rather, it was an elaborate fiction drawn from the audience's collective imagination of Chinese people. Yellowface would soon become an enduring tradition of American theater that would persist as a popular practice for centuries.

The earliest practitioners of yellowface sought to transform white actors into Asian characters using skin-darkening pigments and makeshift contraptions of tape and rubber bands. The look would be combined with an over-the-top performance that included exaggerated accents and other physical tics. Yellowface was considered a bona fide technique mastered by skilled makeup artists, and instructions were published in technical manuals as recently as 1995's The Complete Make-up Artist by Penny Delamar.

The harm of yellowface was described by Robert G. Lee in his book, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture: "Yellowface marks the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental; it sharply defines the Oriental in a racial opposition to whiteness," he writes. "Yellowface exaggerates 'racial' features that have been designated 'Oriental,' such as 'slanted' eyes, overbite, and mustard-yellow skin color."

For the better part of American history, actors would don yellowface to assume Asian identities in theatrical productions while laws (including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Alien Land Laws) effectively barred Asians from integrating into most aspects of American society. Media industry customs and guidelines (such as the Hays Code) restricted the casting of non-whites in any role where they might be perceived as a love interest of a white actor's character; ultimately, this custom often was cited as justification for casting white actors in yellowface. Rather than allow Asian actors to accurately represent themselves, audiences apparently preferred the fictionalized Asian "other" as it was projected through the caricatured yellowface antics of a white actor.

Yellowface proved a wildly successful career move for many white actors and entertainers. Mid-19th-century magicians invented Chinese personas to imbue their acts with an aura of Far Eastern mysticism. For example, despite his Scottish heritage, New York-born William Ellsworth Robinson wore a long black wig and Chinoiserie costume and spoke in nonsense Chinese to lead a lengthy career as the famed stage mystic, Chung Ling Soo.

With the proliferation of moving film into popular culture during the early 20th century, yellowface made the transition from stage to silver screen. Swedish-American actor Warner Oland led a storied career that spanned decades as a highly sought-after yellowface actor. He routinely played Asian characters, including the first live-action depiction of the villainous Dr. Fu Manchu, and the bumbling Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan in 16 full-length films. Other famed actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando, Mickey Rooney, and John Wayne all took a turn at yellowface. In a testament to the mainstream acceptance of yellowface performances, German-American actor Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for her depiction of Chinese peasant O-Lan in 1937's The Good Earth - a role in which Rainier wore a black wig and "facial inlays" to camouflage her Caucasian features, and in which she allegedly was originally set to wear a rubber mask to better achieve the "Chinese look."

Producers of The Good Earth allegedly decided to pursue white actors in yellowface for the film's leads because they apparently deemed American audiences to be unprepared for a feature film starring an ensemble cast led by Asian actors. That racial calculus remains popular dogma for major production studios some 80 years after The Good Earth first opened in theaters: in a YouTube video explaining the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Hollywood screenwriter Max Landis responded to critics who were "not understanding [of] how the industry works. "

Although Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing population of Americans, they remain seriously underrepresented in popular American entertainment. In a recent University of Southern California study, researchers found that only 4.4% of speaking characters are Asian in popular American film. Meanwhile, about 1% of Academy Award nominations for acting have gone to Asian or Asian-American actors, HuffPost reports. That same pattern holds true for American television: according to scholar Nancy Wang Yuen, author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, nearly two-thirds of broadcast television shows - including those set in cities with sizable Asian-American populations, like New York City - lack any regular Asian-American characters whatsoever, she tells Teen Vogue.

While the use of yellowface still occurs in contemporary film, use of stage makeup to achieve yellowface is rare and has generally fallen out of favor. Yet, white actors continue to be cast in roles originally conceived to be Asian or Asian-American; now, however, that feat is accomplished through script rewrites and casting choices rather than stage makeup. Recent examples include , , Annihilation, , and live-action adaptations of popular Japanese animated titles including Ghost in the Shell, , and Dragonball: Evolution.

"It's part of the same lineage," Yuen says. "Whitewashing is a descendant of the original yellowface. It's all part of the same story in American media: the underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and usurping of significance of Asians by white actors."

"Why is the erasure of Asians still an acceptable practice in Hollywood?" asks Chow in a 2016 opinion piece for The New York Times. This question captures the central concern expressed by Asian-Americans who have organized numerous protests against whitewashing and yellowface.

One of the earliest such protests was in 1990, when the musical Miss Saigon was set to open on Broadway. Members of its original London cast were slated to reprise their roles for the American production - including white actor Jonathan Pryce, who had worn heavy-lidded eye prosthetics and bronzer to play the biracial French-Vietnamese character, The Engineer, for the show's London performances. Meanwhile, Asian actors were reportedly not "seriously considered" for the part on Broadway.

Outraged Asian-American activists organized a national campaign to criticize yellowface in Miss Saigon, as well as the show's portrayal of villainous Asian men and passive, self-sacrificing Asian women as ancillary to the heroic narrative of white men. That grassroots protest led to the Actors' Equity Association declaring that it could not "appear to condone the casting of a Caucasian actor in the role of a Eurasian" and held a vote to prevent Pryce from taking the role. In response, producers briefly canceled the production until the AEA reversed its decision. Miss Saigon went on to enjoy a 10-year run on Broadway and a brief revival in London in 2014, and Pryce received a Tony Award for his performance. (In a recent interview, Pryce seemingly expressed no regret for taking the role.)

"It is the height of white privilege to think a white person is better equipped to play an Asian character than an Asian person," actor Sun Mee Chomet tells Teen Vogue, who is primarily angered by the stereotypical and misogynistic portrayals of Asian women in Miss Saigon. " Miss Saigon reinforces and reaffirms all of the racial, gendered Orientalist stereotypes that box Asian-Americans in," agrees poet Bao Phi. Chomet and Phi joined several Asian-Americans to campaign against a planned production of Miss Saigon at Minneapolis's Ordway Theater in 2013. Across the country, similar protests have also occurred against productions of The Mikado, which routinely casts white actors in its Japanese roles.

Marissa Lee, who co-founded the group Racebending and led a national campaign against whitewashing in the 2010 film The Last Airbender, cites the 1990 Miss Saigon protests as her inspiration. "We built off of the Miss Saigon campaign and looked at how they did it," Lee recalls. Lee wanted to use the controversy around The Last Airbender to revive the conversation around the racial implications of Hollywood casting decisions. "It's impossible to look at whitewashing without considering it in the context of employment discrimination," Lee says. She notes that there has been an exodus of Asian actors going to Asia because they cannot find work in Hollywood, which only compounds the invisibility of Asians in American media.

Racebending was one of the earliest campaigns to bring the conversation around racial diversity in Hollywood to the digital sphere. Since then, Asian-Americans have continued to use social media to target whitewashing and Asian underrepresentation in Hollywood - including through trending hashtags such as #StarringJohnCho and #SeeAsAmStar (both created by Twitter user William Yu), #WhiteWashedOut (co-created by Chow), and in viral parody videos, such as those created by Tow-Arboleda Films. Thanks to efforts like these, "it's looking more like a bad career move for white actors to participate in whitewashing," says Lee, citing actor Ed Skrein's recent decision to back out of playing a Japanese-American character in the Hellboy reboot.

"So long as whitewashing continues to occur, we need to be conscious of whose stories are being marginalized and whose stories are not being told in mainstream media," cautions Yuen. Indeed, campaigns against Hollywood whitewashing and yellowface have brought fresh awareness to issues of diversity in American media; more tangibly, they have also inspired a proliferation of self-published Asian-American media.

"We're in the middle of a renaissance in Asian-American film and theater," Chomet says. She argues that Asian-American actors need not settle for taking background roles in whitewashed productions that perpetuate stereotypes about Asians. "We need to consider the impact of when media uses damaging stereotypes and centers the white gaze, and we have a responsibility to not participate in them.

"Asian-Americans are creating so many of our own opportunities by writing our own stories right now. Our energy is best used in the creation of our own stories and demanding a permanent seat at the creative table," she says. "We have the power to render racist representations of ourselves as obsolete."

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Yellowface, Whitewashing, and the History of White People Playing Asian Characters

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Paramount Studio's 2017 live-action adaptation of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell opens to the soundtrack of a haunting chant in Japanese while surreal images of cybernetic body parts coalesce into a naked female form.

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In this article, Scarlet

Johansson tries to explain why she took the role of Major in Ghost in The Shell.

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Scarlett Johansson has finally addressed the controversy surrounding her casting in Paramount's upcoming Ghost in the Shell adaptation.

In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Johansson said that she never wanted to take the role away from an Asian actor and wouldn't have accepted the role if that were the case. Johansson added that being a part of a franchise that stars a female protagonist is such a rare opportunity, she felt it was important to take advantage of the opportunity.

"Diversity is important in Hollywood, and I would never want to feel like I was playing a character that was offensive," Johansson said. "Also, having a franchise with a female protagonist driving it is such a rare opportunity. Certainly, I feel the enormous pressure of that - the weight of such a big property on my shoulders."

When Paramount first announced Johansson would be joining the project in April 2016, fans and actors of Asian descent including Ming-Na Wen and Constance Wu protested the casting, calling it another instance of whitewashing in Hollywood. Wen said while she didn't have an issue with Johansson as an actress in general, she stood against everything the whitewashing of the role signified. Wu, who has been vocal about whitewashing and lack of Asian roles in mainstream Hollywood in the past, added her thoughts.

In the film, Johansson will play the Major, a cyborg officer who is tasked with taking down a diabolical hacker with her squad of investigators. In November, the film's director defended Johansson's casting, calling the film an international movie that starred international actors.

"I stand by my decision - she's the best actress of her generation," Rupert Sanders said, according to The Verge. "I was flattered and honored that she would be in this film. I think, certainly people who were around the original anime, have been vehemently in support of her because she's incredible and there are very few like her."

Ghost in the Shell does star Japanese actors, including the acclaimed Takeshi Kitano, but there are also a number of white actors. Michael Pitt, Michael Wincott and Juliette Binoche will also star in the film.

Ghost in the Shell will be released on March 31, 2017.

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Scarlett Johansson finally addresses Ghost in the Shell whitewashing controversy

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Scarlett Johansson has finally addressed the controversy surrounding her casting in Paramount's upcoming Ghost in the Shell adaptation. In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Johansson said that she never wanted to take the role away from an Asian actor and wouldn't have accepted the role if that were the case.

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He organized the march on Washington. Not only was he an advocate for equality for PoC, he fought for the equality of LGBT people as well.

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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Bayard Rustin, the Gay Civil Rights Leader Who Organized the March on Washington | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights leader, was kept in the shadows by the Civil Rights movement establishment, but organized the March on Washington. A Henry Louis Gate, Jr. blog post.

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This list shows the wide array of innovations created by black scientists. All of these innovations still affect us today.

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14 Black Inventors You Probably Didn’t Know About

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Many people have read the story of how George Washington Carver invented over 300 products made from peanuts: flour, paste, insulation…

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She was a prominent blues singer in the 20s. Embracing her queer identity and paving the way for future musicians. She addressed multiple issues in her music, and we can learn from her bravery and unapologetic boldness.

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Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, capturing the lives and legacies of people who have influenced the world in which we live.

But many important figures were left out.

Overlooked reveals the stories of some of those remarkable people.

We started the series last year by focusing on women like Sylvia Plath, the postwar poet; Emma Gatewood, the hiking grandmother who captivated a nation; and Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist whose work was bold, raw and sometimes violent. We added to that collection each week.

Now, this special edition of Overlooked highlights a prominent group of black men and women whose lives we did not examine at the time of their deaths.

Many of them were a generation removed from slavery. They often attempted to break the same barriers again and again. Sometimes they made myth out of a painful history, misrepresenting their past to gain a better footing in their future. Some managed to achieve success in their lifetimes, only to die penniless, buried in unmarked graves. But all were pioneers, shaping our world and making paths for future generations.

We hope you'll spread the word about Overlooked - and tell us about others we've missed.
Read about the project's first year, and use this form to nominate a candidate for future Overlooked obits.

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Gladys Bentley, Gender-Bending Blues Performer and '20s Harlem Royalty

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Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, capturing the lives and legacies of people who have influenced the world in which we live. But many important figures were left out. Overlooked reveals the stories of some of those remarkable people.

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Her music style and talent has made her one of te most influential artists of the 20th century. This article tells readers about her and the way she affected rock and roll.

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Sister Rosetta Tharpe is one of the essential figures in the history of rock and roll. If she had not been there as a model and inspiration, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and other rock originators would have had different careers.

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These brothers confronted the injustices faced in prison by organising protests. They are barely ever talked about despite their bravery and intolerance for unfairness.

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GEORGE JACKSON was murdered by prison guards on August 21, 1971. Half a century later, his story deserves to be known by a new generation of activists.

Jackson was born on September 23, 1941, in Chicago. He was raised by a loving mother and father, and given particular attention by his grandfather, George "Papa" Davis. But at age 15, Jackson was imprisoned at a youth facility in California after several juvenile convictions.

"Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life," Jackson later wrote in his book Soledad Brother. "When told to do something, I simply played the idiot and spent my time reading. The absentminded bookworm, I was in full revolt by the time seven months were up."

At age 18, Jackson was convicted on dubious evidence of a gas station robbery of $70. "I was captured and brought to prison when I was 18 years old because I couldn't adjust," he would later write.

Based on prior arrests, Jackson was sentenced to between one year and life in prison and shipped off to California's notorious San Quentin prison. The indeterminate sentence, declared the judge, would incentivize good behavior.

GEORGE JACKSON, however, was anything but "good" in prison in the view of prison officials.

He organized sit-ins against segregated cafeterias and taught martial arts to other inmates to fight back against the ever-present, abusive prison guards. Introduced to radical politics by fellow prisoner W.L. Nolen, Jackson was soon leading study groups on Marx and Mao, and became a revolutionary.

"I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison," Jackson would later write to his supporters, "and they redeemed me."

While in prison, Jackson was appointed "field marshal" by the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party, and was tasked with recruiting more prisoners.

Throughout the 1960s, Jackson wrote frequently from behind bars about the consciousness of prisoners. He wrote in 1969:

There are still some Blacks here who consider themselves criminals - but not many.

Believe me, my friend, with the time and incentive that these brothers have to read, study, and think, you will find no class or category more aware, more embittered, desperate or dedicated to the ultimate remedy - revolution. The most dedicated, the best of our kind - you'll find them in the Folsoms, San Quentins and Soledads. They live like there was no tomorrow. And for most of them there isn't.

In 1966, Jackson, Nolen and a prisoner named George "Big Jake" Lewis were alleged to have founded the "Black Guerilla Family" - a prison and street gang - from inside San Quentin.

This is contested history, however. For decades, attaching Jackson's name to an active gang allowed the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to deem as contraband all material related to the Black revolutionary.

On January 13, 1970, Nolen and two other Black prisoners were killed by a corrections officer at Soledad prison. Three days after the killings were ruled justifiable homicide, a guard named John V. Mills was killed. Despite a lack of evidence, Jackson and two other prisoners - Fleeta Drumgo and John Wesley Clutchette - were charged.

Together, the three became known as the "Soledad Brothers." A conviction spelled an execution in the gas chamber at San Quentin. The state of California was trying desperately to kill its incarcerated revolutionaries.

THINGS QUICKLY got worse.

On August 7, George's brother, Jonathan, a 17-year-old high school student from Pasadena, took several hostages at the Marin County courthouse, including a judge, and demanded freedom for the three incarcerated men. Four people were killed in the ensuing shootout, including Jonathan and the judge.

Hundreds of miles away, Angela Davis - who had been recently fired from the University of California-Los Angeles for "inflammatory language" - was charged in relation to the shootout because the guns used by Jonathan were registered in her name.

Upon her capture, Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI for apprehending "the most dangerous terrorist" in the country. Davis would later be acquitted in a trial that would go down in the annals of the Black Power movement.

Jackson would dedicate his first book - the collection of writings and letters titled Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson - to Jonathan, Angela and his mother, Georgia Bea:

To the man-child, tall, evil, graceful, bright-eyed, Black man-child - Jonathan Peter Jackson - who died on August 7, 1970, courage in one hand, assault rifle in the other; my brother, comrade, friend - the true revolutionary, the Black communist guerrilla in the highest state of development, he died on the trigger, scourge of the unrighteous, soldier of the people; to this terrible man-child and his wonderful mother Georgie Bea, to Angela Y. Davis, my tender experience, I dedicate this collection of letters; to the destruction of their enemies I dedicate my life.

Soledad Brother sold over 400,000 copies and could be purchased at prison canteens across the country.

JUST OVER a year after Jonathan's death, George followed his brother to the grave.

On August 21, 1971, Jackson was shot and killed by guards at San Quentin during what authorities alleged was an escape attempt. Somehow, they claimed, Jackson had smuggled a gun into the prison.

But the story kept changing - the police couldn't get their story straight or explain how Jackson got the gun past the searches he was subjected to, or why he would try to escape moments after meeting with is lawyer.

At the time of his death, Jackson had spent 11 of his 29 years - and almost all of his time as an adult - behind bars.

"I must follow my mind, there is no turning back from awareness," wrote Jackson. "If I were to alter my step now, I would always hate myself...I would die as most of us blacks have died over the last few centuries, without having lived."

Jackson, like so many rebels before and after him, was murdered by the state. His death was condemned and mourned, and inspired a generation of activists.

"No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did," wrote author James Baldwin. Bob Dylan would eulogize Jackson in song, singing of his "tears in my bed" upon hearing the news.

While Jackson's politics, like the Panthers', were a mix of revolutionary and nationalist influences, as Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney wrote one year after his murder:

The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesperson for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle...[He] knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.

The great Trinidadian author and revolutionary C.L.R. James called Jackson's writings in Soledad Brother "the most remarkable political documents that have appeared inside or outside the United State since the death of Lenin."

In response to Jackson's murder, thousands of miles away in upstate New York, prisoners at Attica staged a show of solidarity.

Journalist Heather Ann Thompson describes the morning after Jackson's murder, when more than 800 prisoners gathered in the cafeteria and sat silently, not touching breakfast. Each one had a black shoelace tied around his bicep. One month later, Attica would soon erupt in one of the most inspiring prison rebellions in history.

WHEN A teenage George Jackson was sentenced in 1960, he became one of nearly 200,000 people incarcerated in the U.S. When he was murdered in 1971, there were an additional 100,000 men and women behind bars.

Fast forward, and the U.S. today holds some 2.2 million people behind bars, with an additional 5 million under the control of parole and probation. According to the recent film The Survivor's Guide to Prison, one-third of all incarcerated females globally are in the United States, and 13 million Americans are arrested each year.

Today, the spirit of George Jackson haunts our incarceration nation. In many prisons, any object referencing George Jackson or the Soledad Brothers is considered contraband, so powerful and inspiring are his ideas.

In 2005, then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger invoked Jackson's name as one of the reasons that prison activist and radical Stanley "Tookie" Williams should be executed.

In the words echoed by dissidents and revolutionaries across many times and many spaces, "you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution." The legacy of George Jackson is proof.

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GEORGE JACKSON was murdered by prison guards on August 21, 1971. Half a century later, his story deserves to be known by a new generation of activists. Jackson was born on September 23, 1941, in Chicago. He was raised by a loving mother and father, and given particular attention by his grandfather, George "Papa" Davis.