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Learn about The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia 

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Learn about The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia 

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ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents found antisemitic incidents jumped 34% across the U.S. from 2020 to 2021, with an average of seven incidents per day.

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ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents found antisemitic incidents jumped 34% across the U.S. from 2020 to 2021, with an average of seven incidents per day.

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Video recording of the ​​11/16/21 GIP event: Understanding Asian American History & Identity & Identity: An Introduction and Follow Up

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Video recording of the ​​11/16/21 GIP event: Understanding Asian American History & Identity & Identity: An Introduction and Follow Up

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GIP Event 11/16: Understanding Asian American History & Identity: An Introduction

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Why Ramadan is the most sacred month in the Islamic culture

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Why Ramadan is the most sacred month in the Islamic culture

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Every year, Muslims around the world anticipate the sighting of the new crescent moon that signifies the official first day of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and the most sacred month in Islamic culture.

The start of Ramadan fluctuates each year because the lunar Islamic calendar follows the phases of the moon. The beginning and end of Ramadan are determined by a moon sighting committee in Saudi Arabia. It begins the day after the committee spots the new crescent moon, which can be tricky since it's quite faint and can be seen for only about 20 minutes. If the moon isn't visible to the naked eye because of haze or clouds, lunar calculations are used to predict whether it's in the sky. This year Ramadan is predicted to begin on March 23, and to end April 21 with Eid al-Fitr celebrations.

Origin of Ramadan

Ramadan, one of the months in the Islamic calendar, was also part of ancient Arabs' calendars. The naming of Ramadan stems from the Arabic root "ar-ramad," which means scorching heat. Muslims believe that in A.D. 610, the angel Gabriel appeared to Prophet Muhammad and revealed to him the Quran, the Islamic holy book. That revelation, Laylat Al Qadar-or the "Night of Power"-is believed to have occurred during Ramadan. Muslims fast during that month as a way to commemorate the revelation of the Quran. (Read how Muslims, although often misunderstood, are thriving in America.)

The Quran consists of 114 chapters and is taken to be the direct words of God, or Allah. The hadith, or accounts by the companions of Prophet Muhammad's thoughts and deeds, supplement the Quran. Together they form the religious texts of Islam.

Fasting is a shield, so the one who fasts should avoid obscene speech and ignorant behavior. If someone abuses him or starts to fight with him, he should reply by saying: 'I am fasting. I am fasting'.

How Ramadan is observed

During Ramadan, Muslims aim to grow spiritually and build stronger relationships with Allah. They do this by praying and reciting the Quran, making their actions intentional and selfless, and abstaining from gossiping, lying, and fighting. (See how American Muslims celebrate Ramadan.)

Throughout the month, fasting between sunrise and sunset is obligatory for all Muslims, except for the ill, pregnant, traveling, elderly, or menstruating. Days missed fasting can be made up throughout the rest of the year, either all at once or one day here and there. (Read about Ramadan with your kids.)

Meals are opportunities for Muslims to gather with others in the community and break their fast together. Pre-dawn breakfast, or suhoor, usually occurs at 4:00 a.m. before the first prayer of the day, fajr. The evening meal, iftar, can begin once the sunset prayer, Maghreb, is finished-normally around 7:30. Since the Prophet Mohammad broke his fast with dates and a glass of water, Muslims eat dates at both suhoor and iftar. A staple of the Middle East, dates are rich in nutrients, easy to digest, and provide the body with sugar after a long day of fasting.

After the last day of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate its ending with Eid al-Fitr-the "festival of breaking the fast"-which begins with communal prayers at daybreak. During these three days of festivities, participants gather to pray, eat, exchange gifts, and pay their respects to deceased relatives. Some cities host carnivals and large prayer gatherings, too.

But no matter what observers have planned for their traditional suhoor and iftar gatherings this year, the spirit of this centuries-old tradition will remain the same as a time for piety and self-reflection.

The Five Pillars of Islam

These guidelines are fundamental to the lives of Muslims.

Sawm: fasting from dawn until dusk during Ramadan

Shahadah: believing there is no deity but God and prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) as his messenger

Zakat: giving to charity

Salah: praying five times a day

Hajj: making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once if able.

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Why Ramadan is the most sacred month in Islamic culture

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The sighting of a new crescent moon marks the start of Ramadan, a time for piety and self-reflection.

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A curated list of educational and informative articles for adult learners on Trans issues by Parent’s Magazine.

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A curated list of educational and informative articles for adult learners on Trans issues by Parent’s Magazine.

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Expert advice about pregnancy, your life, and family time from the editors of Parents magazine.

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A YouTube playlist of kids discussing gender and interviewing members of the Trans and Nonbinary community as a way to gently introduce these concepts to Young Learners.

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A YouTube playlist of kids discussing gender and interviewing members of the Trans and Nonbinary community as a way to gently introduce these concepts to Young Learners.

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2022 TGUYL Trans Day of Visibility Educational Videos

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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A booklist for young learners with a variety of perspectives as a way to educate, raise awareness, and help teach them to be better allies and advocates of their Trans peers.

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A booklist for young learners with a variety of perspectives as a way to educate, raise awareness, and help teach them to be better allies and advocates of their Trans peers.

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Every year on March 31st we celebrate Trans Day of Visibility to recognize the accomplishments and resilience of the Trans community. We hope you enjoy the curated book list we have created for young learners with a variety of perspectives as a way to educate, raise awareness, and help teach them to…

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Parent Ed Presentation on "Gender Diversity and Welcoming Gender Diverse Children Into Our Schools"

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Parent Ed Presentation on "Gender Diversity and Welcoming Gender Diverse Children Into Our Schools"

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For centuries, Irish Americans have played a crucial role in helping define the soul of our Nation, and today, nearly 1 in 10 Americans proudly trace their roots back to the Emerald Isle. With hope and faith in their hearts, the first immigrants from Ireland crossed the Atlantic in search of liberty and opportunity. It was the dream of a better life that brought my ancestors - the Blewitts of County Mayo and the Finnegans of County Louth - and countless other Irish immigrants.

Like so many Irish American families, my grandparents carried the spirit and memory of Ireland in their hearts - a pride and passion they instilled in their home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Through the journeys of their own mothers and fathers and in the lessons they passed on to my mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, they joined Irish Americans in every corner of America in helping to write the next chapter of the American story.

The story of Irish Americans has always been one of strength and perseverance through adversity. Many Irish immigrants arrived on America's shores to escape the Great Famine, only to face discrimination, prejudice, and poverty. Despite these hard times, they embraced their new homes in every corner of America - from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the Midwest and through the Rocky Mountains - and helped build and fortify our Nation into what it is today.

Irish Americans expanded the American middle class, building ladders of opportunity that future generations could climb. They became teachers, firefighters, police officers, labor leaders, farmers, business owners, and more. Along the way, Irish Americans contributed enormously to the American labor movement - championing safe working conditions, advocating for children's rights, and fighting racism, prejudice, and income inequality. They bravely answered the call to serve, defending our Union and its values in every battle. They continue to work on behalf of the American people as public servants - serving in the Congress, the Supreme Court, Federal agencies, the White House, and in State and local offices across the country. Irish Americans have enriched our culture and nourished our hearts and souls through the arts and humanities, earning recognition as Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning poets and authors, award-winning musicians, storytellers, and dancers, and critically acclaimed actors. They have blessed our Nation with their indomitable spirit, faith, and love for family that has been passed down through the generations. This sense of community, hospitality, resilience, and passion are integral pieces of America's cultural tapestry.

The United States and Ireland are deeply and forever intertwined: linked in memory and imagination - in joy, sorrow, and resilience - by our common love and common dreams. We share, in every heart, an unrelenting optimism - a flicker of hope that guides us through even the darkest of nights.

As we celebrate Irish-American Heritage Month, let us honor the journey and contributions of Irish Americans who helped shape this land of opportunity and define what it means to be American. Let us reaffirm the legacy of friendship and strong family ties between the United States of America and Ireland - united by our common purpose, by our histories, and by our futures.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 2022 as Irish-American Heritage Month. I call upon all Americans to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Irish Americans to our Nation with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-sixth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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A Proclamation on Irish-American Heritage Month, 2022 | The White House

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For centuries, Irish Americans have played a crucial role in helping define the soul of our Nation, and today, nearly 1 in 10 Americans proudly trace their roots back to the Emerald Isle. With hope and faith in their hearts, the first immigrants from Ireland crossed the Atlantic in search of liberty and opportunity.

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Black History Month is coming to an end, but the Pasadena Museum of History wants to ensure that the history of Pasadena's African American community is something that is recognized and celebrated not only in February but also throughout the year.

The museum is doing this with its Black History Collection, consisting of taped interviews, indices, donor lists, photographs, family material, newspaper articles, information about churches, community leaders, education, and pioneers. It also includes the Samuel C. Sheats Papers.

The genesis of the Black History Collection was the Museum's outreach effort to assemble material for a documentary, "The Changing Rose," that the Museum produced in 1984.

Historian Robin Kelley, who's currently a history professor at UCLA, interviewed Black community members and collected photographs and memorabilia for the documentary, which make up the bulk of the collection. Many of these materials date from the early 20th century, and shed light on a less-visible period in African American life prior to the Second Great Migration.

The materials were also included in a 1985 museum exhibition entitled "Early Days in Pasadena's Black History."

The Samuel C. Sheats Papers are included in the collection. Sheats (1924-1993) was a local lawyer and civic leader, who was a member of the Pasadena NAACP and fought against segregation in Pasadena schools. The entire collection, which includes more than 3,000 pages of materials and 400 historic photographs, tells the stories and struggles of Black citizens who either migrated to or grew up in Pasadena.

Among the stories in the Black History Collection that Panton remembers is that of a very light-skinned African American woman, Joan Williams, who was chosen to be Miss Crown City for the Tournament of Roses in 1958. Shortly before the Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 1959, it was discovered that Williams was African American. City officials decided to cancel the City's float as a result.

It wasn't until January 1, 2015, that Williams was finally able to ride the Rose Parade float, upon invitation by Pasadena City officials who also apologized to her for the unfortunate episode in 1959. Williams died on Feb. 20, 2019 at her home near the Rose Bowl Stadium. She was 86.

The Black History Collection also includes an oral history portion, including interviews that Kelly did of 27 prominent members of the African American community in Pasadena, among them Olympian Mack Robinson; Ray Bartlett, who was Jackie Robinson's college teammate, a veteran, and one of the first black employees of Los Angeles County Fire Department; and Ruth Wright who was married to the founder of Pasadena NAACP John Wright.

The audio has been digitized as a part of the California Revealed Project, a State Library initiative that helps public libraries throughout the state digitize, preserve, and provide online access to the archived materials. You can search through the archived interviews and listen to them on the California Revealed website, www.californiarevealed.org/collections/pasadena-museum-history.

Adrian Panton himself utilized the Black History Collection in 2011 when he curated an online exhibition on Flickr, "Glimpses of Early Black History in Pasadena, 1850 to 1950." The 50 photographs, and their accompanying captions, were taken from an illustrated talk that Panton developed that explores the rich and complex history of African Americans in Pasadena. The online exhibit, still available online through www.flickr.com/photos/50910702@N04/albums/72157625660829134, was one of the first featured by the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration.

Launched in 2010, the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration makes available web-accessible historical content from the Pasadena Public Library, Pasadena City College, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, Pasadena Buddhist Temple, private collections from families of Pasadena, and the Pasadena Museum of History.

Information about the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration project, and the items preserved online, can be found at www.pasadenadigitalhistory.com.

The Black History Collection, one of more than 250 special collections in the archives at Pasadena Museum of History, is part of a generous digitization grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of USC's "L.A. as Subject" Community Histories Digitization project. Overall, the project involves digitization of approximately 17,000 items, including paper materials, historic photographs, video recordings, and other unique items from collections held by six community archives in the "L.A. as Subject" research alliance.

The project is expected to add to the visibility of collections in Southern California that document underrepresented community histories.

Currently, due to COVID-19, the Pasadena Museum of History, at 470 W. Walnut Street, is temporarily closed to the public. Anyone interested, however, can look through the Black History Collection, as well as other museums' and libraries' collections, through the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration website, www.pasadenadigitalhistory.com.

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Black History Month Never Ends at the Pasadena Museum of History

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Black History Month is coming to an end, but the Pasadena Museum of History wants to ensure that the history of Pasadena's African American community is something that is recognized and celebrated not only in February but also throughout the year.

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March is Women’s History Month – commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.

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Educational Resources on Women's History

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Educational Resources on Women's History

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Wonderful activities and e-books for young students.

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When we were in the classroom, we both had a special place in our hearts for social studies lessons. We admit we didn't always make time for it or value it as much as we should, but once we decided to lead culture-centered classrooms, our lives and the lives of our students were forever changed.

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“How to be a girl” -A sweet video about a mother’s journey with her trans daughter

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“How to be a girl” -A sweet video about a mother’s journey with her trans daughter

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Marlo Mack and her young trans daughter share their story in a short cartoon. Learn more on Marlo's blog, www.gendermom.com—or check out her "How to Be a Girl" podcast

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Book recommendations for discussing gender with your child:

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Book recommendations for discussing gender with your child:

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"It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity" – Theresa Thorn
"Who Are You?: The Kid's Guide to Gender Identity" – Brooke Pessin-Whedbee
"George" – Alex Gino
"Calvin" – JR & Vanessa Ford
"Red: A Crayon's Story" - Michael Hal

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The revolutionary truth about kids and gender identity | Angela Kade Goepferd

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The revolutionary truth about kids and gender identity | Angela Kade Goepferd

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The revolutionary truth about kids and gender identity | Angela Kade Goepferd | TEDxMinneapolis

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"The Genderbread Person | Gender Revolution"

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"The Genderbread Person | Gender Revolution"

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The Genderbread Person | Gender Revolution

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Defining LGBTQ Words for Elementary School Students

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Defining LGBTQ Words for Elementary School Students

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A Guide to Being an Ally of Transgender and Non-Binary Youth

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A Guide to Being an Ally of Transgender and Non-Binary Youth

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2024 Guide to Being an Ally to Trans and Nonbinary Young People

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The first step to becoming an ally to transgender and nonbinary people is to learn more; thank you for taking that step with us!

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Gender Spectrum: Intro to Understanding Gender

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Gender Spectrum: Intro to Understanding Gender

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"A person’s gender is the complex interrelationship between three dimensions: body, identity, and social gender"

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Executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

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Executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

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In this Conversation on Race, Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

Her work has been featured in books on Black Power, Jewish politics, and moral resistance, and spiritual authority. She's been featured in "The New York Times" and has published articles in the "The Forward", "Jewish Philosophy", and the "Foundation Review".
Key Topics:

The Jews of Color Initiative - was founded three years ago to create some infrastructure for Jews of Color inside the Jewish community. "We wanted to answer the questions how do we respond as Jews of Color, and how do we center Jews of color and all of our conversations?"

Results of research and survey to count Jews of Color in the US

Focus on Jewish people who self-identify as Jews of Color

The impact of racism outside the Jewish community and within the Jewish community from white Jewish people

How you can be a white Jew and be racist even having been oppressed as a Jewish person

One oppression doesn't cancel out the other

The complex makeup of the Jewish community, and the diversity of Jewish people in the US and the world

Why everyone's liberation is tied together

How the US invented the concept of whiteness to enslave, and like forcing people into labor who were Black and Brown, Indigenous, Asian in this country

Different perspectives on race, racism, Israel, colonialism, amongst Jewish people based on age and direct relationship to the holocaust

How the trauma of the holocaust is passed down and its impact on safety and behavior

The younger generations of Jewish people are more and more racially diverse

How the Black Power movement was the foundation for the movement to free Soviet Jews

Jews of Color have to deal with racism amongst white Jews and both racism and antisemitism outside the Jewish community

About Ilana Kaufman
Ilana Kaufman is the Director of the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative, a national project housed at the Leichtag Foundation. The initiative, inspired by a team of racially diverse Jewish community leaders and motivated funders, informed by racial equity and justice, and anchored by the voices and experience of Jews of Color is focused on grant making, research and field building, and community education. As a guest on NPR's Code Switch, with pieces featured in eJewish Philanthropy and The Foundation Review, and an Eli Talk titled Who Counts, Race and the Jewish Future with 16,000 views, Ilana is passionate about all things at the intersection of Jewish Community/Racial Justice/Jews of Color/Education/Philanthropy. Prior to joining the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative Ilana was the Public Affairs and Civic Engagement Director, East Bay for the San Francisco, Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council. Ilana, a Schusterman Fellow who is always searching Jewish Text for discussion of equity and justice received her B.A. in Sociology from California State University-Humboldt, and her M.A. in Educational Pedagogy from Mills College.

Contact Info:

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Episode 76: Conversation on Race and Jews of Color with Ilana Kaufman - Race Convo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this Conversation on Race, Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew. Her work has been featured in books on Black Power, Jewish politics, and moral resistance, and spiritual authority. She's been featured in "The New York Times" and has published articles...

# data[].attributes.headline
Executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

# data[].attributes.subject
Executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this Conversation on Race, Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew.

Her work has been featured in books on Black Power, Jewish politics, and moral resistance, and spiritual authority. She's been featured in "The New York Times" and has published articles in the "The Forward", "Jewish Philosophy", and the "Foundation Review".
Key Topics:

The Jews of Color Initiative - was founded three years ago to create some infrastructure for Jews of Color inside the Jewish community. "We wanted to answer the questions how do we respond as Jews of Color, and how do we center Jews of color and all of our conversations?"

Results of research and survey to count Jews of Color in the US

Focus on Jewish people who self-identify as Jews of Color

The impact of racism outside the Jewish community and within the Jewish community from white Jewish people

How you can be a white Jew and be racist even having been oppressed as a Jewish person

One oppression doesn't cancel out the other

The complex makeup of the Jewish community, and the diversity of Jewish people in the US and the world

Why everyone's liberation is tied together

How the US invented the concept of whiteness to enslave, and like forcing people into labor who were Black and Brown, Indigenous, Asian in this country

Different perspectives on race, racism, Israel, colonialism, amongst Jewish people based on age and direct relationship to the holocaust

How the trauma of the holocaust is passed down and its impact on safety and behavior

The younger generations of Jewish people are more and more racially diverse

How the Black Power movement was the foundation for the movement to free Soviet Jews

Jews of Color have to deal with racism amongst white Jews and both racism and antisemitism outside the Jewish community

About Ilana Kaufman
Ilana Kaufman is the Director of the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative, a national project housed at the Leichtag Foundation. The initiative, inspired by a team of racially diverse Jewish community leaders and motivated funders, informed by racial equity and justice, and anchored by the voices and experience of Jews of Color is focused on grant making, research and field building, and community education. As a guest on NPR's Code Switch, with pieces featured in eJewish Philanthropy and The Foundation Review, and an Eli Talk titled Who Counts, Race and the Jewish Future with 16,000 views, Ilana is passionate about all things at the intersection of Jewish Community/Racial Justice/Jews of Color/Education/Philanthropy. Prior to joining the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative Ilana was the Public Affairs and Civic Engagement Director, East Bay for the San Francisco, Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council. Ilana, a Schusterman Fellow who is always searching Jewish Text for discussion of equity and justice received her B.A. in Sociology from California State University-Humboldt, and her M.A. in Educational Pedagogy from Mills College.

Contact Info:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Episode 76: Conversation on Race and Jews of Color with Ilana Kaufman - Race Convo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this Conversation on Race, Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative shares her experience and perspective as an African-American Jew. Her work has been featured in books on Black Power, Jewish politics, and moral resistance, and spiritual authority. She's been featured in "The New York Times" and has published articles...

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Commentary: Whoopi Goldberg got it all wrong on the Holocaust. But if she can learn, we all can

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Commentary: Whoopi Goldberg got it all wrong on the Holocaust. But if she can learn, we all can

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Commentary: Whoopi Goldberg got it all wrong on the Holocaust. But if she can learn, we all can

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‘The View’s’ Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for misinformed comments on the Holocaust. Her error is a chance for us all to examine our misperceptions.

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Whoopi Goldberg's Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don't fit into Western boxes

Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

This is an edition of Yair Rosenberg's newsletter, Deep Shtetl. Sign up .
Yesterday, celebrated actor and TV host Whoopi Goldberg caused a minor meltdown on ABC's The View when she asserted that the Holocaust "isn't about race." Later that day, she joined The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and expanded on these remarks in an uncomfortable exchange, insisting that "the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people."

As countless commentators pointed out, this line of thinking is profoundly mistaken. The Nazis were obsessed with race and defined the Jews as their racial inferiors, which is how they justified exterminating them. This is why the Nazis targeted anyone with a Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether the person identified as Jewish or not. Nazism was a blood-based doctrine of racial supremacy, and its consequence was the genocide of the Jews. The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen. Race is a social construct, and this is how it was constructed in Nazi Germany and much of Europe.

pic.twitter.com/KUpdyhQnho- Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022

To her credit, Goldberg apologized last night on Twitter, and then again this morning on The View, alongside Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League, who talked through the issue with the panelists.

How Do You Define Jews?

Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused-and understandably so. In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don't know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like "race" or "religion," and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn't conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It's not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it's also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It's not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it's not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

Instead, Judaism is an amalgam of all these things-more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition-and so there's no great way to classify it in English. A lot of confusion results from attempts to reduce this complexity to something more palatable for contemporary conceptions.

This is just my off-the-cuff explanation. One could write a book about this topic- scholars have -and still not exhaust its nuances. Over the years, smart people have used terms like "civilization" or "peoplehood" or "tribe" to describe the Jewish collective, but because those words are not as straightforward to the average person, I prefer "family." Whichever label one employs, I hope that the above explanation provides a starting point for those trying to understand the nature of Jewish identity, and helps them avoid the trap of imposing outside ideas on it.

Goldberg was right to apologize, and probably wishes she hadn't raised this subject. But I'm glad her misstep has provided a public opportunity to address it. We need to have more conversations about these topics going forward, not fewer. Conversation dispels confusion and leads to greater understanding, and given recent events, we need a lot more understanding about Jews in our public discourse.

This is a free edition of Deep Shtetl, a newsletter about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion. You can sign up here to get future free editions in your inbox. But to get access to all editions, including exclusive subscriber posts, and to support this work, please subscribe to The Atlantic

Sign up for this newsletter.

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Whoopi Goldberg's Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don't fit into Western boxes This is an edition of Yair Rosenberg's newsletter, Deep Shtetl. Sign up . Yesterday, celebrated actor and TV host Whoopi Goldberg caused a minor meltdown on ABC's The View when she asserted that the Holocaust "isn't about race."

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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones Preorder/Release Date: November 16, 2021

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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones Preorder/Release Date: November 16, 2021

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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones Hardcover - Preorder/Release Date: November 16, 2021 A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

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Camille Rich referenced this in her talk “The Value of an Anti-Racist Education” on on 1/18/21

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View of On the Impossibility of Learning "Not to See": Colorblindness, Invisibility, and Anti-Bias Education

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Return to Article Details On the Impossibility of Learning "Not to See": Colorblindness, Invisibility, and Anti-Bias Education

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More Resources to Learn About AAPI History & Support

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More Resources to Learn About AAPI History & Support

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GIP Event 11/16/21 - Understanding Asian American History & Identity: An Introduction

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GIP Event 11/16/21 - Understanding Asian American History & Identity: An Introduction

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GIP Event 11/16: Understanding Asian American History & Identity: An Introduction

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Resources to support the AAPI community compiled by Dr. Iqbal and Dr. Woo

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Resources to support the AAPI community compiled by Dr. Iqbal and Dr. Woo

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MLK Day of Service, January 17, 2022 | California Volunteers

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Serve your community in honor of Dr. King Jr.

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Serve your community in honor of Dr. King Jr.

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MLK Day of Service, January 17, 2022 | California Volunteers

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Hike in L.A. to Visit Dr. MLK Jr Memorial

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Hike in L.A. to Visit Dr. MLK Jr Memorial

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I can't think of a better place to commemorate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. than at the highest point in Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills. That's where you'll find a grove of trees and a memorial that was dedicated to the slain civil rights leader in 2018. Most people know little about this special place. The views of the city are incomparable, framed by stones etched with King's inspirational quotes and an obelisk that bears his likeness. "There are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of memorials, institutions, streets, avenues, boulevards, and other monuments across the globe that are dedicated to Dr. King," former L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said at the dedication event. "But today we seek to do something a little different and a little special. Today we meet Dr. King at the mountaintop." The 15,000-square-foot grove is meant to evoke the outdoor site where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 in Washington, D.C.

Take this easy hike to the memorial that's a couple of miles round-trip: Start at Norman O. Houston Park at 4800 S. La Brea Ave., cross La Brea on foot and pick up a dirt path called Ron's Trail. The trail loops gently upward. Bear right to connect with part of the Bowl Loop and on to the Western Ridgeline Trail, where you'll find the memorial - and the views. It's a great place to pause and reflect on King's legacy. You can visit another local King landmark, a sculpture of white panels arranged in a circle. The King Memorial is at 205 S. Willowbrook Drive in Compton. If you're going farther over the three-day weekend, national parks and forests as well as other federal lands that charge entrance fees will be free on Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For example, Yosemite National Park waives the $35 per car fee to enter. By the way, L.A.'s long-running Kingdom Day Parade set for Monday has been canceled because of COVID-19 concerns.

3 things to do this week

1. Take a hike to Orange County's hidden red rocks. Red Rock Canyon is one of those names that seems out of place in the O.C. Not so. The hidden gem on the edge of Lake Forest is pretty easy to access on an out-and-back 4-mile hike following Borrego Canyon and Red Rock Canyon trails in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park. If you want to learn about the geology, join a Sierra Club Angeles Chapter hike at 8 a.m. Jan. 22. Geologist Jay Schneider will guide the group on an easy-paced trek and talk about the history of the massive sandstone formations. The hike is free; more information here. Check out more Orange County hikes.

2. Take the run-your-age challenge? Writer Christopher Solomon lays out a case to "run your age" in 2022 in this L.A. Times Op-Ed piece. Yep, that means continuously running a mile for every year you've been on the planet. Three-year-olds and 95-year-olds may find this daunting - me too. If you can't run, Solomon offers a twist on a potential New Year's resolution. "Run your age ... Or take it as a metaphor," he wrote. "Do something so large you can barely get your arms around it, so big it scares you, outsize enough that it forces you to reconsider everything. Quit the job you loathe, the one with the golden handcuffs. Rise at 4 a.m. every day to write the memoir that you're terrified to tell but that you can't stop thinking about. Shoulder the cause that will cut you wide open and that may lose you friends and family."

(Micah Fluellen / Los Angeles Times)

3. Camellia lovers, it's time. Plan to see these local garden shows. Big, showy camellias bloom in January and February in Southern California. You can expect to see varieties from Japan as well as yields from seeds imported from China and other Asian countries. The Southern California Camellia Society is hosting a show Jan. 22 and 23 at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge and a second show Jan. 29 and 30 at the L.A. County Arboretum in Arcadia. (Entrance fees are required at both gardens.) It costs nothing if you want to enter your favorite bloom. And there's more. Camellia shows continue through February where you can savor different varieties and learn more about how to grow them. Learn more about why this is the month to luxuriate in camellias.

Wild ways

Are you thinking about hitting the road with your pandemic pup? Digital editor Jessica Martinez writes about what she learned traveling with Millie, her 11-month-old goldendoodle, to Capitol Reef, Arches, Rocky Mountain, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Grand Canyon national parks. Some of the pre-trip questions that Martinez fretted over: "Were we doing the right thing by taking Millie with us? Would she like being in the van for the majority of most days? Would she behave? Would there be enough for her to see and do?" Tips include practicing driving your dog around (especially if your pet isn't used to a moving vehicle) and bringing comforts along, like the dog bed and chew sticks. Read about the 10 ways to make traveling with your pup stress-free for both of you.

The must-read

Aww, we love our special outdoor places, and we mourn them when they vanish. Tourists to Spooner's Cove in Montaña de Oro State Park used to marvel at a small rock arch perched above the ocean. "Used to," because heavy December rains and storms collapsed the arch at the park near Morro Bay. "I knew that it was fragile," Dan Krieger , a professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, told The Times. "I just fell in love with it, and when I heard it was gone, I felt a sense of loss." Others expressed similar sentiments on social media. Big ocean waves have carved caves and arches in the sandstone cliffs, which gives coastal California its signature look. Read more about the arch and its fans in this story.

The red flag

Is the Ojai Valley a paradise or a place in peril? Hard to say as the area's water source is starting to dry up, says Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, who wrote an opinion piece for The Times. The resort and farming area 83 miles north of downtown L.A. for years tapped into Lake Casitas reservoir, built in the 1950s. But, with less reliable rain and more drought conditions, that has all changed. What can be done? Pincetl has some ideas, but it will take a rethink - a situation that other California communities likely will face too. "The driving force of this new ethics is about loving a place, and I see glimpses of it in the Ojai Valley and those who learn to farm within the limits of this small place," Pincetl writes. "This means learning about an area's groundwater resources, how to re-infiltrate storm water effectively when it does rain, ensuring there is enough mulch to maintain soil moisture and build soil fertility, planting locally appropriate plants in gardens and treating water as precious and life-giving."

P.S.

P-22 is making (uninvited) house calls. Catch a glimpse of L.A.'s most famous mountain lion on Ring video (included in the link below) taken at a Beachwood Canyon home's backyard on Jan. 4. "I was shocked to see a lion's tail," resident Leilani Fideler told The Times. "I saw him jump over my gate. It was just wild." Officials know it's P-22 because he wears a tracking collar. The lion has made his home in Griffith Park for a decade. Read more about P-22 in Beachwood Canyon.

Southern California's big December storms caused flooding that shut Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu. The park and its popular campground will remain closed until Jan. 31. Fifty campers were evacuated from the campground Dec. 30 when water surged through the area, causing vehicles to get stuck in the mud.

Send us your thoughts

Share anything that's on your mind. The Wild is written for you and delivered to your inbox for free. Drop us a line at TheWild@latimes.com.
Click to view the web version of this newsletter and share it with others, and sign up to have it sent weekly to your inbox. I'm Mary Forgione, and I write The Wild. I've been exploring trails and open spaces in Southern California for four decades.

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The best place to reflect on King's legacy? This grove of trees

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I can't think of a better place to commemorate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. than at the highest point in Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills. That's where you'll find a grove of trees and a memorial that was dedicated to the slain civil rights leader in 2018.

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Books for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrates the life and civil rights work of Dr. King.

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Dr. MLK Jr resources for Educators and Families

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Dr. MLK Jr resources for Educators and Families

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17 Ways to Learn About Martin Luther King, Jr. for Kids, Adults, and Teachers | Berkshire Museum | Berkshire Museum

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Use this collection of videos, stories, websites, lesson plans, and more curated by Berkshire Museum's education team to learn and share the message of one of America's greatest civil rights leaders.

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When you think about teaching students about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. what narrative comes to mind? What about when you think about what you were taught in school? For us, (LaNesha and I) we remember being taught the same story year after year after year in elementary school.

The Story of MLK Jr (That We Grew Tired of Hearing):

Once upon a time there was a nice man named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He couldn't drink out of white water fountains or go to white schools because he was Black. This made him sad. He wanted to be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. When he grew up he had a dream about Black kids and white kids being BFFS. He nicely told white people to stop being racist and... they all listened! Racism stopped and now Black people can go to school wherever they want. The End.

Honest + Inclusive History

"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history."
- James W. Loewen

Some teachers like to go for a "fun and cute" angle when teaching history, but the truth of the matter is, most of U.S. history is neither fun or cute.

Do we want to be age-appropriate? Of course! But do we want to tell the truth? Absolutely, we do.

It's so important to tell the truth and be as accurate as your grade level allows. When we think about the amount of adults that hold certain ideas about this nation and their founding fathers, we think about the many lies they have been told and believe that contribute to a society that will not properly address and heal from its past. Honest and inclusive history is the solution to that.

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."
Malcolm X

Try This and Not That When Teaching About Dr. King

Try to get some vertical alignment going at your school. How many teachers in your building are teaching basically the exact same MLK lesson and doing some form of the exact same craft? Chances are your students already know he had a dream. How can grade levels at your school approach these lessons this year? Dr. King was more than just a dream.

Racism is still very much an on-going issue. Are your students simply leaving your lesson with their, "I Have a Dream" writing prompt where most of them wrote down silly things they dreamed about or a wish they had? (If this is the case, the lesson clearly didn't land and they missed the point).

Or are they leaving your lesson a little bit wiser about the racism people had to face, more understanding of the ways in which those people resisted, and inspired to continue the fight that is still going on today?

Your students should not walk away from your lesson about Dr. King with a sense of relief because he stopped racism. He was killed because of it.

Your lessons should not be white-washed and watered down. Honest history matters. *Gestures at America.

Words + Thoughts + Feelings Matter

The words you choose to use when discussing this critical lesson matter.

We compiled a few thoughts based on what we have seen and questions we have been asked over the years at our places of work or on social media.

You can call Black people Black or African American (though some Black people, who feel no connection to Africa or America, may prefer a different title).

Do not refer to Black people as colored, coloreds, or the Blacks.

Black people did not and do not experience racism simply because they are Black. They experience it because of people who are racist.

Be mindful of saying things like, "They couldn't go to the white schools because they were Black." This implies that being Black is the issue. Try saying, "They couldn't go to the schools because of the racist people that didn't want them there."

No matter who you teach (an all white class or an all Black class or anyone else) make sure your students know that there is nothing wrong with being Black. The problem was white people being racist. Racism is the legacy of enslavement.

Speaking of enslavement, if you reference slavery, "slaves", or "slave masters", instead say enslavement, enslaved people, and enslavers.

Masters gives off an air of importance that they simply didn't have. Enslavers lets people know that someone was actively enforcing this evil and racist practice. It wasn't just how things were or titles they earned.

Don't attempt to water down or normalize racism by saying, "That's just how it was in the past." For who? It wasn't just the way it was and many people knew better and were fighting for change from the very beginning.

Check in with students often about how they feel throughout the lesson. Injustice can bring out a lot of strong emotions.

Objectives and Learning Goals

It may be too late now, but it helps if this isn't your first conversation with students about race, discrimination, or racism.

Before you begin your lesson, think about what you want your students to get out of it. And we aren't just talking about working on their main idea or summarizing skills. What content do you want your students to know and understand? What life lessons do you want them to walk away with?

For us, we wanted our students to understand that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conveyed a powerful illustration of how racism operates and how people at one point in time resisted the unfair treatment. We discuss his impact and the reason there is a federal holiday named after him. Anytime we discuss racism and discrimination, we always make sure to include how people resisted and fought for what was right. We give them hope that it doesn't have to be that way and that they can be a part of the solution.

So, What Exactly Do We Teach?

We teach them the facts. We let our students know we have a big and important conversation to have. We read historical information and then ask for students to weigh-in. We ask what they think. We come up with ideas of how we can help. In order to make sure it was appropriate for our students, we researched it and created it ourselves in PowerPoint.

Note: There are many things we allowed our students to debate about over the school year, but racism is not one of them. It is wrong. There are not two sides. There are no pros. End of discussion.

We have whole group discussions, as well as turn and talks with partners. We use students' answers during discussion time to informally check for understanding.

Children are naturally justice oriented (cue one of them yelling, "That's not fair!). Most of our lessons end with students brainstorming ways to organize something peaceful to take a stand against present day racism. One year my students voted to create posters and hang them around our school. We also buddied up with a 4th grade class (we were in 1st) to teach the older kids what we learned and find out what they knew about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. .

*We understand circumstances have changed and ideas may be limited due to covid-19, but there is still action that can be taken that helps students see that their voices and choices matter.

We gave our students the opportunity to process their learning and share their ideas through Draw & Respond sheets, debates, and writing prompts. Our lessons about Dr. King last 4-5 days, to ensure students are truly understanding what they've been learning. We read the eBook we created daily during that time.

We teach the vocabulary words students will need to access the lesson. These words are also helpful when students are learning about other historical leaders and moments. There is always overlap and it feels good when students make those connections.

Need vocabulary strategy ideas? https://www.readingrockets.org/article/teaching-vocabulary

Where Can You Find Our Lessons?

The Resource Shown in the Images Above. Click on the image to see the resource.

If you think your students have the information about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. covered, check out this resource below that explores how his birthday came to be a federal holiday!

Click on the resource to see more.

We hope this post was helpful!

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for Primary Students - Naomi O'Brien - Read Like a Rockstar

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When you think about teaching students about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. what narrative comes to mind? What about when you think about what you were taught in school? For us, (LaNesha and I) we remember being taught the same story year after year after year in elementary school.

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10 Things You May Not Know About Dr. MLK Jr

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10 Things You May Not Know About Dr. MLK Jr

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Baptist minister and social activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) dedicated his life to the nonviolent struggle for justice in the United States. King's leadership played a pivotal role in ending entrenched segregation for Black Americans and to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Read on to discover more facts about the life and legacy of the civil rights icon.

1. King's Birth Name Was Michael, Not Martin

King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929. In 1934, however, his father, a pastor at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, traveled to Germany and became inspired by the Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. As a result, King Sr. changed his own name as well as that of his five-year-old son.

2. King Entered College At the Age of 15

King was such a gifted student that he skipped grades nine and 12 before enrolling in 1944 at Morehouse College, the alma mater of his father and maternal grandfather. Although he was the son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, King did not intend to follow the family vocation until Morehouse president Benjamin E. Mays, a noted theologian, convinced him otherwise. King was ordained before graduating college with a degree in sociology.

3. King Received His Doctorate in Systematic Theology

After earning a divinity degree from Pennsylvania's Crozer Theological Seminary, King attended graduate school at Boston University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1955. The title of his dissertation was "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman."

4. King's 'I Have a Dream' Speech Was Not His First at the Lincoln Memorial

Six years before his iconic oration at the March on Washington, King was among the civil rights leaders who spoke in the shadow of the Great Emancipator during the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on May 17, 1957. Before a crowd estimated at between 15,000 and 30,000, King delivered his first national address on the topic of voting rights. His speech, in which he urged America to "give us the ballot," drew strong reviews and positioned him at the forefront of the civil rights leadership.

5. King Was Imprisoned Nearly 30 Times

According to the King Center, the civil rights leader went to jail 29 times. He was arrested for acts of civil disobedience and on trumped-up charges, such as when he was jailed in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone.

6. King Narrowly Escaped an Assassination Attempt a Decade Before His Death

On September 20, 1958, King was in Harlem signing copies of his new book, Stride Toward Freedom, in Blumstein's department store when he was approached by Izola Ware Curry. The woman asked if he was Martin Luther King Jr. After he said yes, Curry said, "I've been looking for you for five years," and she plunged a seven-inch letter opener into his chest. The tip of the blade came to rest alongside his aorta, and King underwent hours of delicate emergency surgery. Surgeons later told King that just one sneeze could have punctured the aorta and killed him. From his hospital bed where he convalesced for weeks, King issued a statement affirming his nonviolent principles and saying he felt no ill will toward his mentally ill attacker.

7. King's Last Public Speech Foretold His Death

King had come to Memphis in April 1968 to support the strike of the city's Black garbage workers, and in a speech on the night before his assassination, he told an audience at Mason Temple Church: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now ... I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

8. Members of King's Family Did Not Believe James Earl Ray Acted Alone

Ray, a career criminal, pled guilty to King's assassination but later recanted. King's son Dexter met publicly with Ray in 1997 and argued for the case to be reopened. King's widow, Coretta, believed the Mafia and local, state and federal government agencies were deeply involved in the murder. She praised the result of a 1999 civil trial in which a Memphis jury decided the assassination was the result of a conspiracy and that Ray was set up to take the blame. A U.S. Department of Justice investigation released in 2000 reported no evidence of a conspiracy.

9. King's Mother Was Also Slain by a Bullet

On June 30, 1974, as 69-year-old Alberta Williams King played the organ at a Sunday service inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, Marcus Wayne Chenault Jr. rose from the front pew, drew two pistols and began to fire shots. One of the bullets struck and killed King, who died steps from where her son had preached nonviolence. The deranged gunman said that Christians were his enemy and that although he had received divine instructions to kill King's father, who was in the congregation, he killed King's mother instead because she was closer. The shooting also left a church deacon dead. Chenault received a death penalty sentence that was later changed to life imprisonment, in part due to the King family's opposition to capital punishment.

10. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Cesar Chavez are the Only Other Americans to Have Had Their Birthdays Observed as a National Holiday

In 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that created a federal holiday to honor King. The holiday, first commemorated in 1986, is celebrated on the third Monday in January, close to the civil rights leader's January 15 birthday.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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10 Things You May Not Know About Martin Luther King Jr. | HISTORY

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Explore 10 surprising facts about the civil rights leader.

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My earliest memory of delighting in my own androgyny came inside a birthday party bounce house near the end of my time in elementary school. I climbed inside with what my mother had named a "pixie cut" but what my grandmother had derisively called "boy hair," a sharp black leather jacket, and cuffed denim. Immediately, a little boy interrupted me to demand information about my gender in a way that only kids can: was I a boy or was I a girl? The question gave me the good kind of goosebumps. I was having my first confrontation with binary gender.

This, I would find out later on, is not an especially cis experience.

It may be surprising to learn that I didn't have a serious talk with myself about gender again until I was almost thirty. I was hesitant even to call myself nonbinary at first, spending a few noncommital months wearing "she/they" buttons and avoiding the gender conversation altogether.

I climbed inside with what my mother had named a "pixie cut" but what my grandmother had derisively called "boy hair," a sharp black leather jacket, and cuffed denim.

For me and for many of us in the queer community, the language we use to describe our experiences can be a source of anxiety. Worries about our own shifting understanding of ourselves invalidating us to other people, or even gatekeeping in our own communities, can discourage us from exploring terms that may make us feel more at home in ourselves. I, for the last few months, have had this relationship with the word "trans."

I hadn't even considered calling myself trans until I bumped into this concept in a book on genderqueer identity I'd brought along on a flight in early October. The author, who identifies as nonbinary, casually calls themself trans throughout the text, with the ease of someone who had not just thrown another person into a panicked identity crisis at 31,000 feet. As a nonbinary person, was I even "trans" enough to be trans?

Of course, what words mean matters. Language is shifting and changing around us at every opportunity, but words have definitions; it's how we organize and understand the world. I always assumed that to be transgender meant to have gone through a "transition" from one binary gender to another. But this definition didn't feel accurate or reflective or inclusive once I articulated it. Gender is a complex multidimensional intersection of presentation, expression, and identity, so it stood to reason that identifying as something other than my assigned gender at birth would mean that I was transgender. Even Monica Helms, the designer of the five-bar transgender pride flag, explained that the white stripe in the center of the design was for "those who are transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender." So why didn't I feel like I "deserved" to call myself trans?

Glossaries of terms within the queer community are often outdated, and lack the nuance and emotional usage that we see in our lived world. For my answer, I would just have to ask around.

So I did. I reached out not only to my personal nonbinary friends, but also to the author who gave me the identity crisis, a colleague who had lived in the world of queer language decades longer than me, and my 38,000 Tik Tok followers.

@justflintisfine I can't wear this sweatshirt to school, so it's an at-home treat for you #trans #nonbinary #enby #theythem #transmasc #queerdiscourse #lgbtq ♬ original sound - Flint

Here's what I learned:
Kay
Kay (26, they/them), self-describes as a "queer pansexual nonbinary human/entity" and has been confident calling themself trans for a long time. "Some people might be hesitant because they think being transgender means going from one to the other, but that concept is binary," they argue, "but I've always been this person, I just had to discover it within myself and transition to it, but it's always been there."

It's easy to be confident and comfortable around Kay, and it's affirming to hear them talk about their gender in such clear and assured terms. Unlike me, a person who found gender affirmation at the hands of a well-tailored vest and a patterned tie, Kay says that they know who they are in the most clear terms out in the wilderness, far from hot showers and binary expectations.

"Some people might be hesitant because they think being transgender means going from one to the other, but that concept is binary."

"You can be more comfortable with yourself in outdoor communities," Kay tells me. "You get to just go out and exist with the birds. No bird is going to look at me and say 'Miss?' What bird is going to misgender me?"

This perspective - of shirking off expectations and guidelines of gender set down by the fragile institutions of man - seems to be Kay's central tenant of transness. The idea that had been clouding me, that I might not be trans "enough" to use that word for myself, they rejected outright: "Once you tell someone there's no boundary, that there's no 'more or less' trans, they can become more of themselves," they tell me. "There's no prescription, there's no narrative you have to fill to be transgender."
Ivy
Ivy (27, they/them), self-describes as a "queer Vietnamese nonbinary femme" who grew up in "Vietnamese-American limbo" when it came to their understanding of sexuality and gender, where the expectations of what it meant to be a woman within both cultures kept them from feeling entirely connected to their assigned gender at birth. They have felt alienated also, however, from the typical picture of nonbinary identity on websites like Tumblr.

"Most of the time I do not want to dress that way," they say of the "short hair and tie" version of gender nonconformity that has become so popular online. "There are some people who think that being nonbinary but dressing femme is like 'woman lite,' but when I express myself more femininely, it's not to subscribe to society's expectation of femininity, it's a comfortable and honest expression of my nonbinary self."

"For a while, I felt like I didn't identify [as] trans because I didn't deserve it. I felt 'not trans' enough."

Ivy challenges the common assumption that to be nonbinary is to be primarily masculine, especially for those of us assigned female at birth. "My femininity is fluid and ranges from hyperfeminine to some degree of masc energy," they say. "Nonbinary identity opened up a lot of room for me to explore. I hope to break assumptions about what nonbinary looks like. If I look like a woman but I tell you I'm not, I hope to break your brain a little."

So what's their take on the use of "transgender" as a personal identifier?

"For a while, I felt like I didn't identify [as] trans because I didn't deserve it. I felt 'not trans' enough." For Ivy, it's an ongoing struggle, a case of imposter syndrome. "Trans feels like the pinnacle, something aspirational. I'm more open now to identifying as trans, but I'm still working on the idea that you have to completely change from one gender to another. I'm trying to change my mentality."
Eris
Eris (29, they/them), is the cause of my original airplane gender crisis. The author of 2019's nonbinary and genderqueer identity guide They/Them/Their , and an internationally-celebrated fiction writer, I tried to keep my cool when they answered my very chill DM on Instagram asking for some clarification on their position regarding trans language.

They explain that being "very online" as a queer Millenial, during a time of great linguistic change, meant that there was an abundance of confusion about what words would work for a community like ours. "There was a lot of transphobia, or even just plain incomprehension, and I think a lot of us carry that inside still," they say. For them, "trans" takes a front seat to other descriptors, as they explain that what the term represents "very much fits with my experience and my values, the community I consider myself to be a part of, whereas nonbinary is more of a descriptor than an identity."

And one of my fears, that I would never truly be transgender unless I had completed some kind of medical transition, was waved away early by Eris's much larger definition:

"Trans is a broad church, and it's about both the safe haven of understanding and shared lived experience, and political solidarity. If you feel trans fits your experience or if the community and language are useful to you, regardless of what you change or don't change about your body and appearance, I say welcome!"
Robyn
Robyn (61, she/her), is the only one of my interviewees who does not identify as nonbinary. When I ask her to give me an idea of how she would describe herself, it takes a while for her to come up with a satisfying list of words, but she finally settles on "Married lesbian, educator, and gamer."

Her own experience with language and LGBTQ+ identity was shaped by a world that many of us in younger queer circles will never truly understand. A self-described "post-war generation baby" who went to high school in the deep south, her early encounters with words like "queer" were not of empowerment and community, but of persecution and fear. She explains that her earliest memories of encountering people like her were in situations of danger: a black trans woman tricked into sitting on thumbtacks in the classroom, a camp counselor accused of being homosexual, beaten and run out of the community.

A self-described "post-war generation baby" who went to high school in the deep south, her early encounters with words like "queer" were not of empowerment and community, but of persecution and fear.

"I saw it and felt complicit," she says, "The experience keeps you from wanting to be out. [I was] trying to blend in."

These moments have bled over into how Robyn now sees her own identity. Though she went through a gender transition when she was younger, she very rarely identifies herself as trans. "When I first heard it, the world transgender felt like the word queer: it's an insult. I've gotten more comfortable with it in the last five years, but I used to blanch," she says, explaining that her transition feels more like something she went through, a process that happened and then was left behind, than a current identity.

"People feel comfortable when they have labels for you," Robyn argues, and though she is and has been active in the world of LGBTQ+ advocacy in her community since the 1980s, she says that the lowest priority for her is worrying what somebody calls themselves. "Support groups when I was coming out were led by transvestites, drag queens, and transsexuals. There was no transgender... If people want to use that word for themselves that's fine, but if you start labeling everybody, it's easier to pigeonhole them. You're no longer listening to them."
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Ultimately, I have feared adding words to describe my experience because I am worried about being "too much" for people. I am already exhausted correcting acquaintances when I get she/her'd, and I don't correct strangers at all. Adding "transness" to my understanding of who I am feels heavy, and as Eris correctly pointed out, I am still likely carrying the weight of my own internalized transphobia.

My problem is that I have seen being trans as walking as quickly as possible across the hot coals of androgyny. What makes some people uncomfortable with the notion of nonbinary identity is that there's no obvious place you're transitioning to; there's no goal or endpoint that will make cis people comfortable, no clearly defined cultural finish line. And I recognize completely that this is coming from a white and western view of gender, because that's the box I was raised in and the one I'm trying to bust out of. But for me, for now, just challenging that is enough.

What I've really gleaned from this experience hasn't been a clear-cut black and white outline for who can use these words, but that there is a profound value in asking and learning. "There is something to be said about having this conversation with someone who understands," Kay says at the very end of our talk. "I don't know what it is about this connection between nonbinary people, but it makes me feel safe and comfortable. I wouldn't want to have this conversation with anyone else."♦

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My earliest memory of delighting in my own androgyny came inside a birthday party bounce house near the end of my time in elementary school. I climbed inside with what my mother had named a "pixie cut" but what my grandmother had derisively called "boy hair," a sharp black leather jacket, and cuffed denim.

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This Guy Said Critical Race Theory Was The Most Important Issue In The Virginia Gubernatorial Race. Here’s His Reaction When He Was Asked To Explain It - Digg

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A Virginia voter doesn’t think schools should be teaching kids about Critical Race Theory. Please don’t ask him to define what it is though.

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How a complicated and expansive academic theory developed during the 1980s has become a hot-button political issue 40 years later.

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How a complicated and expansive academic theory developed during the 1980s has become a hot-button political issue 40 years later.

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Critical Race Theory is currently facing a wave of right-wing attacks aimed at restricting the teaching of race and racism in America. This dangerous assault anchors its strategy in misinformation and the distortion of Critical Race Theory's meaning. So what is CRT, really? And why do we need it so badly?

Narrated by Kimberlé Crenshaw

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#TruthBeTold: What is Critical Race Theory?

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Affirmative Action helps level the playing field. Produced by the African American Policy Forum in 2010

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by Tema Okun. Best read on a computer not an iphone or ipad.

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I have designed the pages of this website to offer a revised and updated take on the original article outlining White Supremacy characteristics, written in 1999 when I was working in collaboration with my late colleague and mentor Kenneth Jones. While I wrote the words on the pages that became the White Supremacy Culture article all those years ago in 1999, I do not consider the original article or this website my work. I feel a sense of stewardship rather than ownership. The article was informed by my decade of experience facilitating racial equity workshops and work, starting with my original colleague the inestimable James Williams and followed by a 12-year partnership with Kenneth. I was deeply steeped in my own learning curve over the course of that decade as a result of my work with these two as well as many other colleagues who are named on the About page. In addition, I was fortunate to be mentored by Sharon Martinas, who was organizing the Challenging White Supremacy workshop at that time; Sharon was the one who advised me to include antidotes. I also attended a Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond workshop (one of many I was lucky to attend). This workshop was co-facilitated by Daniel Buford, a lead trainer at PISAB at the time the original article was written. You will see asterisks next to the sections of the original article (and here as well) informed by his teaching.

I did not know at the time I wrote the article that it would have such relevance over so many years. I never saw it as a free-standing piece; Kenneth and I included it as part of a much longer workbook that we designed and created to support our workshop curriculum and facilitation. People who came to our workshops then copied it and distributed it and put it on this new phenomenon called the internet. The article began to develop its own legs. I feel the power of the article has nothing to do with me as the author (and you will see why I say that on the Characteristics page) and everything to do with our shared desire to both understand and transgress white supremacy culture.

I want to be clear that this website is offering one way of understanding white supremacy culture, not the way. May this be a small contribution to a larger understanding.

Many other people have been and are writing about white supremacy culture; you will find links to many of them on this website. You will also find a list of some of those resources on the What Is It? page.

My hope is that this website offers something useful and that you, the reader, take what you find and develop it further. Please take whatever wisdom you find here and make it grow, correct whatever mistakes you find, create something deeper, wiser, better, and put it out in the world to help us all.

My goal in offering this website is to contribute to our shared anti-racist racial justice commitment. My hope is that this website is an organizing and justice building tool, one that helps us live into a collective vision of nourishment, resourcing, and cherishing ourselves and each other as we dream, build, stumble, get back up again, and cultivate compassion on our way together.

White supremacy culture is a devastating force in all our lives, used by ruling class power brokers to maintain vast and violent structural inequality (thank you Chris Crass). I will also say, with deep regret, that even those of us who are movement builders get confused about the difference between a tool and a weapon. I ask that we avoid weaponizing this information on the , along with the Characteristics page.
And... page that houses many of the different and ingenious ways that people have taken the original article, adapted it to a particular field, illustrated it, added to and revised it. I am so grateful for the creativity and brilliance that so many people and organizations have brought to this project. I close the website with a Joy page, where I include, with your help, all the ways we foster joy with and for each other as we resist, transgress, transform, liberate, and thrive.
If you click on the buttons below or on the Characteristics Page, you will find individual pages that take an in-depth look at some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, including a few additional characteristics to those named in the original article. I have revised and updated the characteristics to incorporate more of an intersectional lens. I have added stories, poems, art, as well as links to other resources, all in service of a deeper dive and multiple ways to interact with and explore the characteristics' nuances and complexities.

While I describe these characteristics separately or in groups, they never stand alone. I have pulled them apart to help us understand them better and they reinforce each other rather than act in isolation.

I also include a page of Racial Equity Principles developed by DismantlingRacismWorks

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I have designed the pages of this website to offer a revised and updated take on the original article outlining White Supremacy characteristics, written in 1999 when I was working in collaboration with my late colleague and mentor Kenneth Jones.

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A diverse range of our instructors come together to talk about the power of empathy and how it can transform the way you view the world. Join Pharrell Williams, Robin Arzón, Roxane Gay, Walter Mosley, Robert Reffkin, Gloria Steinem, and Cornel West as they share their experiences with empathy and its importance in their lives and careers. Learn how to exercise, cultivate, and promote empathy to connect with others on a deeper, more human level.

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Getting Unhoused People Into Shelter Is Hard, But Finding A Place for Trans Or Nonbinary People Is Harder

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Experts say more funding is needed to help LGBTQ+ people experiencing homelessness who aren’t young or old enough to access targeted services, especially for trans and non-binary people who have to overcome certain prejudices to get safe and affordable housing.

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Tryron Ramsey had been living at his grandfather's house for a week when he walked into his bedroom after a shower. His grandfather stood there, holding the cell phone Ramsey had left unlocked on the bed, and asked:

"Who are all these guys on your phone?"

Ramsey had his phone open to Grindr, a dating app popular with gay men, and a stream of them were getting in touch - most of whom were shirtless. The constant dings from guys on the app waiting for a response from Ramsey had caught his grandfather's attention. Ramsey stood there silent as his grandfather continued.

"I don't want this in my house," his grandfather said. "I love you, but I can't have this around. You gotta leave today."

Stunned, the then 19-year-old Ramsey packed his few belongings in a gray suitcase and a duffle bag. By sunset, he was on the streets. It was two weeks before Thanksgiving 2019.

"I didn't have nowhere to go," Ramsey said. "I had to sleep outside. I never thought I would sleep outside."

My whole family has been destroyed by drugs and gang violence. I'm the only one who wanted a different life.

His first night outdoors, Ramsey slept in his grandfather's yard, but soon moved to different spots within a few blocks. He said going back to Lancaster, the Antelope Valley city where he grew up, was not an option.

"My father's into drugs, my mom's into drugs, brothers, sister - you know, it's a lot," he said. "My whole family has been destroyed by drugs and gang violence. I'm the only one who wanted a different life."

A different life is what brought Ramsey from Lancaster to his grandfather's house in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood of L.A. He was planning on enrolling at Los Angeles Trade Tech College to study fashion merchandising.

"There weren't really fashion opportunities in Lancaster," he said. "That's why I came to L.A. - but my family didn't get a lot of opportunities."

Ramsey is one of the thousands of youth who end up homeless in Los Angeles each year. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority's 2020 count, there were 4,775 youth experiencing homelessness, which included transition-aged youth (18-24) and unaccompanied minors. Nearly 36% said they were gay or lesbian.

L.A. County's young people who are homeless have unique needs when compared to the overall unhoused population. They are more likely to be Black, Latino and/or LGBTQ+, and also suffer from not having a job, support system or positive adult relationships, according to LAHSA. Finding support can be difficult, especially since the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender individuals and queer people are different and each group has specific needs.

In 2019, three-out-of-five young people experiencing homelessness became that way for the first time, according to LAHSA. Ramsey was one of them, but said he only lasted four days before deciding to reach out to the Los Angeles LGBT Center in Hollywood, which has been around since 1969 providing services that include healthcare, social services and housing.

Before going to the shelter, Ramsey said he ditched most of his clothes - including his favorite red, white and blue windbreaker - stashing them behind a dumpster in an alley. He worried they would be stolen, but he didn't want to carry everything to the shelter until he knew he could secure a spot.

(Courtesy of Tryron Ramsey)

When Ramsey arrived at the Anita May Rosenstein Campus of the LA LGBT Center, he said he was out of his comfort zone.

"I'd never been around people who were going through the same exact experience that I was going through, and it was hard to open up," he said. "I was just coming from a crazy experience of my own family doing me wrong, my own family kicking me out."

Ramsey was able to secure one of the 40 emergency shelter beds available to LGBTQ+ people, but it's usually a process that can leave someone waiting for weeks for an available spot. Before the new campus was completed in 2019, the Center only had emergency beds for 20 people.

Gil Diaz, media and public relations director for the LA LGBT Center, said the number of homeless LGBTQ+ people they provided beds for decreased during fiscal years 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the Center had been on track to meet and potentially exceed its 2019 number, which was 1,518 people - a 2% increase from fiscal year 2018.

Ramsey said he was grateful to the center for providing him a place to live, but it opened his eyes to the unique challenges faced by LGBTQ+ people who are unhoused, which include overcoming substance abuse and running away from traumatic experiences, much of it brought on by family.

"Some of them grow like a flower, and some of them don't really grow and get worse because of their situation," Ramsey said. "It's hard to be in a space with all that going on and you're still trying to navigate your life and make the right decisions."

According to the National Runaway Safeline, a hotline established in 1971 to provide crisis intervention for young people, the most common issues it dealt with in 2020 were related to family dynamics, followed by abuse and neglect. The data found that 71% of crisis calls came from young people still at home.

We have little doubt that LGBTQ incidents are more common in terms of outreach to our organization than we capture in annual data

Jeff Stern, chief engagement officer for the safeline, said the organization only knows if a person is LGBTQ+ if they say so, but he believes it's "very likely" that more people are reaching out from the LGBTQ+ community.

"We have little doubt that LGBTQ+ incidents are more common in terms of outreach to our organization than we capture in annual data," he said in an email, adding that they rely on the data of True Colors United, an organization co-founded by Cyndi Lauper that works to prevent youth homelessness.

"With their data showing the disproportionate number of LGBTQ+ youth who are homeless as compared with the general makeup of the population, it also leads us to expect we have more such folks reaching out to us even if they don't disclaim it in a crisis contact," Stern said.

Aging Out

When Ramsey called the LA LGBT Center, he said he had no idea what to expect. A case manager told him to come charge his phone and have a meal so they could talk. When Ramsey arrived, someone else had left the shelter that day - leaving a spot open for him. He couldn't believe his good fortune.

Ramsey is also aware that his youth played a big part in why he was able to seize what he calls the "miracle" of getting a bed that he called home for eight months before moving to another shelter where he lived for a year.

"I'm right at that age group where I'm about to be cut off," he said. "I realize that. I need to get in as much as I can before I really have no help."

Much of the LA LGBT Center's programming is focused on young people such as Ramsey, or seniors - both seen as particularly vulnerable groups within an already vulnerable population. For younger people, the Center's programs are focused on those between 18 and 24 years old.

The center says it provides services for more LGBT people than any other organization in the world, and it relies heavily on the kindness of others. The Anita May Rosenstein Campus, where Ramsey was able to get an emergency shelter bed, was 10 years in the making and a significant portion of its funding came from philanthropy. The new complex was designed specifically for youth and seniors.

I'm right at that age group where I'm about to be cut off. I need to get in as much as I can before I really have no help.

During her first address to the L.A. City Council in January 2020, Council President Nury Martinez acknowledged the need for resources that address the needs of young LGBTQ+ people.

"Our LGBTQ youth who are shunned sometimes by their own family members also have a high percentage of homelessness if we don't assist them," Martinez said. "We absolutely have to do everything in our power to make sure these young people don't end up on the streets."

But then the COVID-19 pandemic happened two months later, causing priorities to shift.

But the circumstances that cause so many young LGBTQ+ people to be in crisis haven't changed much. An analysis of Los Angeles Police Department data by Crosstown LA found that between Jan. 1 - May 15, 2021, there was a nearly 18% increase in bias reported against gay men, lesbians, bisexual or transgender individuals in the city of Los Angeles, compared with the same period last year. Bias against gay men specifically jumped 45% during that same time period.

Family Ties

On a particularly warm Saturday morning as we drive down the street in Florence-Firestone where Ramsey's grandfather lives, he reflects on his short time living there.

"It's bittersweet because my grandfather, we don't really have the best relationship because of my family's history of doing drugs and gang banging," he said. "My grandfather is a Jehovah's Witness, so he isn't playing any of that."

While we were chatting, his grandfather appeared at the front door, unaware that we were standing outside. They've had infrequent communication since Ramsey was thrown out.

After some small talk, the conversation shifted from why Ramsey was there in the first place to discussing being kicked out when he was 19-years-old. Ramsey's grandfather said he didn't approve of Tryron's choices, but that he still loves his grandson. After pushing a bit further, his grandfather told me that he was dealing with his own issues at the time, but he believed his grandson would be okay because he's a "survivor."

Ramsey said he understands he was kicked out because of his grandfather's religious beliefs. But the once-fractured relationship also underscores a generational divide about perceptions of LGBTQ+ people that are hard to overcome, and leave many young people unhoused each year with limited available resources.

As we leave the house, Ramsey chuckles, acknowledging that his grandfather is set in his ways and nothing would probably change his mind about feeling that being gay is wrong.

"What I'm thinking ... is how far I've actually come," he said. "I came a long way from sleeping outside of his house to having my own apartment in West Hollywood."

Making LGBTQ Youth A Priority

Ramsey says his favorite memory at the LA LGBT Center was on Thanksgiving Day in 2019 when he found himself surrounded by volunteers, staff and people he bunked with at the shelter. Thanksgiving dinner was prepared and donated by strangers who stayed and shared the meal.

"It was people that I knew grew up very different from how I grew up," he said. "My own family, my own blood, was like, You gotta sleep outside because I don't like your lifestyle. So it was bittersweet. It was really bittersweet."

I came a long way from sleeping outside of his house to having my own apartment in West Hollywood.

That act of kindness from people who brought food to the shelter is likely how Ramsey said he was eventually able to forgive his grandfather and move on with his life. He said he's forgiven his grandfather because "that's what Jesus would want."

Aside from finally moving into his own apartment, during his time at the center Ramsey made new friends and successfully completed a 300-hour culinary art program. Although he still wants to be a streetwear designer, he believes it's all part of God's plan for his life and he hopes to work as a fashion assistant one day to gain experience - much like the culinary program he took advantage of.

Food prepared by participants of the LA LGBT Center's Culinary Arts program.

Food prepared by participants in the LA LGBT Center's Culinary Arts program.

Shelly Rosenblatt, an intake and crisis specialist at My Friend's Place, a nonprofit in Hollywood that helps unhoused youth between the ages of 12 and 24, said young people show up at their doors everyday asking for showers and help with housing, food and clothing.

Ramsey was able to adjust to life at the shelter, which allowed him to move forward, but Rosenblatt said queer youth who are non-binary or gender non-conforming have it much harder.

"There are no non-gender specific shelters, at least not in L.A," she said. "The only options are only-male or only-female, which is a bit of a struggle. We haven't figured out a way to create all-gender shelters. So, youth will end up staying on the street, and that may be more risky or harmful because there isn't a place for them."

Rosenblatt said resources did shift as the pandemic hit, which was "unfortunate" because there was already a lack of resources for queer youth experiencing homelessness. Beyond the issue of finding it hard to place queer youth in shelters where they feel safe, she said that a lot of shelters are "high barrier," which also causes problems.

"A lot of them have a curfew of 9 p.m.," Rosenblatt said. "Or, you can't bring any substances in. That's also hard because some youth who are on the street have substance abuse issues. It's easy to say not to bring any substances in, but if you're already addicted on the streets, how are you supposed to quit cold turkey with no support? If more shelters are opening, hopefully, they are more low-barrier."

Sophie Gilchrist, a spokeswoman for Nury Martinez, said in an email that the L.A. City Council president is proud her colleagues have been supportive of organizations such as the LA LGBT Center, and that the city is working with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to create more interim shelter beds for 18-24 year olds across the city, with a focus on LGBTQ+ youth in Martinez's district, which includes neighborhoods such as Van Nuys, North Hollywood and Panorama City.

"Citywide, there are a variety of programs and initiatives we are investing in to ensure we reach this population ... we developed and enacted our Enhanced Comprehensive Homeless Strategy that contains components with a focus on vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ youth," Gilchrist said. "We have taken strides as a city to ensure that LGBTQ youth who are experiencing, or on the verge of experiencing, homelessness are recognized and supported."

Tryron Ramsey said he accepted the situation at the shelter because he didn't want to seem ungrateful for help he needed to get back on his feet. He acknowledged that some people at shelters might not have the strength to keep going, but for him it was a matter of life or death.

"I didn't care who done me wrong, I just knew I wanted something better for myself," he said. "I just wanted to move forward."

What questions do you have about homelessness?

Ethan Ward for a time lived in his car while attending community college. That experience informs his reporting on one of the most pressing issues in Southern California.

Ask a Question

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Many Young Unhoused LGBTQ+ People Are Living On The Streets. Often, Their Families Put Them There

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Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Tryron Ramsey had been living at his grandfather's house for a week when he walked into his bedroom after a shower. His grandfather stood there, holding the cell phone Ramsey had left unlocked on the bed, and asked: "Who are all these guys on your phone?"

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Tuesday, November 16 (6-7 p.m), 2021

In association with the Poly Asian American Families Affinity Group, the GIP is proud to present the first in a series on Asian American History and Identity. Poly parent Susie Woo, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and author of Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of U.S. Empire.  She will provide the Poly community an introduction to the history of Asian American immigration to the United States starting in the mid-19th century, with the building of the railroads, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which ended racial quotas on immigration from Asia.

After Dr. Woo’s presentation, Poly parents Syma Iqbal, M.D., Mark Yen, M.D., and Carol Huang, will discuss their own family’s immigration story and their identities as Asian Americans. Following this year’s GIP theme of "Empathy into Action," the presentation will help us understand how United States laws and historical events have helped shape Asian American immigration to the United States, and highlight the diversity of Asian American communities.

Please RSVP to attend this virtual event.Back

Susie Woo, Ph.D.

Syma Iqbal, M.D.

Carol Huang

Mark Yen, M.D.

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Tuesday, November 16 (6-7 p.m)
In association with the Poly Asian American Families Affinity Group, the GIP is proud to present the first in a series on Asian American History and Identity. Poly parent Susie Woo, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and author of Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of U.S. Empire. She will provide the Poly community an introduction to the history of Asian American immigration to the United States starting in the mid-19th century, with the building of the railroads, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which ended racial quotas on immigration from Asia.

After Dr. Woo's presentation, Poly parents Syma Iqbal, M.D., Mark Yen, M.D., and Carol Huang, will discuss their own family's immigration story and their identities as Asian Americans. Following this year's GIP theme of "Empathy into Action," the presentation will help us understand how United States laws and historical events have helped shape Asian American immigration to the United States, and highlight the diversity of Asian American communities.
Please RSVP to attend this virtual event.

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GIP Virtual Event: Understanding Asian American History & Identity: An Introduction

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Tuesday, November 16 (6-7 p.m) In association with the Poly Asian American Families Affinity Group, the GIP is proud to present the first in a series on Asian American History and Identity. Poly parent Susie Woo, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and author of Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of U.S.

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A Comprehensive U.S. History on Transfolx

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A Comprehensive U.S. History on Transfolx

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U.S. Trans History

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The controversy surrounding Rachel Dolezal's identity has stoked a cultural conversation: Is race something your ancestors dictate or whatever you feel in your soul?  Who gets to police those boundaries?  Is skin color still the defining force?

You can join that conversation in today's Times video chat,  as columnist Sandy Banks and USC law professor Camille Gear Rich talk about Dolezal's charade and the idea of "elective race."

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Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.

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About the Show

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.

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The history of identity, contributions, and challenges experienced by Asian Americans.

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Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About the Show

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.

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The history of identity, contributions, and challenges experienced by Asian Americans.

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In the wake of clashes in Israel and Gaza, synagogues have been vandalized and Jews have been threatened and attacked.

A pro-Israel rally in Times Square this month. The New York region is home to the world's largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Credit... David Dee Delgado/Reuters

A brick shattering a window of a kosher pizzeria on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Jewish diners outside a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles attacked by men shouting anti-Semitic threats. Vandalism at synagogues in Arizona, Illinois and New York.

In Salt Lake City, a man scratched a swastika into the front door of an Orthodox synagogue in the early morning hours of May 16. "This was the kind of thing that would never happen in Salt Lake City," said Rabbi Avremi Zippel, whose parents founded Chabad Lubavitch of Utah almost 30 years ago. "But it's on the rise around the country."

The synagogue has fortified its already substantial security measures in response. "It's ridiculous, it's insane that this is how we have to view houses of worship in the United States in 2021," Rabbi Zippel said, describing fortified access points, visible guards and lighting and security camera systems. "But we will do it."

The past several weeks have seen an outbreak of anti-Semitic threats and violence across the United States, stoking fear among Jews in small towns and major cities. During the two weeks of clashes in Israel and Gaza this month, the Anti-Defamation League collected 222 reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and violence in the United States, compared with 127 over the previous two weeks.

Incidents are "literally happening from coast to coast, and spreading like wildfire," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the A.D.L.'s chief executive. "The sheeraudacity of these attacks feels very different."

Until the latest surge, anti-Semitic violence in recent years was largely considered a right-wing phenomenon, driven by a white supremacist movement emboldened by rhetoric from former President Donald J. Trump, who often trafficked in stereotypes.

Many of the most recent incidents, by contrast, have come from perpetrators expressing support for the Palestinian cause and criticism of Israel's right-wing government.

"This is why Jews feel so terrified in this moment," Mr. Greenblatt said, observing that there are currents of anti-Semitism flowing from both the left and the right. "For four years it seemed to be stimulated from the political right, with devastating consequences." But at the scenes of the most recent attacks, he noted, "no one is wearing MAGA hats."

The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in the United States last year, a 10 percent increase from the previous year. Credit... Geraldine Hope Ghelli for The New York Times

President Biden has denounced the recent assaults as "despicable" and said "they must stop." "It's up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor," he wrote in a statement posted on Twitter.

The outbreak has been especially striking in the New York region, which is home to the world's largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Last Thursday a brawl broke out in Times Square between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters, and it soon spread to the Diamond District, a part of Midtown that is home to many Jewish-owned businesses.

At least one roving group of men waving Palestinian flags shouted abuse at and shoved Jewish pedestrians and bystanders. Video of the scenes spread widely online and drew outrage from elected officials and a deep sense of foreboding among many Jewish New Yorkers.

The New York Police Department arrested 27 people, and two people were hospitalized, including a woman who was burned when fireworks were launched from a car at a group of people on the sidewalk.

The Police Department opened a hate crimes investigation into the beating of a Jewish man, and a Brooklyn man, Waseem Awawdeh, 23, was charged in connection with the attack.

The next day, federal prosecutors charged another man, Ali Alaheri, 29, with setting fire to a building that housed a synagogue and yeshiva in Borough Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood in the city's Hasidic Jewish heartland. Mr. Alaheri also assaulted a Hasidic man in the same neighborhood, prosecutors said.

The Police Department's hate crimes task force was also investigating anti-Semitic incidents that took place last Thursday and Saturday, including an assault in Manhattan and aggravated harassment in Brooklyn.

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, an Orthodox Jewish writer on the Upper East Side, said she had encountered a palpable anxiety among congregants at Park East Synagogue, where her husband serves as a rabbi.

"Quite a few" synagogue members had in recent months asked for help planning a move to Israel, she said, and she secured Swiss passports for her own children after watching a presidential debate in October.

"I know this sounds crazy because on the Upper East Side there was always this feeling that you can't get safer than here," she said.

But her fears are not unfounded. Last year, while out in the neighborhood with their young son, her husband was accosted by a man "shouting obscenities, and 'You Jews! You Jews!'" she said.

Her son still "talks about it all the time," she said. Recently, he built a synagogue out of Lego blocks and added a Lego security patrol outside, she said. He is 5 years old.

"Nobody cares about things like this because it is just words," she added. "But what if this person was armed? And what if the next person is armed?"

The recent spike is occurring on top of a longer-term trend of high-profile incidents of anti-Semitism in the United States.

In Charlottesville, activists at the Unite the Right rally in 2017 chanted "Jews will not replace us!" as they protested the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The next year, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six who had gathered for Shabbat morning services at the Tree of Life- Or L'Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh. At a synagogue in a suburb of San Diego in 2019, a gunman opened fire at a service on the last day of Passover.

The A.D.L. has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in the country since 1979, and its past three annual reports have included two of its highest tallies. The organization recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment last year, a 10 percent increase from the previous year.

The number of confirmed anti-Semitic incidents in New York City jumped noticeably in March to 15, from nine the month before and three in January, according to the Police Department.

Sgt. Jessica McRorie, a department spokeswoman, said that as of Sunday there had been 80 anti-Semitic hate crime complaints this year, compared with 62 during the same period last year.

The attack in 2018 at Tree of Life, in the distinctly Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, was galvanizing for many Jewish leaders. "Every synagogue across the country has increased security since the attack in Pittsburgh," said Rabbi Adam Starr, who heads Congregation Ohr HaTorah, one of several synagogues along a stretch of road in the Jewish neighborhood of Toco Hills in the Atlanta area.

"You look across the street from our synagogue and there's a big church," he said. "And the big difference between the church and the synagogue is the church doesn't have a gate around it."

Rabbi Starr has stepped up security again within the last two weeks, increasing the number of off-duty police officers on site during Shabbat morning services.

For some Jews, the last few weeks have accelerated a sense of unease that has been percolating for years.

"We've all read about what Jewish life was like in Europe before the Holocaust," said Danny Groner, a member of an Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx. "There's always this question: Why didn't they leave? The conversation in my circles is, are we at that point right now?"

Mr. Groner does not think so, he was quick to say. But he wonders, "What would have to happen tomorrow or next week or next month to say 'enough is enough'?"

Jews and others were particularly stung by comments by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has spent the past week repeatedly comparing mask and vaccine mandates to the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany, and by the Republican leadership's slow response to her remarks.

In Salt Lake City, Chabad Lubavitch hosted an event for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot less than 12 hours after the discovery of the swastika on its front door. Rabbi Zippel told his congregation, "I hope it annoys the heck out of whoever did this."

He was proud, he reflected later, of the way his congregation responded to the defacing of its house of worship. "We do not cower to these sorts of acts," he said, recalling emails and conversations in which congregants vowed to continue wearing the kipa in public, for example. "The outward desire to be publicly and proudly Jewish has been extremely inspiring."

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U.S. Faces Outbreak of Anti-Semitic Threats and Violence

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In the wake of clashes in Israel and Gaza, synagogues have been vandalized and Jews have been threatened and attacked. A brick shattering a window of a kosher pizzeria on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Jewish diners outside a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles attacked by men shouting anti-Semitic threats.

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The tribe finally completed a ceremony interrupted by a massacre in 1860.

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On February 26, 1860, the people of the Wiyot Tribe had gathered on Duluwat Island in what is now Humboldt Bay, California, for a sacred, annual ceremony meant to last seven to 10 days. The dance had finished, but there was more yet to do-completion of the ceremony the next day, the Wiyot believe, would bring balance and healing to the world. The next morning, a group of white ranchers encircled the Wiyot and massacred more than a hundred of them. The few survivors either fled the island on canoes or were taken to a nearby fort as forced labor.

"When the massacre happened on the island, we were not able to complete that ceremony and bring the world back to balance," says Wiyot tribal chair Ted Hernandez. "We were not able to heal."

Three days before the massacre, a man named Robert Gunther had purchased all 280 acres of the island. Soon white settlers built dikes and drained the land for cattle grazing and lumber mills. On the northernmost part of the island, they built a boatyard on top of an ancient shell mound dating back to the year 900. The Wiyot population, which hovered around 3,000 in 1850, had dropped to just 100 in 1910.

For the Wiyot, Duluwat is more than an ancestral homeland. It is the spiritual center of the universe, a place of great power, and the tribe has fought for its return for more than a century, according to Michelle Vassel, a tribal administrator. On October 21, 2019, it finally happened. The city of Eureka voted unanimously to return Duluwat to the Wiyot Tribe. The vote, many years in the making, marks the first time a local municipality has voluntarily given land back to the indigenous people who lived there originally. "It's unprecedented," Vassel says. "The island was a missing piece for hundreds of years."

The tribe had long hoped for the return of Duluwat, but didn't officially ask for it until the 1970s, with a phone call to the government of Eureka, the city of 27,000 that then owned most of what was officially called "Indian Island." They heard only laughter, writes Thadeus Greenson in the North Coast Journal. When Cheryl Seidner, a Wiyot tribal elder and former chair, called again decades later, she heard stammering instead.

In 1992, Seidner and her sister, Leona Wilkinson, held a vigil on the last Saturday in February to memorialize the land and those who died in the massacre. It became a yearly tradition on the west side of Woodley Island, a smaller plot between Duluwat and the mainland. "You'd start with a fire and people would sing their songs and talk about healing," Hernandez says. "It was an opportunity for people to tell their stories and remember our ancestors." Over time the vigils attracted as many as 300 people from the greater Eureka community.

In 1996, Seidner spotted a real-estate listing for a 1.5-acre plot of on Duluwat, the site of the former boatyard. The tribe began fundraising any way it could-benefit concerts with Native artists such as Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and selling T-shirts, tacos, and fry bread. "You name it, we did it," Hernandez chuckles. Neighboring tribes donated thousands of dollars, and the Wiyot eventually raised the $106,000 they needed.

What they found there was a disaster. Rusted boat parts and an enormous diesel-powered winch poked through the ground. Years of toxins, sludge, and debris capped the shell mound like sedimentary rock. And the midden itself was visibly pockmarked by pot-hunters, Vassel says. "You could not walk on the property, what with the metal debris, lead paint, and big barrels of liquid of undetermined origin." The shell midden, having eroded over the years, was held up by a makeshift retaining wall of old marine batteries.

So the work began, with a team of dedicated volunteers working weekends. They removed the rusty debris, including the huge winch, which they got off the island and onto a barge using traditional methods-a bed of rolling logs. As they cleaned up the shell mound, volunteers sometimes found bones, which they believe belonged to victims of the Wiyot massacred in 1860, according to Hernandez. "This is where our ancestors are and this is where their blood was shed," he says, "and yet they're covered in chemicals."

In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency provided a Targeted Brownfields Assessment grant to clean the site more thoroughly. Testers found hazardous levels of pentachlorophenol, dioxins, and furans, and high levels of arsenic, according to an EPA report. "People were shocked to see people in hazmat suits digging up the soil," Vassel says. The agency worked with the tribe to remove as little soil as possible, and screen what they excavated for artifacts and remains. The battery wall was replaced by shells donated by a local oyster company.

In 2004, Eureka donated an additional 40 acres of land of the northern tip of Duluwat to the Wiyot, including the tribe's former burial grounds and the rest of the shell midden. There, volunteers cut back invasive cord grass to allow native eelgrass to recover, and planted cuttings of native willows from a neighboring island. They tore down buildings, repainted a metal shed, and capped the remaining contaminated soil with sheets of fabric covered with soil, crushed shells, and native grass seed, according to the EPA report. The island received an official clean bill of health from the EPA in 2014. After 13 years, 70 tons of scrap metal, and 26 tons of soil, Duluwat was ready to be danced on.

In spring 2014, one month after the Wiyot's last vigil and 154 years after the massacre, the tribe returned to Duluwat to hold their World Renewal Ceremony. The Wiyot's religious beliefs are interconnected with those of four other tribes in the area: the Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa (the Chilula was another former, connected tribe), according to Vassel. The five tribes all celebrated the ceremony, but without the Wiyot, "the circle was broken," Hernandez says. "But our four cousin tribes have kept the ceremony going for us."

The tribe dove into preparations. After the massacre, the surviving, splintered members of the Wiyot Tribe had lost precise knowledge of the ceremonial dance. They had to reconstruct it from the related dances of the other tribes, Seidner told the North Coast Journal. "The Yurok and Hupa helped us bring back the ceremony we lost," Hernandez says, noting that the Yurok Tribe lent dugout canoes to transport people to the island. Before the dances started, Hernandez spoke with with a Yurok elder who had come to see the ceremony to fruition. "He said he's always been waiting for us. And that he was happy to see us back in the circle."

The dancers also needed something to wear. Most of the Wiyot's traditional regalia now resides in museums or private collections, Hernandez says. Here the cousin tribes helped again by lending some items, while others were crafted anew, with condor feathers donated by Sía, the Comanche Nation Ethno-Ornithological Initiative, according to the North Coast Journal. "We're building up our collection again," he says.

To prepare for the ceremony, dancers fasted for seven days. People slept on the island, in tents, in the repainted metal shed, and even outside in the nippy March air. Younger members listened to elders tell stories of the island over the sounds of lapping ocean waves. Hernandez says the island's stillness and isolation made him forget that there was a freeway running over the southern tip of the island and another society just miles across the bay in Eureka. "We were in our own little world," Hernandez says. "It felt like we were back at home."

The final three days of the ceremony were devoted to dance. "Our youngest boy who danced was maybe nine, and the oldest was 70," Hernandez says. "To have so many generations was an amazing feeling." On the last day, sea lions came up and sat on the beach to watch. When they completed the final dance, it began to rain heavily. "It cleansed the land that we were dancing on, and we knew the ceremony was complete."

Duluwat's ceremony was private, but the true return of the island was markedly public. On October 21, 2019, hundreds poured into Eureka's Adorni Center at 10 a.m. on a workday. The joy in the room was tangible, according to Cutcha Risling Baldy, department chair of Native American studies at Humboldt State University, who is Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk. "There were times when you could have heard a pin drop," says Kim Bergel, a Eureka City Councilmember.

At the ceremony, Seidner set up two chairs beside the podium: one adorned in a quilt donated by the people who helped raise funds for the initial purchase of 1.5 acres, and the other left empty to remember the victims of the massacre. A group of Wiyot people performed the healing Bush Dance. Hernandez was so moved that he left the podium to join them.

Though Eureka City Council first voted to return the island in 2015, legal hangups delayed the process until 2019. "This should have happened 100 years ago," Bergel says. A fourth-generation Eurekan, Bergel first ran for the council because she wanted to help return Duluwat. "I had to practice my speech before the ceremony so I wouldn't be crying the whole time," she says.

Eureka's decision marks one of the first times a U.S. municipality has given back any Native American land freely. For most tribes, the only way to regain ceremonial land outside of a reservation is to wait for the tract to go up for sale, and then find the money to purchase it. Hernandez hopes the decision could spark a chain reaction for other sacred lands. "It's not a bad thing to give something back," he says.

According to Risling Baldy, Duluwat's return conjures a vision of the future in which land return is a common, grassroots practice. "We have never been asked to imagine what is possible," she says. "I believe what is possible is anything we can imagine to be possible." Risling Baldy suggests national parks as a logical place to start large-scale land return, pointing to recent studies that suggest that indigenous-managed lands boast more biodiversity. And it's not just governmental bodies that have the ability to do this. In October, forest management company Green Diamond returned 50,000 acres near the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe. "I'm not trying to pretend like this is an easy process," Risling Baldy says. "But this is an opportunity to ask what a future could look like that respects and engages with indigenous peoples, and that builds toward a lasting future for all people."

Around 10 percent of Duluwat is still privately owned. But Seidner has made it clear that, though the tribe is open to buying those plots of land, it wants to coexist with its neighbors for as long as they'd like to stay. "We know what that feels like," Seidner told the North Coast Journal. "We know how it feels to be taken away from our land."

Though the return of Duluwat represents the culmination of decades of activism, physical labor, and mourning, this is just the beginning for the Wiyot Tribe. They have plans to rebuild a village, and maybe even build a dance center. For now, they just want to continue to restore the island. And they're partly there. When Hernandez walks on the shell mound now, he can hear the crackle of old oysters and clams shifting beneath his shoes, almost touching the work of his ancestors.

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How the Wiyot Tribe Won Back a Sacred California Island

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On February 26, 1860, the people of the Wiyot Tribe had gathered on Duluwat Island in what is now Humboldt Bay, California, for a sacred, annual ceremony meant to last seven to 10 days. The dance had finished, but there was more yet to do-completion of the ceremony the next day, the Wiyot believe, would bring balance and healing to the world.

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The AP stylebook now says to write antisemitism and antisemitic without a hyphen and with no capital "S".

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Antisemitism or anti-Semitism, that is the question: AP changes its style

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The AP stylebook now says to write antisemitism and antisemitic without a hyphen and with no capital “S”.

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The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term 'antisemitism', often rendered as ‘anti-Semitism’. The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called ‘Semitism’, which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews.

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The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term 'antisemitism', often rendered as 'anti-Semitism'. IHRA's concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called 'Semitism', which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews.

The philological term 'Semitic' referred to a family of languages originating in the Middle East whose descendant languages today are spoken by millions of people mostly across Western Asia and North Africa. Following this semantic logic, the conjunction of the prefix 'anti' with 'Semitism' indicates antisemitism as referring to all people who speak Semitic languages or to all those classified as 'Semites'. The term has, however, since its inception referred to prejudice against Jews alone.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the derived construct 'Semite' provided a category to classify humans based on racialist pseudo-science. At the same time the neologism 'antisemitism', coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to designate anti-Jewish campaigns, was spread through use by anti-Jewish political movements and the general public. The modern term gained popularity in Germany and Europe incorporating traditional Christian anti-Judaism, political, social and economic anti-Jewish manifestations that arose during the Enlightenment in Europe, and a pseudo-scientific racial theory that culminated in Nazi ideology in the twentieth century. Although the historically new word only came into common usage in the nineteenth century, the term antisemitism is today used to describe and analyze past and present forms of opposition or hatred towards Jews. In German, French, Spanish and many other languages, the term was never hyphenated.

The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism.

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The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term 'antisemitism', often rendered as 'anti-Semitism'. IHRA's concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called 'Semitism', which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews.

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Black Academics have to wear too many hats, and don’t get paid for the extra work. Patricia Matthew talks about why this happens aast

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Luminary is a podcast streaming platform that gives you access to 500k+ shows, when and where you want. Sign up today and be the first to try @hearluminary!

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‘I’m not allowed to feel those things’: How adoptees experience anti-Asian hate

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After the mass murder of spa employees in Atlanta last month and amid a surge in anti-Asian hate across the country, Americans of Asian descent banded together in protest and grief.

Among them were some of the tens of thousands of Americans adopted from China, South Korea and other Asian countries. Raised in many cases by white parents in largely white communities, they have a unique perspective on race and racism in America, and one that is all too often overlooked.

"In light of the horrific events in Georgia and around the country during this pandemic, these people have been wondering where they fit in," said Iris Chin Ponte, a professor at Lesley University and a specialist in early education, who has been leading adoptee support groups for more than 20 years.

Kim McKee, a professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, an author of a book about Korean adoption and a Korean adoptee herself, said this community is "trying to figure out what does this mean in terms of building coalition with other Asian Americans, what happens when my parents don't recognize that I'm a person of color."

As the white father of an adopted Korean daughter, I know some of the issues that surround international and transracial adoption. As a newspaper reporter, I'm in a position to provide them with a bit of a public voice.

I talked to more than a dozen adoptees from South Korea and other Asian countries. (One of them, Tina Zhu Xi Caruso, is a family friend who suggested this story.) They described a number of shared experiences: growing up in nearly all-white schools and communities; parents who had no experience or understanding of racism; a sense of loss for their biological families and ethnic culture; and a desire to express their outrage over anti-Asian hate from their own unique perspective.

Here are their words.

'Asian adoptees do have a say'

Tina Zhu Xi Caruso, 22, attended Stop Asian Hate rallies in her hometown of Boston two days after the Atlanta killings. Asian people from all walks of life spoke, along with speakers from Black Lives Matter. "But I noticed there were no adoptees speaking up. I realized Asian adoptees do have a say." So she took a turn at the microphone, too.

Questions of identity make it difficult for adoptees to move into this particular spotlight, she said.

"You feel like you don't belong in the Asian community, but you don't belong in the white community your parents raised you in either," Caruso said.

Caruso was adopted from China and is now a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her activism has been empowering, Caruso said, but it has also brought up feelings of grief and loss of heritage. "People [at the rallies] were saying, 'I came out for my parents, I came out for my grandparents.' It made me kind of sad. I want to know who my birth parents are."

She was raised by two white parents. Her mother, she said, made sure to connect her with Chinese culture through videos, books and support groups with other adopted kids.

But even the most sensitive non-Asian parents can't fully understand the aggressions and micro-aggressions that Asians, both children and adults, often suffer.

"They may say it's not important, or may just be uncomfortable talking about racism," Caruso said. As a first step, she advised validating a child's thoughts and feelings - for instance, by acknowledging how hurtful mean comments can be.

'I wasn't surprised ... but I was terrified'

Mila C.C. Konomos, 45, lives in Atlanta, seven miles from two of the spas where workers were killed, with her husband and two children, ages 7 and 10.

When she heard the news, "I wasn't surprised per se, but I was terrified."

Adopted from South Korea as an infant into a white military family, she said she's dealt with anti-Asian racism - intentional, or based in ignorance - her entire life. Being adopted into a white culture complicates the Asian-hate issue for her.

"I got to experience all the racism of being Asian but none of the connection to food and language and family," she said. "My only connection to my Asian heritage is stereotypes."

She's been called Twinkie and banana. "Your English is so good," she's told, though English is her native language. "It's been with me since kindergarten, people pulling up their eyes, going 'ching-chong.'"

Growing up, home offered no respite. "My whole family made fun of my looks," she said. "I do love my family, but it's very complicated." When she was bullied for being Asian, by her three white brothers or others, her parents said she was too sensitive. "It can really be hurtful because the people that are supposed to be your family and love you the most have no idea what your daily life is like."

Adoptive parents, she said, shouldn't beat themselves up for errors of the past. "It's OK, it's part of the journey," she said. They should remember, though, that making amends is "not going to ease the pain and trauma."

A few years ago, she searched for her birth parents in Korea. She's in touch with her father. She doesn't speak much Korean, and he doesn't speak much English.

"We use a lot of emojis," she said.

'That was her way of telling me she saw me'

Julie Macartney, 44, lives in Atlanta. "For me," she said, the spa killings "were just another violent and tragic reminder of my whole eternal otherness in this country."

Adopted from South Korea, Macartney grew up in McHenry, Ill., northwest of Chicago. Most of the time, people treated her as white, she said, albeit with some appalling exceptions. (Signing her junior high yearbook, a classmate addressed her with a slur.)

Her family's blue-collar background synced, she said, with some of the values held by immigrant Asian culture in the U.S. at the time: "Work hard, keep your head down."

She's happy to see that culture starting to shift - the part about sucking up abuse without protest.

She's appreciative of her adoptive family, too. "I've never experienced anything other than love from my family," she said.

A few days after the shootings, she talked to her mother by phone. "She didn't have the right words, but she said please be careful when you go out walking with the dogs. That was her way of telling me she saw me, she saw the news."

'Being an Asian adoptee adds lots of different layers'

Christina Romo, 38, was adopted from South Korea by a white family and grew up in Minnesota, where she still lives. She runs a blog called Diary of a Not-So-Angry Asian Adoptee, which has developed its own community. She's well aware of the fear and emotional turmoil that the Atlanta killings created.

"Being an Asian adoptee adds a lot of different layers to this," she said. "A number of Asian adoptees have experienced the erasure of our cultures and racial identities."

Many Asian adoptees "were raised in situations where our parents didn't necessarily know how to support our racial and cultural needs, and don't know how to talk to their adoptees about race and racism," she said.

White parents "were essentially told that love would be enough."

That's changing, she said, but not fast enough. "There are parents who still believe that being 'color-blind' is OK and that Asian adoptees are somehow immune to racism."

Some white parents have asked her for advice in recent weeks, given the rise in hate speech and violence and the Atlanta slayings.

"They are feeling a lot of guilt and belief that they have failed their children" on dealing with issues of race, bullying and discrimination, she said. "I tell them that you can't change the past. What's important now is listening to adoptees, believing them, affirming their truths, and learning how to support their racial and cultural needs. The adoptees' voice has been so overlooked in adoption." Her own parents, she said, have been "pretty supportive."

For some Asian adoptees, she said, the killings seem like a double loss. "We don't have knowledge about our first families. We were left wondering if one of [the Atlanta victims] could have been our mother."

One of the Atlanta victims' first name was the same as her given Korean name, Soon. "It's the first time I had encountered anyone with the same Korean first name," she said. "It means kindness."

'Your child is going to experience racism'

Amber Field, 46, has advice for white parents of Asian adoptees: "Your child is going to experience racism."

Field, who identifies as nonbinary, experienced it growing up in southern Illinois as one of only three Asian Americans in a high school class of 350.

Adopted from Korea, Field didn't get much support from their white mother when bullied at school. "If I told her about things that were happening to me, she'd say, 'Oh, ignore it, stop your whining, everyone gets teased, no one likes a victim.' There's a way that she can't really hold racism."

For many white people, whiteness is a norm to which other races should conform or aspire to, and don't much think about what it means to be white. "If you're a white person, just based on the color of your skin, you're going to have your own experience and not face racism," Field said.

For transracial adoptees going through an especially hard time right now, Field suggests seeking out community connections. They're active in the Asian American and Pacific Islanders community and at the East Bay Meditation Center, a mindfulness group that actively promotes diversity.

"Being isolated, not having support is the worst," Field said.

'Is her daddy like that?'

Megan Soliah, 41, grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., where she felt like an outsider. Her white adoptive mother tells a story about pushing Soliah in a stroller when a white man approached, pointed to the baby, and said, "Is her daddy like that?"

Adopted from Korea, she grew up feeling out of place most of the time, and fearful when kids made fun of her. "They made the 'Chinese eyes,' told me to go back to where you came from," she said.

Now living in Los Angeles, a vice president at a product placement agency, she finds that "the majority of the people who are surprised [by anti-Asian hate] are living in large populated cities and haven't experienced racism outside the bubble."

'There are some who deny their identities'

Lee Herrick, 50, began to discover his Korean identity in college after a childhood in the Northern California town of Danville, where he was the only student of color at his elementary school.

"Others might have access points through music, through films," he said. "For me, it was through literature." Herrick is now a professor at Fresno City College and a poet. His latest book is titled "Scar and Flower."

Because most Asian adoptees grow up in white culture, "they begin to believe that they are almost if not totally white," he said. "That's a danger for everybody involved. There are some who deny their identities well into their 50s."

When white people hear white racism being called out, he suggests they reduce their defensiveness and not justify, deny or minimize the racism. "They're not necessarily calling you, as a white person, a racist," he said. "They're calling it what it is: racism. Get on board with that and become part of the progress instead of the problem."

'She was the golden child. I was the yellow sheep'

Nellie Sung, 43, was adopted from Korea at 8 months old and grew up in St. Paul, Minn.

Her white parents never talked about race. "They didn't ever," she said. "Ever. Never."

Her parents "were so white upper-middle class I really don't think they ever had a friend who wasn't white," she said. "I had an older sister, their bio child. She was the golden child. I was the yellow sheep."

She suffered the taunts of schoolmates, for being Asian and for being adopted. One asked whether her vagina went sideways. One told her: "I bet your parents wish they could return you."

Sung connected with her Korean heritage when she went off to college and looked to live in a place more diverse than where she grew up. She settled in New York City, where she is development director at Korean American Story, a nonprofit organization that interviews Korean immigrants and shares the stories though its website.

While New York City is plenty diverse, Asian Americans are still being attacked there. "I never felt so fearful for my kids as I do now," she said.

Contemporary parents of Asian adoptees may be more open to discuss racism with their children than earlier generations, but still struggle, she said. Younger adoptees have told her their families reached out to them after the Atlanta killings, "but in a sort of 'I don't know what to say' way."

"My parents and adoptees of my generation were told to assimilate us and love us as their own with a very 'color-blind' approach, which itself can be damaging," she said. "There needs to be a broader conversation about race that includes their role as parents to a nonwhite child and their role as a white person in society."

'Abolish the adoption system'

Leah Nichols, 35, was adopted from Korea. She believes the system of transracial adoption is corrupt and should be ended.

"I can love my transracial adoptive family and wish to abolish the adoption system that created it," she said.

"White Americans knowingly removed children from their homes and brought them to a place of deep existing racism in the name of saving them."

She acknowledges her proposal to end transracial international adoptions is radical. But, she notes, such adoptions are on the decline.

International adoptions from countries including China, Korea, Russia, Guatemala and Ethiopia have ceased or been dramatically reduced. In February, the Dutch government put a moratorium on international adoptions after it found evidence of child trafficking and other abuses. (Adoption advocates opposed what they deemed an overly harsh measure.)

In the United States, 12,732 children were adopted from other countries in 2009. In 2019, that number was 2,971.

My elders 'look like the people creating the hate crimes'

Los Angeles actress Sam Futerman, 33, is well known in the adoption community for producing and co-directing the 2015 movie "Twinsters." The award-winning documentary follows Futerman, a Korean adoptee, as she locates and reunites with her twin sister Anaïs, who had been adopted by a family in France.

Each grew up with white parents in white cultures, so dealing with and talking about issues surrounding transnational and transracial adoption is nothing new to her.

But, she said, "The rise in anti-Asian crimes and especially the Georgia shootings brought up anxieties I didn't even know I had."

After the Atlanta killings, "I felt anger and sadness, and a tinge of guilt." But, as a beneficiary of white privilege, she also thought, "I'm not allowed to feel those things."

The Asian American community uniting to protect its elders inspires her but brings up issues she is sure many other Asian adoptees are grappling with: "My elders don't look like the people who are the victims," she said. "They look like the people creating the hate crimes."

Growing up in a white family and a white culture with Asian features can leave transracial adoptees feeling "that we're never enough," she said. Especially with racial hate on the rise, adoptees may feel lost.

"It's no fault to our parents. They're showing us copious amounts of love," she said. "But they don't necessarily know how to handle the situation at hand, and that's why we're feeling alone."

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'I'm not allowed to feel those things': How adoptees experience anti-Asian hate

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After the mass murder of spa employees in Atlanta last month and amid a surge in anti-Asian hate across the country, Americans of Asian descent banded together in protest and grief. Among them were some of the tens of thousands of Americans adopted from China, South Korea and other Asian countries.

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between. This podcast makes all of us part of the conversation — because we're all part of the story. Code Switch was named Apple Podcasts' first-ever Show of the Year in 2020.

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society - from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between.

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Years ago, producer Chana Joffe-Walt started reporting on one school in New York. She thought the story was about segregation and inequality in public schools. But the more she looked into it, the more she realized she was witnessing something else. She was seeing the inordinate power of white parents at this school.

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When the trailer was released for Chana Joffe-Walt's new show, it prompted a kind of online war. Within a week, people left thousands of ratings and comments: some saying it was divisive and racist; others saying the opposite. But nobody had even heard the show yet. Ira Glass talks about what the discussion illuminates about the show and about this moment. (2 minutes)

In just one year, everything in one ordinary public middle school changed. It went from an incoming class of thirty sixth graders-most of them Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern-to a class of 103 sixth graders. The influx was driven by wealthy white students. Producer Chana Joffe-Walt follows how that works out. (29 minutes)

As the school year moved forward, the fundraising committee planned a gala at the French Embassy. And the PTA planned a separate, Spring Carnival. Chana explains what happens as quiet resentments lock in place between the two groups of parents. (25 minutes)

Song:

"Vienne La Nuit" by Francois Lubiana

A locksmith tells the story of an act of kindness he committed, hoping for a small reward. That, and other stories of kindness in New York City.

We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions!

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If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these A locksmith tells the story of an act of kindness he committed, hoping for a small reward. That, and other stories of kindness in New York City. We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions!

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Our children receive messages about race all the time - from books, games, movies, television, teachers, family friends and family members, neighbors and neighborhoods, their peers, and from you. They learn from what you say and do, from what you don't say and don't do. They notice patterns around race and gender, among other identities. Which kids get to be the stars in their picture books? Who among their peers is considered beautiful or smart or upstanding? Which children do teachers tend to scold? Who's invited to their home for dinner - and who isn't? Which communities' concerns do we meet with care, attention, and resources? Which groups do what work in the world? Who gets to be president?

As adults in the lives of children, we play a crucial role in shaping how and what they learn about race. Here are some starting points for raising children who can be the thoughtful, informed, and race-brave community members our multiracial democracy needs to thrive.

Start early. The earlier, the better.

1) Understand that children notice difference.

Within months of birth, infants prefer same-race faces. Babies can distinguish skin colors and hair textures. This doesn't mean that they think about race the way adults do or that they're "racist." It means that they have begun to participate in the ongoing conversation about race. Be sure to involve yourself thoughtfully in that conversation!

2) Make space for your child's respectful curiosity.

Let your child know that it's okay to notice skin color and talk about race, whether with respect to toys, characters in books, or in the world. Encourage her to share thoughts, feelings, and experiences by asking questions of her and welcoming her questions. If she makes a negative racial comment, ask, nonjudgmentally, What makes you say that?

3) Read #ownvoices books.

#OwnVoices books feature characters from marginalized groups written by members of those groups. Engaging kids with books that offer diverse and authentic racial and cultural representations and stories sends the message that you value diversity and opens up space to have great discussions about race and difference.

4) Use age-appropriate language.

When talking about big concepts like discrimination, power, and oppression with young children, use language they understand. Even young children have a developed sense of what's "fair" and "not fair." That's a good place to start when talking about racial bias and inequality.

Let your child see you do your own work.

5) Talk about your own feelings.

Whatever your racial or ethnic identity, you may have "big" or complicated feelings about race. Acknowledge that with your child and talk about where your anxiety may be coming from. Sharing your struggle will help free your child to share any discomfort about race she may have. Make the struggle part of the journey.

6) Let your child see you face your own biases.

We're less likely to pass on biases we identify explicitly and work to overcome deliberately. Give your child an example of a bias, racial or otherwise, that you hold or have held. Share with your child things you did or do to confront and overcome that bias.​

7) Acknowledge when you don't have a good answer, but don't leave it there!

You don't have to be an expert to talk with a child about race and related topics. If you don't have a good answer to a question, say, Let me think about that for a while or Good question! Let's find out more about that later, okay? And then do the research!

8) "When you know better, do better." (Maya Angelou)

Don't let your mistakes paralyze you. The point isn't to be perfect; the point is to do better. Learn. Do better. Keep going. Repeat! Do the work - and let your child see you do the work.

Learn about others and about yourself.

9) Choose diversity.

Choose a diverse neighborhood to live in. Choose a diverse school for your child. Be sure the books, toys, and movies in your child's life include some with Black, Indigenous characters and people of color in lead roles. Diversify your circle of friends and help your child diversify his. Helping your child build real relationships with a racially diverse set of children and others will probably take some effort. It's worth it!

10) Learn about and respect others.

Talk about and study the experiences of groups we now call African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Whites, among others. Be sure your child understands that every racial and ethnic group includes people who believe different things and behave in different ways. There is more diversity within groups than across them.

11) Tell stories of resistance, resilience, and joy.

It's easy to reduce the story of race to one of bias and discrimination. However, race is also a story about joy, family, community, resilience, allyship, grassroots resistance, and laugh-out-loud humor. Be sure that all of these are in the mix of your discussions and explorations about race.

12) Know and love who you are.

Talk about the histories and experiences of the racial, ethnic, and cultural groups you and your family strongly identify with. Talk about their contributions and acknowledge the less flattering parts of those histories as well. Tell stories about the challenges your family - your child's parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents, others - has overcome.

Raise a changemaker.

13) Be honest with your child, in age-appropriate ways, about bigotry and oppression.

Children are amazing at noticing patterns, including racial patterns (who lives in their neighborhood versus their friends' neighborhoods, for example). Help them make sense of those patterns. Bigotry and oppression are sometimes a big part of those explanatory stories. ​

14) Nurture critical race thinking.

Media portrayals of racial groups might be especially influential in shaping the perceptions of children with little direct contact with the people in them. Teach your child to question the narrative offered in books, movies, and on television. Ask: Whose story is this? Whose voice is missing or sidelined? Who gets to be the hero? Who created this story and when?

15) Support your children to take a stand.

Be sure your child knows that the struggle for racial fairness is ongoing and that your family can take part in it. Help her understand what it means to be, and how to be, a change agent. Connect the conversations you have to the change you both want to see, and to ways to bring about that change.​

16) Plan for a marathon, not a sprint.

Make race talks with your child routine. Race is a topic you should plan to revisit again and again in many different ways over time.

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16 ways to help children become thoughtful, informed, and BRAVE about race

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Our children receive messages about race all the time - from books, games, movies, television, teachers, family friends and family members, neighbors and neighborhoods, their peers, and from you. They learn from what you say and do, from what you don't say and don't do. They notice patterns around race and gender, among other identities.

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Teaching Your Child About Black History | Parenting Tips & Advice

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Introduce children to books and stories that reflect cultures and ethnicities and celebrate Black history and cultural diversity all year long.

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Most people have heard about "the talk" - the conversation many African American parents have with their kids about how to avoid altercations with police or what to do and say if they're stopped.

The recent unrest sparked by anger over police brutality against African Americans has parents who aren't black thinking more about how they talk to their kids about race.

Michel Martin, weekend host of All Things Considered, spoke with Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Michel Martin: You wrote a piece for CNN about how not to raise racist kids. You said most white parents have come up in families in which white silence was a pervasive norm in our socialization. These same parents are now passing such silence on to their kids. Could you talk a bit more about that? What is the consequence of that silence?
Jennifer Harvey: Many white Americans were raised in families that thought that they were teaching equality. The way that they did that was to just say, "Well, we're all equal" and not say anything more explicit about what it means when you believe everyone should be equal.

Many members of our society do not experience equality. And so what happens is that in the racist culture we live in - Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum talks about it as "smog" - our kids, our youth, we adults just breathe it in. So we end up showing up in racist ways, even when we come from families where equality was the presumed value.

It breeds a lack of capacity among white people to engage in conversations about race and to respond when racism is happening. If I hear racism out on the street or from a co-worker, should I challenge it? What should I say about it? If my African American colleagues or friends see me be silent because I don't know what to do, I become untrustworthy.
With videos like the one of George Floyd's death, do you wait for your child to come to you? Do you show it to the child and say, "This is something I need to talk about with you?"
My daughter is told, "Police are safe - go find one if you're in trouble," but her African American cousin is learning complicated messages about the police from his parents. Those differing messages mean they can be great friends for a while. But eventually, the depth of their friendship will erode because my white child will not be able to identify with her African American cousin or her African American friends.

White Americans have to teach our kids how to identify with that experience and how to be good friends to black and brown youth as they grow up. That requires us teaching them about racism. And it requires us modeling anti-racism, which is something a lot of white Americans really struggle with.

White families should not wait to talk about racism with children, because segregation is so deep that if we just wait, it will never come up. I never show my children videos of black people being killed by police, and I try not to watch those videos myself. But I do talk about the videos with them.
How are you discussing the unrest that's being shown in the media?
I started doing that work with my own children before they even had words. I would make sure we were in spaces where we were opposing police brutality, attending vigils and organizing. I knew they wouldn't exactly understand what was going on. One time after a rally, my 5-year-old said, "Black people are not safe." And I said, "Yes, that's true." And then she said, "But we're white, so we are safe." And I said, "Yeah, that's true too."

Then I said to her, "The reason we went to this rally is because we're trying to tell the government that everybody deserves to be safe." So now, six years later, she's already got a deep understanding of this. And so we can talk about what happened to George Floyd. We're much further along the conversation.

I discussed that with my children by talking with them about how they might respond when they have been harmed or an injustice or an unfairness has happened to them and they aren't heard. Because we've been having these conversations, my kids understand that peaceful protest has not yielded justice for black and brown people in this country.
For people who say, "You know what - this stuff just gives me a headache. I don't want to be bothered. This isn't my problem. Why do I have to think about this? I have problems of my own," what do you say?
We're wrestling with it as a family and acknowledging that it's really unsettling, but also appreciating that people are really hurt and really angry. And the government hasn't responded.

I'm always trying to complicate messages about following rules and obeying the law. I made sure they knew that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were breaking the law. They need to know sometimes that's what's required. They're certainly unsettled and it's a scary time for everybody, but they do appreciate that when you've been hurt and harmed and no one is given justice, sometimes eruptions happen.
This story originally aired on The audio was adapted for the Life Kit podcast by Audrey Nguyen, and the text was adapted for digital by Sylvie Douglis. If you want more Life Kit, subscribe to our weekly newsletter. All Things Considered.
I ask them, would they call it a headache if it was their child or their sister or their brother or their parent? We're talking about our fellow human beings. What would you do on behalf of your own?

And then my work as a parent is to raise my kids in a way where they experience communities of color, black people, Latino people, being human beings they identify with as part of their human network. And that's something that hasn't really happened in part because of segregation in the United States.

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How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race : Life Kit

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NPR's Michel Martin talks with Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America, about how to talk with white kids about racially charged events - and how to keep the conversation going.

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Elie Wiesel—Holocaust survivor, best-selling author, and Nobel Peace prize recipient—has worked tirelessly to combat what he calls "the perils of indifference."

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ELIE WIESEL:
Indifference is such an easy option. You don't have to give your time. You can stay home, eat your meals, go to sleep, rather than be concerned with people who suffer and people who live in fear, naturally.

DANIEL GREENE:
Elie Wiesel-Holocaust survivor, best-selling author, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient-has worked tirelessly to combat intolerance, injustice, and apathy. Earlier this year, Wiesel was accosted by a Holocaust denier at a hotel in San Francisco. While the attack left him physically unharmed, the incident led Wiesel to reflect on a recurring theme in his work, which he calls "the perils of indifference."

Welcome to Voices on Antisemitism, a free podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I'm Daniel Greene. Every other week, we invite a guest to reflect about the many ways that antisemitism and hatred influence our world today. From his office in New York City, here's Elie Wiesel.

ELIE WIESEL:
I'll give you an example. That person attacked me-okay?-and we were already outside the elevator and he tried to pull me into his room. And I began shouting, literally howling. I've never heard myself howl like that-"Help, help, help." I must have shouted for three minutes. Not one door opened. Then when I went down to the security people, and they said, "Maybe three people called us that they heard your shouts." Three-there must have been 20, 30, because it was 6 in the evening-6, 7 in the evening-but not one door opened. So how can you not feel discouraged?

What I make of that? Indifference, you know. I fought all my life against indifference. Yes, at least three of them called, but even they didn't open a door. That is painful. That means, what have I done with all of my work? Trying to wake people up.

Even in moral terms, morality means concern for the other, not for oneself-the other.

In order to feel empathy and compassion for and with a person who is alone, suffering, in desperation, it's only because we remember others who were alone, suffering, and in despair. It happens that not only one person, but the group may forget. Forgetting means the end of civilization, the end of culture, the end of generosity, the end of compassion, the end of humanity. And therefore I celebrate memory, and I try to strengthen it. And I believe-I still do, in spite of everything-that memory is a shield. If we remember what people can do to each other, then we can help those who tomorrow may be threatened by the same enemy.

Yes, generations come and generations go, and the new generations are coming. We're already four generations away. There are already grand, grandchildren of survivors. And, I think the third, fourth generations are much more involved than the first one was. So, therefore there's some good things to say about what is happening today. I see it around me, the letters I receive. These are already great-grandchildren, or simply children. I get so many children from all the high schools in the world, especially from America, or France-in the hundreds.

Oh they are so beautiful, mainly from 12-year-old, 16-year-old, 10-year-old children, saying-asking questions and-or saying what they feel. And I'm very touched by them. I cannot tell you how. I'm really touched.

I'm looking here, oh this here, this is the envelopes from children-high school, high school, high school. And I answer every one of them.

You know what? Let's open it. This comes from North Carolina, Winston Salem, North Carolina: "Dear Mr. Wiesel: I am 16-years-old. I read Night. Night is an extraordinary book. The part in the book when you were riding on the train to the camp impacted me most because that seemed like the most frightening. Would you ever think about moving back home, or is it too painful?"

This kind of thing. They all get answered. You know something, they have priority. My secretary knows. Whoever writes, children have priority. Maybe important people, very important people, highest people-children come first.

Again, I believe that he or she who listens to a survivor becomes a witness, because a survivor was a witness. And he or she who listens to a witness becomes a witness. And then, my faith is justified.

DANIEL GREENE:
Voices on Antisemitism is a free podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Join us every other week to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our website, www.ushmm.org.

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ELIE WIESEL: Indifference is such an easy option. You don't have to give your time. You can stay home, eat your meals, go to sleep, rather than be concerned with people who suffer and people who live in fear, naturally. DANIEL GREENE: Elie Wiesel-Holocaust survivor, best-selling author, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient-has worked tirelessly to combat intolerance, injustice, and apathy.

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Opinion: I’d be reveling in Asians’ success at the Oscars if I weren’t so concerned for our safety

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Yuh-jung Youn, winner of the award for best actress in a supporting role for "Minari," poses at the 93rd Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday. (Chris Pizzello/Pool via Reuters)

Arthur Tam is a journalist based in the United States and a former editor at Time Out Hong Kong and Cedar Hong Kong.

As an Asian American, I was proud and elated to watch the Oscars on Sunday night, and to see Chloé Zhao win awards for best picture and best director for her film "Nomadland" and Yuh-jung Youn win best supporting actress for "Minari." And I would be outright reveling in this moment if I were not distracted by daily worries concerning my own safety and the well-being of my community.

The contrast between the major breakthroughs Asians and Asian Americans are making on screen and the violent, hateful attacks we are experiencing on the streets is a reminder that the conventional wisdom about the power of Hollywood visibility has limits. When attitudes toward Asians and Asian Americans are driven as much by the vacillations of geopolitics as familiarity with minority communities, there's only so much movies can do to change minds.

The conventional wisdom is that visibility in pop culture uplifts minorities and offers a pathway toward acceptance and respect. But Asian Americans face circumstances more complicated than this narrative allows. There's no one exceptional story or one great performance that can capture the huge range of our experiences and origins.

The 2021 Academy Awards were an illustration of just how much the terms Asian and Asian American encompass - and how big a breakthrough this year really was. Zhao was not just the first Chinese woman but also the first woman of color to be nominated for best director. Youn is the first Korean actor to win an Oscar. And Riz Ahmed and Steven Yeun were the first men of Pakistani and East Asian descent, respectively, to be nominated for best actor.

This is a major change, considering how much great cinema and cinematic talent has come out of Asian countries, and how poorly America's great film institutions have recognized it. Take just one example: Hong Kong submitted Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's "Infernal Affairs" for best foreign-language film at the 2003 Oscars, but it wasn't nominated. Then four years later, Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," a remake of "Infernal Affairs" set in the United States, won forbest picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. Adding insult to injury, an announcer at the time mistakenly credited "Infernal Affairs" as a Japanese film.

Today, the tone has completely shifted thanks to the global influence of K-pop, the wave of money coming in from Asian investors and the strength of Asia's booming theatrical film market - not to mention the activists pushing for representation and diversity. Even when American recognition is late, as it was when the Academy members voted Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" best picture in 2020 despite South Korea's longtime status as a cinematic superpower, I suppose it's better than never.

Given Hollywood's history and incentives, it's not surprising that the industry has begun promoting Asian and Asian American artists and praising their work as it becomes more reliant on overseas audiences and markets. But when it comes to actually protecting Asian Americans' lives at home, Hollywood's power is limited compared with that of other forces.

Ever since covid-19 was first identified in China, Asians, Asian Americans and Asians of the diaspora across the world knew that we would be blamed and scapegoated. Xenophobic political pundits were all too ready to unleash ugly rhetoric without care for whom they influenced. The president of the United States referred to the pathogen as the "China virus" and "kung flu." In the United States, no matter our origins, Asian Americans knew we would be demoted back to generically and homogeneously Asian and made the target for free-floating rage.

"Minari" is a lovely movie, but what power does a heart-warming family drama that few Americans are even aware of have against a constant stream of nastiness on cable and the Internet? Zhao's breakthrough is well-deserved, but will it change the way our fellow Americans see our grandmothers on the street or our aunts and sisters working in all the very different Asian-owned spas across the country?

It's maddening to know that this cyclical process will restart every time there is tension in the U.S.-China relationship, or when any Asian country is tied to the hardships of Americans. It feels like being caught in a cyclone that lifts us high into the sky and then drops us to the ground, testing whether this time we break, or whether we rise again.

I can't wait to return to the theaters and see films and pieces of art meant to challenge, provoke and stimulate progress. And as I exit through the double doors and process what I've just seen, I'll make sure to check that my pepper spray is still in my right pocket.

Alyssa Rosenberg: The Oscars weren't magical. But they offered a glimpse of a post-covid-19 future.

Cecilia Kim: I grew up in the South as an Asian American. It was clear I wasn't welcome.

Jonathan Capehart: Asian Americans must not fight white terror alone

E.J. Dionne: Joe Biden's hundred days at the kitchen table

J.J. McCullough: Jagmeet Singh is not Justin Trudeau's worst nightmare after all

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Opinion | I'd be reveling in Asians' success at the Oscars if I weren't so concerned for our safety

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Arthur Tam is a journalist based in the United States and a former editor at Time Out Hong Kong and Cedar Hong Kong. As an Asian American, I was proud and elated to watch the Oscars on Sunday night, and to see Chloé Zhao win awards for best picture and best director for her film "Nomadland" and Yuh-jung Youn win best supporting actress for "Minari."

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Black women from across the globe unlock stories of their mothers to redefine holistic lives rooted in radical self-care and healing in this documentary.

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Hair Love | Oscar®-Winning Short Film (Full) | Sony Pictures Animation

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SPATIAL ABOLITION AND DISABILITY JUSTICE

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In her new book, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, the artist and design researcher Sara Hendren describes an assignment her engineering students undertook to redesign a lectern. Hendren introduces us to Amanda Cachia, a curator with a form of dwarfism, who challenges the students to think beyond the simple engineering specifications of an imaginary ideal form and to design specifically for her needs. One can imagine the range of solutions that eager engineering students might have offered up: a robotic lectern, or one outfitted with a lift. Usually, Hendren writes, Cachia has to undergo the ritual of "bringing her body to the dimensions of a room at odds with her physicality," typically involving a pedestal that she stands on to reach the height of an existing lectern.

Instead, Cachia wanted a lectern scaled to her dimensions, one that she could easily transport to her speaking engagements. Hendren's students responded to this call; now, each time Cachia speaks at this new lectern, the audience must adapt to her. Changing that relationship-between speaker, stage, and audience-changes the possibilities of the room itself. The lectern no longer sits above the heads of those seated in a room. As a result of this spatial shift, an audience member would likely become very aware of all the other sensory details: how the seating is arranged, the height of doorknobs and tables, the various ambient sounds. This newly oriented space highlights how disability is not a lack, but a space of possibility for other ways of being and noticing. "Ability and disability may be in part about the physical state of the body," Hendren writes, "but they are also produced by the relative flexibility or rigidity of the built world."

The most famous political achievement of the disability justice movement in the United States has been the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a landmark civil rights law that prohibited discrimination based on disability. It is, arguably, one of the most influential policy forces on the shape and form of the urban built environment, mandating things we now take for granted, such as curb cuts and pedestrian signals. According to the ADA framework, an adequate solution to Cachia's predicament might have been to require the lecture hall to have a platform ready at all times, one that could be adjusted to enable speakers, regardless of their physical dimensions, to reach the microphone.

Yet, as scholars such as Aimi Hamraie and Jos Boys have shown, stories of curb cuts, ramps, and other design innovations are incomplete, and have spun into a popular narrative of universal or inclusive design. This narrative risks turning the politics of disability into simple matters of logistics and compliance. It erases real class, gendered, and racial differences in terms of access to space, and it ignores the different types of "physical, sensory, and mental access needs of different disabled users." There are deep flaws in an accessibility framework; as the disability and transformative-justice scholar Mia Mingus says, "We don't want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them."

These are key themes that underpin Sara Hendren's What Can a Body Do?, which explores and expands on the relationships between the built world, design, and disabilities. If Hendren is reframing design and how we approach the designed and built environment through the lens of disability justice, Liat Ben-Moshe extends that lens to our geographies-focusing more fully on spatial relationships-in her new book, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. A critical geographer and prison abolitionist, Ben-Moshe provides a groundbreaking connection between disability justice and prison abolition.

Disabled people-nuanced and complex individuals who are forced to both adapt to the world and make the world adapt to them-have a rich history of influencing the designed and built world. Yet there is a lack of nuance and complexity to how disability is understood and conceptualized in both academic and popular portrayals. Revealing the multiple histories of disability justice-as Hendren and Ben-Moshe do-can expand how we think of and design the places we build beyond the simple concepts of access and inclusion, to encompass questions of care, vulnerability, agency, maintenance, and difference.

The Social Model of Disability

As the noted disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997), has said, "I want to move disability from the realm of medicine into that of political minorities, to recast it from a form of pathology to a form of ethnicity." Disability, as a human condition, is salient almost everywhere once you learn how to notice it.

Hendren's What Can a Body Do? calls attention to the ubiquity of disability, showing how disability is a matter of asymmetric relationships among humans, and among humans and their many environments. Through a range of case studies, Hendren critically details the various ways disabled bodies and minds "meet" the built world at different scales and through different technologies and mediums. The focus is not on the wizardry of high-design prosthetics and technology, such as wheelchairs that can climb stairs or Olympics-ready running blades, but on the many creative and everyday ways that disabled people have taken agency over their own lives.

Poetically structured through concentric sections reminiscent of Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, Hendren's book starts with Limb, and moves outward from there to Chair, Room, Street, and, at last, Clock. There's a cultural-material ecology at work here, which Hendren firmly grasps: " the human body is a relationship," both to others and to the objects, spaces, structures, and systems that are always coming together or breaking apart.

By analyzing case studies such as that of Amanda Cachia's new lectern, Hendren illustrates a powerful idea that holds potential for the fields of urbanism, architecture, and design: the social model of disability, which holds that being disabled is not simply a medical diagnosis, but a social phenomenon. For some, this can be a radical perspective, one that has many implications-notably, that disability is a "misfitting" of bodies and minds to the world one encounters and confronts. When that world is inflexible to people's diverse needs, Hendren says, this misfitting limits certain individuals' abilities to do things. In order to ground us in the concept of misfitting and the social model of disability, Hendren must first explain the history of "normalcy," as it relates to the body.

Prior to the 19th century, the ideal human body was determined by the impossible standard of gods and angels, a useful organizing rhetoric for churches and monarchies. Afterward, with the secularization of science, statistics, Darwinism, and the collection of population data, the ideal became associated with what was most common-a useful rhetoric for the economic organization of market capitalism. As anyone whose regular childhood medical checkups involved being charted on a graph of percentiles knows, this is a logic of standardization that pervades everything. Just as the concept of whiteness has to be created and reproduced in order to support systems of racism, so does the concept of normal have to be defined in order to uphold ableism.

From late 2019 to early 2020, a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery Murmurs by visual artist Emily Barker called attention to the ways in which banal design and architectural choices can exclude, how standardization can be violent toward anyone that deviates (through genetics, chance, misfortune, or any number of other factors) from what Hendren calls the "canopy of normalcy." In the exhibition, titled Built to Scale, the artist, who moves through the world in a wheelchair, installed a transparent, plexiglass scale model of their kitchen, with the counters and cabinets installed at a height just out of reach, rendering visitors powerless.

The point, as Barker says, was to expose how "nearly every public and private space is built without consideration of non-normative bodies." The exhibit's power-similar to what Hendren does in her book-is to expose the unseen politics and designs of ableism and privilege, since "the hegemony of normalcy is, like other hegemonic practices, so effective because of its invisibility." We have to go beyond accommodation in spaces not built for disabled people, since such accommodation serves to render them invisible.

The social model of disability is well known in the field of disability studies and among disability justice activists. It raises a number of urgent questions: What is architecture and planning if not the organizing of bodies in space? Who gets to go where? Who gets to live in one place versus another? Who has the political agency to exercise power over the shape and form of the built environment?

Disability is not a lack, but a space of possibility for other ways of being and noticing.

In a section on Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, DC, Hendren shows how designing from and with disabled knowledges can be a source of innovation. The school was built according to the tenets of DeafSpace -which prioritize sensory touch, open sight lines, and the full expressive use of the body. Students are able to walk on ramps so that they can sign without watching their step or scanning for what's on the periphery; there are flexible seating arrangements with many sight lines, so that they can orient themselves toward one another; and wood furniture is used to reduce echo and absorb vibration. This is more than just a simple set of technical specifications-it is the inscription of deaf cultural values into the design of buildings.

When we ask, "What can a body do?" we are also asking other questions. What are the things that prevent us from leading lives of dignity? What are the disabling conditions of the world? The system of policing, in the United States and across the globe, is a disabling force. The racist systems of redlining and housing discrimination in the United States are also disabling conditions, as are a highway cut through a neighborhood and underfunded public transportation. Muffled, chaotic subway announcements; narrow, uneven, cracked sidewalks; dark spaces of the city that are unsafe for female-identifying, trans, and nonbinary people. In policy and design, the built environment is full of hostilities to nonnormative bodies and minds.

But rather than focus on the obstacles disabled communities face, Hendren's book ripples with a sense of generative possibility around how these unique perspectives help us see the world in a different way and emancipate new ways of living together in it, otherwise.

The Political Force of Care

In the summer of 2019, I participated in a seminar led by Carmen Papalia, an artist who self-identifies as a nonvisual learner. As a visual artist who was suffering from vision loss and would go blind, he was forced to understand and navigate the world in new ways. Wanting to transmute this sense of perceptive shift, he devised a simple performance artwork called Blind Field Shuttle. In it, he invites participants to line up behind him, link arms, and close their eyes, as he leads them on a walking tour through an urban space.

Papalia's performance piece, to some extent, resembles disability-simulation exercises, which are often intended to raise awareness but have drawn criticism for how they might "actually reinforce the inaccurate negative stereotypes that often limit opportunities for people with disabilities," as Toby Olson has written. While that may be a fair observation to make of Blind Field Shuttle, the piece was less focused on simulating disability than on revealing the ways that we are dependent on each other, precisely because disability is not exceptional. Many people who have engaged with Carmen's piece describe initial feelings of trepidation, nervousness, and vulnerability-having to trust what they could feel with their free hand and the verbal directions of Papalia, as he called out doors, stairs, entryways, railings, fences, curbs, and the changes in surface texture that he observed with his walking cane.

As someone born deaf / hard of hearing, whose hearing aids had terminally stopped working only a few days prior, the only way I could navigate during this experience was by feeling the movement and sway of the shoulder in front of me and the hand of the person behind me. The sensation of displaced embodiment was especially jarring: to see and hear nothing, only able to experience my own movement and the texture of different surfaces with my free hand; the rise and fall of going up and down stairs or slopes, one fragile body as part of a larger collective body snaking through this landscape. I was reminded of Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic, a 2019 book of poetry that imagines a town that goes silent when a deaf boy is shot in the street by police forces. The townspeople's dissent becomes coordinated by a new sign language of their making; in the book, Kaminsky writes that "silence is the invention of the hearing."

Carmen's piece also served as a reminder that the built environment can be dangerous, and that the places we inhabit are living indexes of the sounds, textures, surface levels, curves, air, and chemicals that we are always encountering. As we age, or as the climatic conditions of the planet continues to change all around us, our relationship to the world also changes.

We all go through various states of dependency throughout our lives; perhaps, then, disability itself is a universal feature of human life. This is not a call for universal design. In difference, there are always competing needs for every person in a given space. To honor that difference is to see that we are always collectively making spaces through our negotiations with one another. Power is, inherently, always a factor in this process.

This echoes the renewed interest in the themes of care and maintenance; these theoretical lenses have inherited a lot from the field of disability justice, as disability justice scholars and activists have long spoken to the political force of care as an organizing framework for how we structure our collective lives.

Disability and Abolition

In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe extends these questions about disability justice and design to examine specific, yet widespread, geographies-what she calls "carceral locales." Charting the history and genealogy of the deinstitutionalization movement-which saw, over two waves through the 1950s and '60s, almost half a million patients transferred from state-run institutions to community mental-health centers-Ben-Moshe draws lessons for the prison abolitionist movement, showing that abolition is a realistic goal with precedent in disability activism.

Ben-Moshe is also a critical geographer and especially focused on "the ways carceral locales and their histories of closure and abolition are interconnected." By carceral locales, she is referring to "a variety of enclosures, especially prisons, jails, psychiatric hospitals, and residential institutions for those with intellectual or developmental disabilities." One key lesson is that you cannot understand the socioeconomic framework of cities without grappling with the logic and geographies of incarceration and containment that structure these spaces. As the poet Tongo Eisen-Martin wrote: "My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison. / If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city."

The use of incarceration to banish and contain populations has a long history, from Enlightenment-age leper colonies to insane asylums. In the early 20th century, the scale of confinement in large state mental hospitals, psychiatric facilities, wards, reformatory schools, group homes, and asylums was vast, stemming from the same carceral logic and geographies that underpin the current prison-industrial complex. In the 1960s, as Victoria Papa has explained, quoting from Susannah Calahan's The Great Pretender (2019), "the concept of mental illness-of madness, of craziness, of deviance-had become a topic of conversation like never before in the history of our country. It became more of a philosophical debate than a medical one." The activism behind the closure of state-run institutions-deinstitutionalization-was, Ben-Moshe points out, an act of abolition, in its refusal of carceral logics.

Disability, as a human condition, is salient almost everywhere once you learn how to notice it.

Building on the works of Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Dylan Rodriguez, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Ben-Moshe posits abolition not just as "an agenda for demolishing but also for building." Abolition, in these terms, becomes a critique of society but also a practice of envisioning entirely different "ways of relating to one another." The crux of disability justice culture, too, is imagining other ways of being in the world. It carries the spirit of fugitive and Maroon knowledges that counter carceral logics-foundational to justifying a world in which prisons are seen as a given-as "senseless and commonsenseless." It is also a form of "dis-epistemologies," according to which we must "refuse certainty, embrace the unfinished, prefigure" the world we seek to build. Here, Ben-Moshe is calling for the discovery of utopian futurities that derive their possibilities from difference and positive deviance.

While not explicitly drawing on abolition terminology, Sara Hendren finishes her own book on a similar note, in her section "Clock." In what is the most elegiac and humane part of the book, she speaks at length about her hopes and dreams for her son, who has Down syndrome. She writes of his intellectual development in relationship to the world and the ways in which he does not neatly fit into the demands of modern-day time. Lewis Mumford famously explained how the technologies of modernization, namely the mechanical clock, had the effect of synchronizing our lives and making it easier to subject them to the economic logic of productivity, disrupting us from more organic patterns of living. Anyone who is yoked to our modern way of working, who has ever felt the demand to monetize every hour, understands this. The economization of life is everywhere-real estate developers, planners, and economists often refer to the metric of "highest and best use," which to me is a particularly dim and unimaginative view of the built environment.

The theory of crip time is a powerful critique of this. To be disabled is a form of asynchronicity, out of step with what the rest of the world has deemed not just normal but economically productive. If we can build the material world to be flexible to these asynchronous lives, we can live in what Ben-Moshe calls that "perhaps." Crip time refuses to acknowledge a world that marks value only by what is productive. This is a deeply abolitionist imaginary.

Bringing together the worlds of disability justice and abolition could be one of the most powerful prompts for the future. What kind of world could we live in-where there is no need for prisons, flexible enough to meet the needs of everybody, understanding that we move through various states of dependency and vulnerability through our lives, in which we go beyond accessibility and inclusion toward systems of care and radical interdependence?

As the fields of architecture, design, and other practices connected to space and place are reckoning with their complicity in systems of mass incarceration, in contagion and disease transmission, in upholding racial capitalism, many are trying to redefine their practice. If we take on the idea of abolition as a form of social imagination, we can creatively engage with Hendren's misfitting as an opening for radical possibilities in how we think of our cities. The social model of disability-a relational worldview-reframes disability as a result of whether "the experience of spaces, systems, practices, and ideologies accommodate the cognitive and embodied needs of their users."

These calls for a politics of transformative justice have cut across many disciplines, including the urban and spatial fields, and have emerged from the overlaps between transformative justice, disability justice, and abolitionist imaginaries. This raises an important point: it is impossible to talk about the history of our cities without taking into account the history of how society has viewed the body-from medical and public-health standpoints to questions of race, identity, and normativity-and the infrastructures we build that support or hinder our ability to collectively care for one another.

This article was commissioned by Sophie Gonick.

Featured image: Installation photograph of Built to Scale by Emily Barker. Courtesy of Josh Schaedel and Murmurs Gallery

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Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice

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In her new book, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, the artist and design researcher Sara Hendren describes an assignment her engineering students undertook to redesign a lectern.

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Be Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi imagines what an antiracist society might look like and how we all can play an active role in building one.

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Katy Hessel interviews Loretta Pettway Bennett and Mary Margaret Pettway of the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers.

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In episode 56 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews Loretta Pettway Bennett and Mary Margaret Pettway of the GEE'S BEND QUILTMAKERS!

[This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!]

Located in a small, remote and rural community in Alabama, USA, officially known as Boykin, which is surrounded on three sides by river and has a population of around 700, the women of Gee's Bend have been creating hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present day.

Electric, off-beat, full of flair, as well as both vivid and vibrant, for decades, the women of Gee's Bend have adopted a wide range of material for their improvisatory, jazzy and geometric quilts. From denim to old patterned clothes, which they have referred to as, making something shine from something that has been thrown away.

Often quilting - and singing - in groups as they configure their stunning works, some of the women of Gee's Bend are in the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states, of which our guest and quilter extraordinaire, Mary Margaret Pettway is chair.

Although having been quilting for decades, with some claiming the tradition stemming from the 1800s, it has only been in recent years that the women have come to international renown and attention, exhibiting at major museums all over the world, from the Whitney Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, New York's The Met, Margate's Turner Contemporary, and now, their first ever solo exhibition in my hometown of London at Alison Jacques Gallery, which shows quilts spanning nearly 100 years.

I should add that our guests today are first cousins, who come from an important lineage of female quilters and are showing alongside three generations worth of ancestors.

Described by the New York Times as having created some of "the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced", the women of Gee's Bend are rightfully forcing us to readdress the art historical canon, and I couldn't be more delighted to have them on the show today.

ENJOY!!! FURTHER LINKS!

The Gee's Bend website!
https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers
Their show at Alison Jacques Gallery (don't miss if you're in London!)
https://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/exhibitions/192/overview/

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/29/arts/art-review-jazzy-geometry-cool-quilters.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHEqYVzSs7U

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Laura Hendry
Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner
Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

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‎The Great Women Artists: The Gee's Bend Quiltmakers! on Apple Podcasts

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‎In episode 56 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews Loretta Pettway Bennett and Mary Margaret Pettway of the GEE'S BEND QUILTMAKERS! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Located in a small, r...

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Discussed in depth is “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” which remains one of Saar's most important works from this era–a mixed-media assemblage which uses the stereotypical figure of the ‘mammy’ to subvert traditions of race and gender.

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In Episode 13 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews one of the most important and groundbreaking curators working today, Dr Zoe Whitley on BETYE SAAR!!

And WOW was it incredible to record with Zoe at London's Hayward Gallery - where she is senior curator - to discuss the life and work of the now 93 year-old Betye, who featured in Zoe's 2017 Tate Modern (and now touring) exhibition, SOUL OF A NATION!

Betye Saar is one of the most important artists in contemporary art, and currently has solo exhibitions on right now at both MoMA and LACMA! Known for her political collages and assemblages of found objects that mix surreal symbolic imagery with a folk art aesthetic, Saar has contributed enormously to the history of art from her involvement with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, right up to the present day.

Growing up in the 30s and 40s in Los Angeles, Saar was inspired by Joseph Cornell's assemblages and Simon Rodia's "Watts Towers" nearby to where she grew up made from found scrap materials.

Raised by strong women who always encouraged her creativity, as well as identity as a black woman, Saar's work predominately critiques American racism toward blacks. It was in the 1960s that she began collecting images of stereotypes African-American figures from folk culture and advertising of the Jim Crow era, which she transformed into figures of political protest.

A work we discuss in depth is "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" which remains one of her most important works from this era (also exhibited at Zoe's incredible "Soul of a Nation"), a mixed-media assemblage which uses the stereotypical figure of the 'mammy' to subvert traditions of race and gender.

Speaking about the work she said: "I feel that The Liberation of Aunt Jemima is my iconic art piece. I had no idea she would become so important to so many. The reason I created her was to combat bigotry and racism and today she stills serves as my warrior against those ills of our society."

She is INCREDIBLE, and a force. And Zoe's enthusiasm, personal approach and expertise in Betye Saar is SO inspiring!!!

If you want to see more then DO NOT miss Zoe's co-curated "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983" currently on view at San Francisco's de Young Museum (https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/soul-of-a-nation); and for those in LA and NYC don't miss her show at MoMA (https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5060) and LACMA (https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/betye-saar-call-and-response). . GO BETYE!

Works discussed in this episode/ Further reading Black Girls Window (1969)
https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/302The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)
http://revolution.berkeley.edu/liberation-aunt-jemima/
Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/soul-nation-art-age-black-power
Here is also an incredible essay recently published in the NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/arts/design/betye-saar.html

Thank you for listening!!
This episode is sponsored by the National Art Pass and the Affordable Art Fair!

@artfund: https://bit.ly/32HJVDk
To receive a free tote bag with your National Art Pass, enter the code GREAT at checkout!

@affordableartfairuk: https://affordableartfair.com/

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Recorded by Joel Price
Sound editing by @_ellieclifford
Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner
Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

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‎The Great Women Artists: Zoe Whitley on Betye Saar on Apple Podcasts

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‎In Episode 13 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews one of the most important and groundbreaking curators working today, Dr Zoe Whitley on BETYE SAAR!! And WOW was it incredible to record with Zoe at London's Hayward Gallery - where she is senior curator - to discuss the life a...

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Ghosts of Segregation: Washington photographer raises awareness about America's struggle for equalit

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How a Black designer made her way among the white élite.

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In 1953, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John Fitzgerald Kennedy in one of those "weddings of the century" that seem to occur every few years. She was a twenty-four-year-old former débutante, who had been working for a Washington newspaper as an "Inquiring Camera Girl" while prospecting for a husband. He was a freshman senator from Massachusetts with his eyes on the White House. But you know all that, and what ensued. You may even recall the pictures of Jackie's dress-one of the most photographed bridal gowns in history.

Jackie was the architect of her own myth, and pretty much everything she wore after her marriage was chosen to enhance it. Her Gallic ancestry, embellished in the retelling, was a central motif. In that regard, her wedding gown was a disappointment to her. According to Kennedy historians, the young Miss Bouvier had lobbied for something svelte and Parisian. But Joseph Kennedy, the groom's father and impresario, overruled her. He was wary of sending the wrong message: decadent foreign glamour.

The dress that Jackie got was a chaste confection of ivory silk taffeta with a portrait neckline, a daintily tucked bodice, and a parasol skirt appliquéd with frilly rosettes. She wore it with regal aplomb, though her pique may have simmered. In 1961, Mrs. Kennedy's first year in the White House, a writer who interviewed her for the Ladies' Home Journal reported that the gown had been made by "a colored woman dressmaker" and was "not the haute couture."

That "colored woman dressmaker," Ann Lowe, was in fact a consummate couturier. Her work was admired by Christian Dior and by the legendary costumer Edith Head. Jackie's formidable mother, Janet Auchincloss, was a faithful client. Jackie and her sister, Lee, had both made their Newport débuts in a Lowe dress. Marjorie Merriweather Post, the heiress and philanthropist (Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago from her estate), chose a silk-faille robe de style, attributed to Lowe, for her portrait by an artist who had painted Queen Elizabeth. Olivia de Havilland accepted her first Oscar in a strapless Lowe number of aqua tulle lavished with hand-painted flowers. Jessica Regan, an associate curator at the Met Costume Institute, compares Lowe to Mainbocher: "She was a brilliant example of the American couture tradition-a sculptural designer whose work was a dialogue with the body of the woman who wore it."

Lowe's evening and bridal wear were sold coast to coast in upscale department stores. She owned salons at several locations on Madison Avenue. In her heyday, the mid-fifties, she claimed that she sold a thousand gowns a year, grossing three hundred thousand dollars. (Her math tends to be inflected by hyperbole. Each gown was an original that required hours of intensive labor; Balenciaga, by comparison, produced about three hundred pieces of couture annually.)

Yet Lowe commuted to the Upper East Side from a ground-floor apartment in Harlem that she shared with her sister Sallie, who did the cooking. The same millionaires who cherished the finesse of her needlework haggled shamelessly over her prices, and she routinely undercharged them, explaining in interviews that the sheer happiness sewing brought her was its own reward. Retailers profited from her label's cachet but didn't advance the costs of her materials or her labor, and the debts she incurred to suppliers helped ruin her. (She was ruined several times, but staged more comebacks than Muhammad Ali.) The Kennedy wedding, for which Lowe also dressed the bridesmaids, was a notable debacle for her. A plumbing disaster in her studio destroyed the gowns shortly before the event; toiling sleeplessly, she re-created them at her own expense. She never complained to the family. She did, however, indignantly refuse to use the service entrance at the Auchincloss farm, threatening to take her work back to New York if it and she weren't ushered through the front door.

In 2007, a retired biology teacher from Washington, D.C., Joyce Bailey, made a landmark bequest to the recently established National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bailey's glamorous mother, Lois K. Alexander Lane, is a singular figure in the history of Black fashion. Born in Little Rock in 1916, she dreamed of becoming a designer, but spent most of her life working for the federal government. On the side, she founded a school in Harlem that offered classes in dressmaking and millinery. In 1979, she opened the Black Fashion Museum, in a brownstone on 126th Street, a few blocks from Lowe's apartment.

Lane spent decades building the museum's archives. By the time her daughter donated them to the N.M.A.A.H.C., they contained about two thousand garments designed, fabricated, or worn by African-Americans. The earliest artifacts-a muslin dress, a bonnet-were the handiwork of enslaved women. But Lane also collected the showstopping outfits that Zelda Wynn Valdes created for such stars as Ella Fitzgerald; Geoffrey Holder's costumes for "The Wiz"; and the drab-chic day wear of Arthur McGee, a dressmaker's son, who was the first Black designer to run a studio on Seventh Avenue. In Lane's collection, a simple rayon dress that Rosa Parks had been sewing for herself when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery shared pride of place with the opulent ball gowns of Ann Lowe. "Lane had done something that the great costume collections in the United States had not," Robin Givhan wrote, in the Washington Post. "She focused on storytelling"-the stories that clothes tell of pride and hardship, triumph and endurance.

Lowe's rediscovery is due largely to the work of Black fashion scholars and curators, beginning with Lane, and including, more recently, Elaine Nichols, of the N.M.A.A.H.C.; Elizabeth Way, of the Fashion Institute of Technology; and Margaret Powell, a textile historian from Pittsburgh. A draft of Powell's master's thesis on Lowe was published online, in 2012, by the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, and she was working on a full-scale biography when she died of cancer, at forty-three, two years ago.

Despite assiduous research, however, much of what is known about Lowe's life-especially her youth-comes from interviews that she gave as an elderly woman. One can't discount her lapses of memory, or her genius for embellishment. But one also can't discount the paucity of public records documenting the births, marriages, and deaths of African-Americans, not to mention their accomplishments. Several dozen of Lowe's dresses have been lovingly preserved-out of thousands. The fabric of her biography is an imperfect patchwork.

According to her own chronology, Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, in 1898. In the census of 1910, however, she figures as a married woman of twenty-one, living with her first husband, Lee Cone (his name has ubiquitously been reported as "Cohen"), a tailor, in the town of Dothan, about fifty miles from her birthplace.

Clayton is the seat of Barbour County, a center of plantation culture before the Civil War. A Confederate monument still stands in the courthouse square. George Wallace, the infamous segregationist, and his wife, Lurleen, who succeeded him as governor of Alabama, raised their family in Clayton, and racial strife has a long history there. On Election Day, 1874, a white-supremacist mob carried out a violent coup in Barbour. Its members murdered at least seven Black voters, and wounded scores, while routing hundreds of others at their polling places. Having destroyed ballots already cast, the insurrectionists unseated a Reconstruction judge duly elected by a majority of Alabamians-many of them free men of color.

One of those men was Lowe's grandfather General Cole ("General" was his given name, not a rank), a carpenter who had helped build the original Clayton courthouse. Around 1860, Cole bought the freedom of his wife, a young woman of mixed race: Georgia Thompkins, or Tompkins-Lowe's grandmother. Georgia's father owned the plantation where she and her enslaved mother worked as seamstresses.

Lowe's mother, Jane, was born during the Civil War. At some point during Reconstruction, she met Ann's father, Jack Lowe, of whom nothing is known. But by the beginning of the twentieth century Jane and Georgia had established themselves as society dressmakers in Montgomery, the state capital, catering to political wives and daughters. Ann's education in the segregated schools of Alabama would have been rudimentary, and she dropped out at fourteen. But her apprenticeship in the family business trained her for one of the few vocations by which a woman could support herself respectably. It also gave her a rare example of female autonomy.

Lowe's driving ambition, she told Mike Douglas, as a guest on his talk show in 1964, was "to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer." She cut the figure of one, birdlike and soignée. Her uniform was an exquisitely severe black suit or dress, accessorized by a trademark hat, a taut chignon, red lipstick, and dark glasses. By then, Lowe was the tenacious survivor of a game in which most contestants get thrown off the island. Who now remembers Gustave Beer, a contemporary of Charles Frederick Worth? What about posh Carolyne Roehm, a fixture of the Reagan era? Does Bill Gaytten ring a bell? (He briefly replaced John Galliano at Dior.)

From early childhood, Lowe possessed a transcendent self-confidence in her gifts. At five or six, she had started turning scraps of silk into the trompe-l'oeil flowers that became her signature as a couturier. Her husband, she said, forbade her to work-he wanted a stay-at-home wife-and she obeyed him for a while. But when her mother died, in 1914, Ann was recalled to Montgomery to finish four ball gowns for Alabama's First Lady, Elizabeth Kirkman O'Neal. It was, Lowe said, "my first big test in life," and it inspired her to feel that "there was nothing I couldn't do when it came to sewing."

Within two years, Lowe's life was transformed by a chance encounter at a Dothan department store. An out-of-town shopper noticed Lowe's clothes and remarked that she had "never seen a colored girl so well dressed." That lady, Josephine Lee, the wife of a wealthy citrus grower from Tampa, had four daughters, the eldest of whom were twins engaged to be married. She offered Lowe a job as her live-in dressmaker, initially to create gowns for the wedding party. Lowe, who had recently given birth to a son, Arthur, ditched her husband and leaped at the opportunity: "I picked up my baby and got on that Tampa train."

Lowe recalled her years in Tampa as the happiest of her life. The local press celebrated her work in its accounts of weddings and galas. An "Annie Cone" dress was a status symbol. Jessica Regan noted that Lowe became famous for her surface embellishments-"for tiny carnations with organza petals, each one minutely hand-finished. But the interior structure of a dress was just as important to her. Invisible tacking stitches keep the layers of fabric moving together; a lightly boned bodice holds the bosom stable on a dance floor. Her emphasis on a perfected fit made her clients feel secure."

That security was a luxury that Lowe herself couldn't enjoy. She raised her son as a single mother in the Jim Crow South. They lived in the staff quarters of a rich man's house. Its owners were "sincere" with her, Lowe later recalled, yet she had to navigate boundaries of race and class that neither talent nor affection could breach. As Elaine Nichols noted in a recent e-mail to me, Lowe was "helping young, wealthy white women (and their parents) live in a world of fantasy." In that respect, she belongs to a tradition of African-American dressmaking that stretches back before the Civil War. "A dressmaker, in some senses, is a body servant," Elizabeth Way observed. "She works on her knees."

Michelle Obama was the first chatelaine of the White House to champion the work of Black designers-Tracy Reese, Laura Smalls, Duro Olowu, Byron Lars, Mimi Plange, and Maki Oh, among others. But she wasn't the first to wear them. Women of color have been dressing First Ladies at least since 1861, when Mary Todd Lincoln hired Elizabeth Keckley as her personal "modiste."

Keckley was born on a Virginia plantation in 1818. Her father, Armistead Burwell, was its owner. She and her mother, a skilled seamstress, were his house slaves. For three decades, she endured a life of violence and degradation. Burwell "loaned" her to his son Robert (a minister), and when Keckley was eighteen one of Robert's parishioners took it upon himself to "subdue" the girl's "stubborn pride" with a whip. Later, she fell prey to a local shop owner, who raped her for four years. A son, George, was born of those assaults; he would die as a Union soldier.

In 1847, Keckley and George were transported to St. Louis, Missouri, by her white half sister and new mistress, Anne Garland. As the Garlands' fortunes dissipated, they hired "Lizzie" out to sew for ladies of their acquaintance. A few of those ladies grew fond of Keckley, and loaned her the price of her freedom. Her artfulness as a couturier, however, had increased her value as a piece of property. The Garlands demanded twelve hundred dollars for mother and son. (Abraham Lincoln and his wife had recently paid that sum for a house in Illinois.)

Once she was a free woman, Keckley sent George to Wilberforce University, in Ohio, a historically Black institution, where she herself later taught domestic arts. In 1860, she settled in Washington, D.C., and established a dressmaking business, with a bipartisan clientele that included the wives of Stephen A. Douglas, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. A daughter of Edwin Sumner, the Union general, arranged the job interview with Mrs. Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln, like Jackie, was a Francophile and a clotheshorse. Her extravagance was notorious. Unlike Jackie, she had a dumpy figure and pretentious taste. (Her sartorial ideal was the Empress Eugénie.) Keckley dressed her with an elegance befitting her station-and her self-importance-but toned down the flamboyance. Volatile women are an occupational hazard of the fashion business, not to say of the plantation house. Stoical, reserved Mrs. Keckley had a gift for talking Mary Lincoln through her bouts of outrage and depression. And when the Lincolns lost their son Willie, at eleven, to typhoid, months after Keckley's son was killed on the battlefield, the two women grieved together.

That companionship, however, had a bitter aftermath. In 1867, the widow Lincoln, short of funds, decided to sell her luxurious White House wardrobe. Keckley travelled to New York to help with the sale. No buyers were found, and their foray was derided in the press. The next year, Keckley donated a trove of Lincoln memorabilia to Wilberforce, including the bloodstained bonnet that Mary had worn to Ford's Theatre. Her gift infuriated the former First Lady, who had wanted the items back. But the worst affront came several months later, when Keckley, seeking in part to raise sympathy for Mrs. Lincoln, published a memoir with the sensational title "Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House." The condemnation it received, especially from the Lincoln family, effectively ended a career that depended on deference and discretion.

Elizabeth Way, who wrote a master's thesis on Keckley and Lowe, was struck by their similarities, she told me. "Their skills were inherited from enslaved ancestors, and they both transformed them into free labor. More remarkably, they were able to build a client network of élite white women who came to respect their professional authority. Lowe represents a transitional figure in fashion history-a bridge between the old-fashioned artisan that Keckley was and the modern designer."

The American South has never been a bastion of modernity in fashion. Even in the North, chic women of Lowe's generation-and of Jackie's-looked to Paris. When Lowe began her career, designer ready-to-wear was five decades away. Mrs. Lee, however, realized that Lowe had the potential to create sophisticated haute couture-at down-home prices. In 1917, the family sponsored her enrollment in an established dressmaking school, S. T. Taylor, on lower Broadway, in Manhattan.

Nearly every American designer of the past century gravitated to New York, the capital of self-invention. It was a magnet for Lowe, too. She was unprepared, however, for the prejudice she encountered among Northerners. "The whole idea to admit a Negro girl to a high-class fashion school was absurd," she told a journalist in 1966. The school's director, who was French, "didn't believe I had the $1,500 for the course-he just laughed. When I showed him my bankbook, he stopped laughing, but he still didn't believe that I could learn what he was teaching there." Here one should note that Harvard's tuition, at the time, was a hundred and fifty dollars, and that S. T. Taylor, according to Margaret Powell, advertised its courses in the Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine. It is entirely plausible, though, that Lowe's fellow-students snubbed her-until they were humbled by her virtuosity. She left after a few months, when the dazzled Frenchman acknowledged that there was nothing he could teach her.

Lowe spent the next decade in Tampa. In 1919, she married a hotel bellman named Caleb West, and launched her own business in a workroom behind their house. She trained a staff in her exacting techniques of hand beading and trapunto (a style of quilting that creates an intricate raised design), and some of her protégées went on to prosper independently. Lowe's most treasured creations from that era were her fancy-dress costumes for Gasparilla, a local festival with parties and parades akin to Mardi Gras. The revels included a themed ball; they were dogged by charges of racism until the nineties.

One of the earliest Lowes to have survived, a short flapper-style dress from 1926, is the costume for a Gasparilla courtier that might have come from les petites mains of Lesage. "The asymmetrical neckline has one jeweled shoulder strap," Powell writes. "A large jeweled medallion in the upper left of the bodice and a series of small medallions towards the bottom of the skirt are connected with sprays of brilliants . . . in a pattern reminiscent of tree branches or curling smoke." The cloth has decayed, but the embellishment is intact. Each tiny bead was attached individually.

Lowe may have distinguished herself in the South, but she was also stymied there. Her white competitors had an insuperable advantage, Powell writes. A Black dressmaker could not get credit or rent a workspace in the downtown business district; her clients had to visit her in a segregated neighborhood. Josephine Lee, for one, felt that Lowe was "too good to waste herself" in a provincial backwater.

By 1928, Lowe had moved to New York with several assistants and rented a third-floor studio on West Forty-sixth Street. "No one flocked in," she told the Daily News, in 1965. "I kept afloat for a whole year making the wedding gown and trousseau for Carlotta Cuesta"-a former Gasparilla queen. In the early months of the Depression, Lowe went looking for a job in the garment district. (She claimed to have started her new business with twenty thousand dollars in seed capital, although that figure, more than ten times the average family's annual income at the time, should probably be adjusted for exaggeration.) According to the census of 1930, Lowe was sharing her two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan Avenue with her husband, her son, her assistants, and "a roomer." The marriage didn't endure. Lowe told Ebony that Caleb West "wanted a real wife," so he divorced her.

When no one hired Lowe, she offered to make gowns on spec. Her work, as usual, found appreciative buyers. For the next decade, she freelanced anonymously for carriage-trade houses such as Sonia Gowns and Hattie Carnegie. Eventually, she said, she met "the right people." By then, she was using her maiden name. One of the earliest garments with an "Ann Lowe" label is now at the Met Costume Institute: a sublime wedding dress from 1941, with the silhouette of an Erté Tanagra. Embroidered trapunto lilies, bedewed with seed pearls, cascade down the bodice; molten satin bubbles at the hem like a pool of candle wax.

Some of the greatest designers have been hopeless with money. Paul Poiret and Charles James both died destitute. Yves Saint Laurent was a financial imbecile, but his partner, Pierre Bergé, managed their fortune cannily. Lowe never had a Bergé, not to mention a yacht, a country house, or an art collection-common perks of success in fashion. Her son, Arthur, kept her books and paid the bills. But after his premature death, in a car accident, no one capable took over. In 1962, the Internal Revenue Service shuttered Lowe's salon for nonpayment of taxes.

The timing was ironic, since the new First Lady's patronage, or even a public acknowledgment, might have rescued Lowe. But Jackie's reported slight was more painful to her than any lost business, and she registered her chagrin in a letter of heartbreaking dignity. "My reason for writing this note is to tell you how hurt I feel," she wrote. "You know I have never sought publicity but I would prefer to be referred to as a 'noted negro designer,' which in every sense I am. . . . Any reference to the contrary hurts me more deeply than I can perhaps make you realise."

Letitia Baldrige, Jackie's social secretary, called a few days later to assure Lowe that the reference to "a colored woman dressmaker" hadn't been approved by Mrs. Kennedy, and to convey an apology for her distress-without, however, taking responsibility for it. Lowe then engaged an attorney and sought "tangible" redress from the Ladies' Home Journal, in the form of a story about her career. The magazine never obliged, but Jackie may have tried to make amends. A year later, one of Lowe's eyes was removed-it had been irreparably damaged by glaucoma. While she was in the hospital, someone paid off her debts to the I.R.S. Lowe always believed that the First Lady was her anonymous benefactor.

Lowe's misfortunes of the early sixties nearly crushed her. "I almost gave up dreaming about beauty and thought only of suicide," she told the Daily News. Saks offered her a workroom and a title-the head designer of its Adam Room, creating bridal and début gowns. She brought Saks her clients, and it touted her collaboration. But Lowe agreed to a disastrous deal: she had to buy her own materials and pay her own staff. "I didn't realize until too late," she said, "that on dresses I was getting $300 for, I had put about $450 into it."

Overwhelmed by debt, Lowe was forced to declare bankruptcy. She went to work for a small custom shop, Madeleine Couture, until cataracts blinded her other eye. In 1964, she underwent a risky operation to remove them. Once she could see again, she opened a new salon. When the cataracts grew back, she dictated her designs to a sketcher and her assistants realized them.

After Kennedy's assassination, Lowe finally got credit for Jackie's wedding dress, and she liked to claim that it was exactly what the bride had asked for: "a tremendous, typical Ann Lowe gown." (The logo on one of her labels is the dainty figure of a court lady in a hoop skirt and panniers.) Her work began to appear in national magazines. Vanity Fair featured one of her coming-out dresses in an editorial spread. The Saturday Evening Post ran a picture of three insouciant debs, riding the Central Park carrousel in their Lowe gowns. It accompanied a profile of the designer, whose headline became Lowe's sobriquet: "Society's Best-Kept Secret." She played along. "I'm an awful snob," she told Ebony, in 1966. "I love my clothes and I'm particular about who wears them. I am not interested in sewing for café society or social climbers. I don't cater to Mary and Sue. I sew for the families of the Social Register."

There is no evidence that Lowe's society clients invited her to their affairs or their débuts. She heard about them secondhand: "When someone tells me, 'The Ann Lowe dresses were doing all of the dancing at the cotillion last night,' that's what I like to hear." But in 1967 Josephine Lee's granddaughter asked Lowe to contribute a gown to be auctioned at a Junior League fund-raiser in Tampa. She was happy to oblige, though she added that-after fifty years-she was curious to attend the sort of gala that she had so often sewn for. The family brought her as a guest of honor, and she sat at the front table.

Lowe's presence at what Powell called a "historically white event" was an audacious break with tradition. Lowe had defied exclusion countless times in her life. But, unlike Keckley, an activist for the impoverished former slaves who had flocked to Washington in 1862, and unlike Rosa Parks, a dressmaker by trade, she never played a public role in the civil-rights movement. Nor did she advertise the fact that she sewed for distinguished Black clients like Elizabeth Mance, a classical pianist, or Idella Kohke, a board member of the Negro Actors Guild. I found a picture of Kohke in the New York Age, a venerable Black newspaper. She was featured in an article on Easter finery, dated April 20, 1957. A caption describes her "fabulous ensemble-a gown of imported French black satin created by Ann Lowe." Lowe's name was unqualified by an epithet. It apparently needed none.

The historically white fashion press never paid attention to Harlem's vibrant fashion scene. Yet Lowe's name had such prestige in the Black community that the New York Age sent her to Paris, at exorbitant expense-an ocean crossing, a stay at the Hôtel Lutétia-to cover the postwar couture shows. A story from 1949 reports that Dior, Balenciaga, Paquin, Molyneux, Dessès, and other grandes maisons had received their correspondent graciously. (At one of the défilés, Lowe said, she met Mrs. Post, who introduced her as a prominent designer.) One longs to know what she made of the clothes-and of Europe. But perhaps the picture that ran with the story-of an outfit that Lowe had designed for the paper-was a form of reportage. Her "Paris-inspired creation" was a sexy black cocktail dress "with the new sheath skirt which dips very low to the right side. The overskirt is appliqued with cutwork of large dahlias. The wing collar is highlighted by a deep plunging neckline."

There is nothing else so daring in the Lowe archives, and it made me wonder what she might have created had she been freer to innovate. "Her work was overwhelmingly pretty," Elizabeth Way reflected. "It wasn't radical, or meant to be. Even in the sixties, she was still inspired by the nineteenth century, and by a nostalgic ideal of femininity. Yet I also think it's important to appreciate what breathtaking courage she had."

Lowe's career flourished, in part, for the same reason it would decline: she deferred to the proprieties of the women for whom she sewed. They were originally Southern belles. Later, they were East Coast patricians, or the daughters of Midwestern industrialists who lived, as Jackie had, in a bubble of gentility. But by the late nineteen-sixties society girls were interested in shacking up with rock stars and jetting off to ashrams. Coming out was a charade of purity that many endured to placate their mothers. Lowe made a late effort to evolve: she skimmed her froth; she trimmed her sails; she spiced up her palette. American Beauty-a débutante dress from 1967, smothered in roses-looks virginal from the front, but it's backless to the waist. The Times fashion critic Virginia Lee Warren pretended to be shocked on behalf of the girl's mother. No scandal was intended, Lowe told her; she just didn't want the "hands of the boys" soiling her creation.

Lowe's mantra might have been an adage attributed to Winston Churchill: "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." But Churchill wasn't a self-employed Black octogenarian with an eighth-grade education and no savings.

Lowe soldiered on until 1972. Her vision outlived her sight. Only complete helplessness forced her to retire. By then, her sister had died, and she couldn't manage her own care. (Keckley, in a similar predicament-frail and penniless-took refuge in a home for destitute women of color that, in better days, she had helped found.) Lowe moved to Queens, to live with a friend whom she described as her "adopted daughter," Ruth Alexander-one of the assistants from Tampa who had followed her to New York. She died there on February 25, 1981. Her obituaries were a jumble of misinformation. Ann Lowe's real story is her own best-kept secret. ♦

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Ann Lowe's Barrier-Breaking Mid-Century Couture

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In 1953, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John Fitzgerald Kennedy in one of those "weddings of the century" that seem to occur every few years. She was a twenty-four-year-old former débutante, who had been working for a Washington newspaper as an "Inquiring Camera Girl" while prospecting for a husband.

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What does love look like in a time of hate?
Asian and Asian-American photographers respond.

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In Chinese families, you greet someone by asking if they've eaten yet. It is love expressed as concern: Let me take care of you, let me tend to your most basic need. And the response - I've eaten already - is an expression of love, too. Don't worry, Mom, I'm doing fine.

When I was in college, my father would send boxes of snacks: packets of potato soup mix, sticks of beef jerky, my favorite chocolate pudding cups, purchased in bulk. Didn't he know, I thought, that I could buy food myself? He would call me weekly - to fuss, I used to think. Did I need money? Was I staying out late? The day before he died, he called to see if I was going to bed on time.

After my son's birth, I took him to visit my mother and found she'd converted my old desk into a changing station. A soft mat on the desktop for my baby to lie on. Boxes of wipes in the cubbies that once held envelopes; a pump of hand sanitizer where pens once stood. Every need anticipated and attended to, though of course I could have just changed him on the floor. Holding my 3-month-old, his skull still soft, I was finally old enough to see this for what it was: love disguised as worry.

These days, I video-call my mother every weekend; I ask about her hip, her allergies, her medications. Has she been eating enough vegetables? Is she double-masking? Has she gotten any exercise?

Love is a slippery and intangible thing, and sometimes we can only pin it down in these mundane, bodily needs.

For many of Asian descent, there is good reason for love to look like worry, especially now. Our faces mark us, in the eyes of too many, as foreigners, no matter how long we've been in the United States. Sadly, this is nothing new. Like so many other wrongs in our society, it's a crack that has always been present, widening under the pressure of the pandemic.

I watch the videos of attacks on elderly Asians, though they are hard to stomach. They dress like my faraway aunties and uncles; sometimes they walk like them too, hands clasped behind their backs, or clutching plastic shopping bags heavy with fruit. I cry because it could have been them; it still could be them, next time. Each of these people is someone's auntie or father or poh poh.

I text my cousins - only our generation replies promptly. How are you? How are your parents? Stay safe, OK? I text my mother a picture of the food I've cooked, the cake I've baked, my son smiling and well-fed. What I mean is: Don't worry, we're all fine, see?

I wish I lived nearby, so I could bring her melons and the pork buns she loves, so that if someone came rushing toward her, ready to strike, I could throw myself in their way.

When your face makes you vulnerable, one solution is to disappear: Keep your face hidden; don't go far from home; don't leave the house at all. Some advocate becoming hyper-American. Change your name; change your smile; wave the flag - camouflage yourself with what we're told Americanness should resemble, which is to say: not us. Others would like us to disappear literally. I was 11, standing at a bus stop, when a man shouted in my face: Go back to China or Vietnam or wherever you came from.

Hanging above the desk where I type this is a small print of a famous Dorothea Lange photograph: "Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942." It shows the Wanto grocery store, a huge banner stretched across its front. I AM AN AMERICAN, it reads. I picture Tatsuro Matsuda, the owner, a University of California graduate, commissioning the sign. Larger. All capitals. As large as you can make it. Hanging it across the windows of his family's store, embracing his Americanness in two-foot letters.

And then, with tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans, he was rounded up and sent to a detention center nonetheless, disappearing into the desert. I can't find anything about what happened to him after that, only this picture of this sign that did not save him.

A picture can't prove someone's humanity - at least not to those determined to see you as other. But we don't need our photos and stories to convince people we're human, that we're just like them. We don't need to be just like them, for that matter; we don't need to match some narrow red-white-and-blue blur of what Americanness - or humanity - means.

There is value in choosing how to be seen, in reclaiming the right to select the face you show the world, in insisting that others see you as you know yourself to be. In proudly and boldly framing ourselves in the ways of our own choosing, to say: Here I am, this is me.

In a way, this is a form of love, too.

In the meantime, we survive: by loving each other through our worry and by our worry. We check in. We mask our children, and ourselves; we remind each other to stay on guard. We send packages with gift messages to the living and make offerings to those who have gone. We stock each other's fridges, feed each other, tend each other's bodies and spirits in whatever ways we can. We visit those we love, but sometimes only through glass: behind windows, on our screens, in our minds. We do what we can to show them we are fine, so that they worry less, and in this way, we show them our love, too.

In the early days of the pandemic, I sewed mask after mask, mailing them to family and friends when none were available to buy. My mother had been worrying about my masklessness for weeks, so I snapped a selfie in one and sent it to her. Happy, Mom? I asked.

I am very happy now, she texted back.

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In Chinese families, you greet someone by asking if they've eaten yet. It is love expressed as concern: Let me take care of you, let me tend to your most basic need. And the response - I've eaten already - is an expression of love, too. Don't worry, Mom, I'm doing fine.

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Dispossessed, Again: Climate Change Hits Native Americans Especially Hard

Many Native people were forced into the most undesirable areas of America, first by white settlers, then by the government. Now, parts of that marginal land are becoming uninhabitable.

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Dispossessed, Again: Climate Change Hits Native Americans Especially Hard (Published 2021)

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Many Native people were forced into the most undesirable areas of America, first by white settlers, then by the government. Now, parts of that marginal land are becoming uninhabitable.

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Many cities and states are observing the day. Here’s some of the history behind it.

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Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Thanksgiving: "It Has Never Been About Honoring Native Americans"

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Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Thanksgiving: "It Has Never Been About Honoring Native Americans"

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Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the U.S. empire.

In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by U.S. Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." [Publisher's description.]

Interview with Author

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Thanksgiving: "It Has Never Been About Honoring Native Americans" on Democracy Now! on Nov. 29, 2016.

Excerpt
The excerpt below "Redskins" (from Chapter Four: Bloody Footprints) is useful for teaching about the #ChangetheMascot campaign regarding the Washington football team and other sports mascots.
Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations. During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670's, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.

Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. "In the process," John Grenier points out, "they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities." Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization - destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging and scalp hunting-became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.

Reviews

A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation's founding. -Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller's Guide to Indian Country

This may well be the most important U.S. history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes U.S. history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks. Here, rendered in honest, often poetic words, is the story of those tracks and the people who survived - bloodied but unbowed. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians. -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

ISBN: 9780807000403 | Beacon Press

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States - Zinn Education Project

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Book - Non-fiction. By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2015. 312 pages. Four hundred years of Native American history from a bottom-up perspective.

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Student Opinion: Tell us how you’ve come to understand your gender identity, and what it means to you.

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Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.
Note to teachers and students: To prepare to answer these questions, you might visit our recent lesson plan on transgender athletes that began with the definitions of some relevant terms as well as a "temperature check" exercise with questions about talking about gender in general.
Have you ever considered your gender identity? How comfortable do you feel talking about it? What does that identity mean to you? How do you express it?

Do you, like a growing number of teenagers, identify with a nontraditional gender label, or do you know someone who does? A 2019 article about nonbinary teenage fashion explained:

The word "nonbinary" became something people asked the internet about around 2014, making a steady upward climb to present day. Gender identity has become an international conversation, especially among teenagers. In 2017, a University of California, Los Angeles study found that 27 percent (796,000) of California youth between the ages of 12-17 believed they were seen by others as gender nonconforming.

More teenagers overall are identifying with nontraditional gender labels, according to a March 2018 study published in the journal Pediatrics. Some progressive synagogues and Jewish communities are holding nonbinary mitzvahs. Nonbinary teenagers are choosing non-gendered for driver's licenses.

"When we're looking at trends that we might see in the community of youth who are identifying as nonbinary, what we really are seeing is a community of people who are just accepting the diversity of gender expression," said Jeremy Wernick, a clinical assistant professor in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at N.Y.U. Langone. Mr. Wernick's work focuses on gender-expansive children and adolescents.

"Yes, nonbinary kiddos are sort of leading the way in pushing the boundaries of those binary stereotypes," Mr. Wernick said. "But what they're really doing is modeling for other young people and adults the reality that gender expression can inevitably have an impact on the rest of the world if things are accepted and celebrated."

This week, the Times Opinion section published an essay about gender exploration during the pandemic, in which a transgender-nonbinary writer,Alex Marzano-Lesnevich writer, asks, " How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me? ":

How much have you thought about your gender identity? How have you come to understand that identity? How comfortable are you in talking about that with others? What questions about gender and gender expression do you have?

How has the world - including your parents, teachers and friends, as well as strangers like waiters in a restaurant - tended to interpret your presentation of gender? Do people understand you differently than you would like to be understood?

How do you express your gender identity? For example, the article on nonbinary teen fashion described how some young people are exploring via unisex clothes, or fashion that plays with notions of masculinity and femininity. Have you ever experimented with expressing gender? How?

What do you like about being the gender you are? What do you dislike? Why?

How much do the communities you are a part of discuss gender and gender-related issues? To what extent are the young people you know "pushing the boundaries of those binary stereotypes"? Do you feel as if there is a general acceptance of diversity of expression in these communities, or does it feel more like a "policing of gender"?

The Opinion essay focuses on how the pandemic gave some people time and space to question their identities. Has it been your experience this year that being away from school, and thus mostly removed from the "peer gaze," has allowed you to be more yourself, whether in terms of gender expression or anything else? If so, how?

What do you think older generations should know or better understand about gender and gender expression?
Some of these questions were developed with the help of Connie Noyes, a 17-year-old from New York City who identifies as a trans girl.

About Student Opinion

When the world went into lockdown five months after I started taking testosterone, I thought it would be easier not to see people for a while. Maybe they wouldn't hear my voice go scratchy or see up close the hormonal acne splattered across my face. Alone in my apartment, I imagined that all my difficulties in being seen and recognized as transgender-nonbinary would evaporate. No one would gender me except myself; my pronouns would be right there in the text box on my Zoom screen.

So I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant's waitstaff that neither "he" nor "she" applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language - devoid of anyone to signal my gender to - I felt, suddenly, amorphous and undefined. It was as though when I had swapped my Oxford shoes and neckties for fuzzy slippers and soft sweatpants, I, too, had lost my sharply tailored definition.

After I podded with two trans friends, the only people I saw from closer than six feet were also nonbinary, neither men nor women. Among us, not only the once ubiquitous binary, but also any gender expectations, had vanished.

Where did my own gender reside, then, if not in sending signals of difference? My friends and I had long joked, "Gender is a social construct!" every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: "Too bad there's no more 'social'!"

The essay continues:

Wanting to understand how others were adjusting to the pandemic change, I reached out to Rebecca Minor, a licensed clinical social worker who works with trans youth. "What's really struck me," she told me, "is that removing the peer gaze has allowed for more gender experimentation."

Ms. Minor is in private practice and estimates that 85 percent of her clients are transgender. She works with teenagers, who are at an age when they spend endless hours watching and being watched. Thanks to Zoom school, she told me, "the peer gaze isn't entirely gone" - but now it can be controlled. "It removes that feeling that someone sitting in the row behind me might be snickering or looking at what I'm wearing," she said. It removes, in other words, the policing of gender.

To be sure, Ms. Minor's clients, who are predominantly white, have resources that have protected them in the pandemic. They have supportive families, health care and economic stability. I, too, am white and thus privileged. Like them, I live in the liberal Northeast. For them, as for me, the time at home has been something of a reprieve.

Ms. Minor told me about the change in one client, a young, white, trans girl who had been struggling in school both socially and academically before the pandemic. "What we're seeing is someone who finally isn't having all of their space in their head taken up by worrying about their safety, worrying about other people's perceptions of them," Ms. Minor said. In her place was now a star student who had been missing.

* Find all of our Student Opinion questions in this column.
* Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it.
* Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021. Note to teachers and students: To prepare to answer these questions, you might visit our recent lesson plan on transgender athletes that began with the definitions of some relevant terms as well as a "temperature check" exercise with questions about talking about gender in general.

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Are you a person, place or thing? We have good news.

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The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid is Other People

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The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid is Other People

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The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People (Published 2020)

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A mother recounts the pushback she received from her own family in raising a gender-nonconforming child.

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The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary

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The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary

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Not everyone identifies as male or female. This is what it’s like to be nonbinary in a world that wants to box you in.

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The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary (Published 2019)

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Not everyone identifies as male or female. This is what it’s like to be nonbinary in a world that wants to box you in.

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^click above, and also consider: https://gendercool.org/akidsbookabout/

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Our conversation with Rosetta Lee, Seattle Girls' School Outreach Specialist unpacks all of the reasons affinity groups provide comfort zones for kids who may be "onlys" in classes, or among the very few in school.

For students navigating predominantly white schools, being in the numeric minority is a fact of every day. Affinity groups provide unapologetic affirmations of identity. We talk with Rosetta Lee about the four P's provided by affinity groups: pride, protection, preparation and practice, including helping students role play taking on questions by responding with "I don't represent everybody in my group, but this is my experience."

Lee also brings the data that makes it clear affinity groups are essential, and not "ruining kids innocence" by pointing out people's differences, reminding us that even babies at six months old notice and show preferences for in-group facial features, because survival depends on it. Affinity groups are support systems based in evolution, we are hardwired to be supported and protected, including at school. Plus how-to's for schools starting or building affinity groups.

Get something to write with, you'll want to take notes on this one.
SHOW NOTES
Interested in Starting Affinity Groups at your school? Learn more from Rosetta's Affinity Group Resource Page

Follow Rosetta on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosettalee

And on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosettalee/

Resources (1,000 Presentations): https://www.slideshare.net/leerosetta/presentations?order=popular

Affinity Groups & Best Practices Discussion (PSV YouTube Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUM8YA2EoNM&t=1354s

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and connect with us on Instagram!

Intro music by https://instagram.com/mikedupreemusic

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Episode 20: The Power of Affinity Groups "It's Not Just a Club" featuring Rosetta Lee - Eraced Podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our conversation with Rosetta Lee, Seattle Girls' School Outreach Specialist unpacks all of the reasons affinity groups provide comfort zones for kids who may be "onlys" in classes, or among the very few in school. For students navigating predominantly white schools, being in the numeric minority is a fact of every day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our conversation with Rosetta Lee, Seattle Girls' School Outreach Specialist unpacks all of the reasons affinity groups provide comfort zones for kids who may be "onlys" in classes, or among the very few in school.

For students navigating predominantly white schools, being in the numeric minority is a fact of every day. Affinity groups provide unapologetic affirmations of identity. We talk with Rosetta Lee about the four P's provided by affinity groups: pride, protection, preparation and practice, including helping students role play taking on questions by responding with "I don't represent everybody in my group, but this is my experience."

Lee also brings the data that makes it clear affinity groups are essential, and not "ruining kids innocence" by pointing out people's differences, reminding us that even babies at six months old notice and show preferences for in-group facial features, because survival depends on it. Affinity groups are support systems based in evolution, we are hardwired to be supported and protected, including at school. Plus how-to's for schools starting or building affinity groups.

Get something to write with, you'll want to take notes on this one.
SHOW NOTES
Interested in Starting Affinity Groups at your school? Learn more from Rosetta's Affinity Group Resource Page

Follow Rosetta on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosettalee

And on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosettalee/

Resources (1,000 Presentations): https://www.slideshare.net/leerosetta/presentations?order=popular

Affinity Groups & Best Practices Discussion (PSV YouTube Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUM8YA2EoNM&t=1354s

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and connect with us on Instagram!

Intro music by https://instagram.com/mikedupreemusic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Episode 20: The Power of Affinity Groups "It's Not Just a Club" featuring Rosetta Lee - Eraced Podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our conversation with Rosetta Lee, Seattle Girls' School Outreach Specialist unpacks all of the reasons affinity groups provide comfort zones for kids who may be "onlys" in classes, or among the very few in school. For students navigating predominantly white schools, being in the numeric minority is a fact of every day.

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From past Poly speaker Rosetta Lee: Presentation on Affinity Groups in Schools. Definitions, rationale, resistance to them, and how to set them up intentionally and meaningfully.

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Presentation on Affinity Groups in Schools. Definitions, rationale, resistance to them, and how to set them up intentionally and meaningfully.

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An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L.

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As part of a series of videos about race, we are featuring personal stories that reflect the breadth of experiences in the United States.

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BIPOC or POC? Equity or Equality? The Debate Over Language on the Left. (Published 2021)

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For those pushing for changes in society on race and other issues, words matter. They can also muddle.