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Neck Deep - In Bloom (Official Music Video)

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Neck Deep - In Bloom (Official Music Video)

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Dylan Marron: Empathy is not endorsement

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Dylan Marron: Empathy is not endorsement

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Digital creator Dylan Marron has racked up millions of views for projects like "Every Single Word" and "Sitting in Bathrooms With Trans People" -- but he's found that the flip side of success online is internet hate. Over time, he's developed an unexpected coping mechanism: calling the people who leave him insensitive comments and asking a simple question: "Why did you write that?"

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We will work in groups April to early May

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We will work in groups April to early May

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Be prepared to present on 5/2

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Please complete 4/30-

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Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

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Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

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In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights.

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Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds

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Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds

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Adolescent girls reported high rates of sadness, suicidal thoughts and sexual violence, as did teenagers who identified as gay or bisexual.

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Political targeting, the pandemic exacerbate mental health struggles of LGBTQ youth | PBS 

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Political targeting, the pandemic exacerbate mental health struggles of LGBTQ youth

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A survey from The Trevor Project found that 45 percent of LGBTQ youth across the U.S. seriously considered suicide last year. Fourteen percent attempted suicide and the rate was even higher among transgender and non-binary individuals. That builds on what the CDC found last month in its first national survey of high schoolers.

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‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens

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Depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among American adolescents. For one 13-year-old, the despair was almost too much to take.

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Harvard University details its ties to slavery and promises a reckoning

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The ties to slavery were deep, the signs in some cases hiding in plain sight.

Among the findings in the 134-page report conducted by Harvard faculty, Harvard presidents, faculty, and staff enslaved more than 70 people in the 17th and 18th centuries, some of whom labored on campus.

Harvard continued to benefit from donations from plantation owners and other trade involving slave labor. It also details how Harvard's longest-serving president, Charles William Eliot, and other prominent faculty members strongly promoted eugenics, a racist idea that selective breeding is needed to purify the human race.

In response to these and many other findings, the university has now pledged $100 million in part to create an endowed Legacy of Slavery Fund.

For more, I'm joined by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. She's dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and she chaired the committee report.

Thank you for joining us.

There are many specifics here in this report, but what's the key for you? Is it how integral slavery was in the life and history of Harvard?

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Harvard University details its ties to slavery and promises a reckoning

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America's oldest institution of higher education, Harvard University, is beginning to come to terms with its own history and role in slavery. The school is out with a new report detailing its extensive entanglement and legacy. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss.

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Death Penalty Researchers Call 2022 ‘Year of the Botched Execution’

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Death penalty concerns

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Death Penalty Researchers Call 2022 ‘Year of the Botched Execution’

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Even as the total number of executions remained among the lowest in a generation, several high-profile failures forced states including Alabama and Tennessee to temporarily halt executions.

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5 Takeaways From the U.N. Report on Limiting Global Warming

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Current pledges to cut emissions, even if nations follow through on them, won't stop temperatures from rising to risky new levels. Nations are not doing nearly enough to prevent global warming from increasing to dangerous levels within the lifetimes of most people on Earth today, according to a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of researchers convened by the United Nations.

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Slavery & much more

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Please [contact us](https://www.ted.com/contact) and let us know what happened.

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Online recruiting

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On a recent episode of his livestreamed show, the 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes repeated a formula that has won him a following with some of the youngest members of the far right. He went on an extended, violent and misogynistic rant, only to turn to the camera and add with a smirk, "Just joking!"

In this case, from the April 22 edition of Fuentes' show, America First, a viewer wrote in to ask Fuentes for advice on how to "punish" his wife for "getting out of line."

Fuentes responded, "Why don't you smack her across the face?"

The rant continued for minutes.

"Why don't you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face - disrespectfully - and make it hurt?" Fuentes went on. At one point, he pantomimed punching a woman in the face.

He then added, "No, I'm kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke."

Fuentes was following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of "just joking" to spread their message, while deflecting criticism.

Researchers who track domestic extremism say the tactic, while not new, has helped several groups mask their danger, avoid consequences and draw younger people into their movements.
Irony as "cover" for extremism
Fuentes is best known for using cartoonish memes to spread white supremacist propaganda. His followers refer to themselves as "Groypers" - a reference to a mutated version of the Pepe the Frog cartoon that was co-opted by the far right. Though Fuentes exists on the fringes of the extreme right, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spoke at a political conference that Fuentes hosted, drawing widespread criticism.

But Fuentes has said himself that he uses irony and "jokes" to communicate his message without consequences.

"Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views," Fuentes said in a 2020 video. He specifically cited Holocaust denial - or what he termed Holocaust "revision" - as a topic that is too fraught to discuss earnestly, even on the far right.

"When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you," Fuentes said.

And, in fact, after Fuentes questioned the death toll from the Holocaust in one rant, he later claimed to The Washington Post that it was just a "lampoon."

Researchers who track domestic extremism say Fuentes is not the only figure to adopt these tactics, particularly among far-right content creators, who encourage their audiences to follow suit.

"A lot of these content creators will tell the audience explicitly, 'When people say you're racist for liking this or thinking this, just laugh at them. They can't handle it - they're sensitive babies,' " said Jared Holt, a resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Concern on campus
In early 2020, Oona Flood started getting more and more worried about a classmate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The classmate, a 22-year-old named Christian Secor, was already well-known for his self-proclaimed "love" of guns. Around that time, he was also posting racist and antisemitic memes and tweets, attacking immigrants online and publicly supporting Fuentes. Often, Secor adopted the kind of "trolling" style that's prevalent on the internet.

When one student called Secor out for a tweet that the student found offensive, Secor responded that he was using "post irony."

"It's called a joke and the fact that you think that these posts are anything more than that is telling," added Secor.

Flood, who is Japanese American, said they wanted to speak up.

"I definitely felt that sense of threat," Flood told NPR recently. "And, like, I really hate to say, [because] it sounds so much like, overblown, 'snowflake,' that we're just overreacting, you know?"

And throughout 2020, students told NPR, UCLA took no action against Secor despite his escalating rhetoric, likely because of free speech concerns. (As a public university, UCLA is legally bound to follow the First Amendment, which protects hate speech.)

In retrospect, Flood's concern does not seem like an overreaction.

Secor is currently facing federal criminal charges for allegedly storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors have cited his support for Fuentes in charging documents. Secor has pleaded not guilty.

In addition to Fuentes and his followers, other experts point to the extremist group known as the Proud Boys, which has embraced outlandish rituals. The group's name was inspired by a song from the Broadway version of Disney's Aladdin, and one of the group's initiation rites involves members listing breakfast cereals while they get lightly punched in the stomach. Yet that same group is known for its involvement in violent street fights. At least 25 members of the group are facing federal criminal charges related to the Capitol riot, including, in some cases, conspiracy.

Gavin McInnes, the group's founder, said in an email that the media, including NPR, "willfully ignores" jokes to paint the group in a more negative light. The Proud Boys are "funny dudes, not Nazis," McInnes wrote.

But Cassie Miller of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the group's use of "jokes" is strategic. "It distracts from what their actual political ideology is and from their violence," said Miller. "Because if you point it out, it's, like, 'well, they're so goofy.' "

Similarly, the far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is often so over the top on his InfoWars broadcasts that his own attorney likened him to a "performance artist" during a court hearing about Jones' divorce.
The appeal to young people
Humor has always been crucial to building social movements, experts say, because it serves to define the people who are "in on the joke" and those who "just don't get it."

And online extremists have adopted irony because it is, in many ways, the native language of the internet.

"I'm speaking the language of other zoomers," said Fuentes in 2020. "If you're a young person online, I mean, this is the language of our generation."

"Every kid naturally wants to push away from their parents," said Joanna Schroeder, a writer based in California.

Schroeder was troubled when she saw a pro-Hitler meme pop up in one of her kids' Instagram feeds. Memes that merely pushed boundaries were mixed in alongside outright racist and antisemitic content.

"The problem is that all of this kind of trolling behavior, some of it is harmless and goofy," said Schroeder, "and others of it is designed to look harmless and goofy but will drive our kids' social media and YouTube algorithms toward alt-right and even more extremist content."

Schroeder has since collaborated with the Western States Center to develop a guide for parents who see their kids share online extremist content.
Historic parallels
Violent domestic extremism in America long predates the internet, however, and so does the tactical use of irony.

Historians have documented how the early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed by group members and their allies as outlandish, rather than as a dangerous terrorist group. The KKK put on racist minstrel shows and created its own songs.

Descriptions of attacks by men in hoods, who had titles like "dragon," "ghoul," and "wizard," were often seen by white Americans as tall tales and ghost stories. Newspapers that supported the KKK played up those aspects of the group and mocked their opponents for supposedly taking the KKK too seriously, said Elaine Frantz, a historian at Kent State University.

Pro-KKK newspaper editors would often "talk jokingly about what the klan has done," said Frantz, "in order to be deniable."

And at first it seemed to work. Frantz cites the testimony of a Georgia congressman who tried to play down klan murders and other racist atrocities.

"Sometimes, mischievous boys who want to have some fun go on a masquerading frolic to scare the negroes," testified U.S. Rep. John H. Christy of Georgia in the early 1870s. Christy insisted that stories of klan attacks were "exaggerated." In fact, he claimed, the group did not exist at all. Frantz said there were also documented instances in the Reconstruction era of white Northerners dressing up in klan robes as a supposedly boundary-pushing "joke."

But eventually, Frantz said, the testimony of Black Americans who witnessed these atrocities - published widely by newspaper reporters and in government investigations - so thoroughly demonstrated the KKK's campaign of lynchings and assassinations that it became undeniable. They pulled back the klan hood to see the terrorism and violence it masked.

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How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

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On a recent episode of his livestreamed show, the 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes repeated a formula that has won him a following with some of the youngest members of the far right. He went on an extended, violent and misogynistic rant, only to turn to the camera and add with a smirk, "Just joking!"

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Don't fit inside the box

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Rosie King: How autism freed me to be myself

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"People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with a specific label," says 16-year-old Rosie King, who is bold, brash and autistic. She wants to know: Why is everyone so worried about being normal?

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Elijah Cummings on democracy

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Elijah Cummings: Wake Up America - we are better than this!

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In a powerful and wide ranging discussion, Congressman Elijah Cummings implores Americans to hold a mirror to ourselves and ask if we like what we have become. He argues that we should throw out the labels that divide us and focus on being Americans, and that it is our duty to leave our democracy in tact for future generations.

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Kamala Harris breaks boundaries

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'You ushered in a new day for America': Watch Harris' full victory speech

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Vice President-elect Kamala Harris addressed the nation in her first public appearance since winning the election.

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Next steps after- bias test

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How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them

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Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we’ve seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

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Toolkit for hiring

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Blackboard & in class directions/ overview

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possible solutions

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"And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.... We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowellis right: “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet, that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.” With this faith we will be able to hue out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day.

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American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King - Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood

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Complete text and audio of Martin Luther King's Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood

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Between serious topics & having a positive experience

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Topics that need to be considered/ addressed next...

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Resources & checklist

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A Checklist for a Welcoming and Inclusive School Environment | Welcoming Schools

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Ensure all of your students and their families feel welcome with this simple checklist to assess your school climate.

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Teen praised for video

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The Black teenager who recorded the now-infamous video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes last May is being hailed as a hero following the former Minneapolis police officer's conviction on murder and manslaughter charges.

Darnella Frazier, who was 17 at the time, testified during the trial that she has spent nights apologizing to Floyd for "not doing more." Now, people across the country - including Floyd's family, President Biden and numerous celebrities and elected officials - are crediting her bravery and quick thinking in capturing the video that they say made the guilty verdict possible.

After the jury convicted Chauvin of all three charges, Frazier shared a post on social media expressing her relief and thanking God. "Justice has been served," she added.

Frazier had been taking her 9-year-old cousin to Cup Foods last Memorial Day when she saw police officers holding Floyd on the asphalt near the rear of a police vehicle, a scene she described during her testimony as that of "a man terrified, scared, begging for his life."

She sent her cousin inside the store and began filming. The 10-minute video she posted to Facebook has since been seen by millions and became a central piece of evidence in Chauvin's trial.

"When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black," Frazier said from the witness stand. "I look at how that could have been one of them."

The graphic video captured a scene drastically at odds withthe initial police statement, which described the encounter as: "man dies after medical incident during police interaction." It said that Floyd physically resisted officers and made no mention of the prolonged restraint.

Many social media users and public figures are praising Frazier for taking the video, which they credit with disproving the police narrative and facilitating the trial's historic outcome.

Police officers are rarely convicted of murder for on-duty killings, and Chauvin is just the second such case in Minnesota's history.

In remarks delivered Tuesday, Biden alsonoted how rare such a verdict is and said Chauvin's conviction seems for many people to have been the result of "a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors" - including "a brave young woman with a smartphone camera."

Angela Harrelson, Floyd's aunt, lauded Frazier's bravery in a Wednesday interview with CNN.

"It really doesn't surprise me that much, with police cover-ups, because they've always had done that, especially towards Black and brown people," Harrelson said. "The sad thing is if it hadn't been for that 17-year-old girl Darnella, it would have been another Black man, that was killed by the police, his own fault, and they would have said, 'Oh, it was drugs, oh it was this.' And we would never have had the story we would have and wouldn't be here today talking."

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore wrote in a tweet that Frazier had changed the world, adding, "No film in our time has been more important than yours." Journalist Ann Marie Lipinski called it "one of the most important civil rights documents in a generation."

Some have called for Frazier to receive the Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., wrote, "What work of media has been more consequential in the past year?"

"She is a stellar example of how everyday people can be powerful in documenting injustice and creating momentum for accountability," tweeted Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

History should remember the incredibly 17 year old Darnella Frazier who had the strength and composure to capture the murder of #georgefloyd on video. Without her video there may never have been #justice.
- Valerie Jarrett (@ValerieJarrett) April 20, 2021

Frazier has received one award already - from PEN America, the nonprofit organization focused on freedom of expression. The legendary producer, director and screenwriter Spike Lee presented Frazier with an award for courage at a virtual ceremony in December.

"She documented the murder of George Floyd, our brother. King Floyd. And that footage reverberated around this God's earth, and people took to the streets all over this Earth," Lee said. "Not just the United States of America, and it wasn't just Black people either."

At the ceremony, a slew of high-profile figures - including actors Gabrielle Union and Meryl Streep, civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and Anita Hill, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. - offered their praise and thanks in a series of brief video clips.

"I never would imagine out of my whole 17 years of living that this will be me," Frazier said as she accepted the award. "It's just a lot to take in, but I couldn't say 'thank you' enough for everything that's been coming towards me."

In the wake of the trial, supporters of Frazier are expressing their gratitude as well as their hopes that she will continue to receive support.

Frazier testified that she felt like she was in danger at the time and that police were threatening bystanders with Mace as they called for officers to stop hurting Floyd and render medical attention.

Many have noted that the experience and resulting trauma will stay with her permanently.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the traumatized witnesses to Floyd's murder. Especially the young people. Darnella Frazier, the teen who filmed it. The store clerk who blames himself. I can't get them out of my mind. I hope the verdict brings them some peace.
- Lauren Williams (@laurenwilliams) April 20, 2021

Bernice King, CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, posted a tweet wishing "emotional healing" for Frazier, while journalist Evette Dionne offered prayers for the safety of Frazier and other bystanders who "now have a city police department's bullseye on their back."

Others are sharing the link to an online fundraiser titled "Peace and Healing for Darnella Fund," which was created last May and has raised more than $630,000 as of midday Wednesday.

"In addition to the trauma of watching a black man be murdered by police, she has had to deal with trolls, bullies and ignorant people harassing her online," organizers wrote. "It took unbelievable courage for her to stand there and bear witness to such an awful tragedy. We all have our roles to play in the revolution against white supremacy. Darnella played an important one and should be uplifted, not shamed."

In an update on Tuesday, organizer Mica Cole Kamenski said that while the fundraiser had originally been established to support Frazier's immediate healing and well-being, contributors wanted to provide the financial resources to ensure her long-term safety and that proceeds from the fundraiser will be transferred to a trust in Frazier's name.

Kamenski added that "because of Darnella Frazier, we saw a glimpse of accountability today."

"The support I had since day one carried me a long way," Frazier wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. "So thank you all again, thank you."

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Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed Floyd's Murder, Praised For Making Verdict Possible

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The Black teenager who recorded the now-infamous video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes last May is being hailed as a hero following the former Minneapolis police officer's conviction on murder and manslaughter charges.