N'Faly Kouyate says his African harp was badly damaged after he was made to put it in the hold.
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Intro Video
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
University removes ad with crime tape around Black student’s neck
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has apologized for an ad that depicts a black criminal justice student with crime scene tape wrapped around her neck.
UWM has taken down the poster ads, designed to promote the criminal justice program after some pushback from alumni, students and others online. Some considered the ad racially offensive.
Student Nate Rosek tells WTMJ-TV that someone should have reconsidered the depiction.
The university in a statement said the police tape was a prop used to add interest to the photos. The ad campaign included students of different races and ethnicities.
The school says it did not intend to offend or diminish the impact of violence in the community.
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Now free from legal limbo, Meek Mill eyes prison reform
Rapper Meek Mill pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun charge Tuesday in a deal that resolves a 2007 arrest that has kept him on probation or in prison for most of his adult life.
The negotiated plea comes after an appeals court threw out his conviction last month over doubts about the arresting officer’s credibility. The 32-year-old rapper, born Robert Williams, is now free of a criminal justice system he hopes to reform.
“I know this has been a long road for you and hopefully this will be the end of it,” Judge Leon Tucker told him.
Williams has called the 12-year ordeal “mentally and emotionally challenging,” but said millions of people face the same issues.
“I know you probably got family members in jail, people going through the same thing as me,” Williams told a small crowd as he left the courthouse. “I will continue to do what I do with the reform movement and help the people that helped me.”
He took up the cause after clashing repeatedly with the trial judge who ordered 10 years of probation and sent him back to prison in 2017 for technical violations. He spent five months locked up before the Pennsylvania Superior Court granted him bail and removed her from the case.
District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office supported Williams’ appeal and said it could not call the former officer to testify after the department found he’d stolen money on duty and lied about it. The officer, Reginald Graham, has denied the allegations.
Still, Krasner could not ignore the fact that Williams acknowledged having a gun, though he denied pointing it at police or selling drugs.
Krasner has overseen an office that has backed more than a dozen exonerations but said this is not that type of case. It is one in which Williams was guilty of a gun crime, but was excessively punished, Krasner said.
“Just as Mr. Williams has evolved in the last 10-plus years, the criminal justice system also needs to evolve,” he said.
Kahsim Buey, 23, listened to his music growing up in North Philadelphia and listened in court Tuesday as he entered his plea. Buey, who spent time in a youth detention center at 14, recently became the first in his family to graduate college and hopes to become a lawyer.
He believes that judges often believe police over defendants.
“Just like the Meek situation. His voice was little at the beginning, but now his voice is big because of the person he is,” Buey said. “I’m very happy for Meek today.”
Buey, a law intern, said he was pulled over by police this month for allegedly running a red light on his bike. The officer searched his drawstring bag for a gun, he said.
“They know our voice is little, so they mess with us,” he said. “That’s why I want to become a lawyer.”
In 2015, a federal jury rejected a lawsuit Williams filed against a Philadelphia police officer over what he called a racially motivated, 10-hour traffic stop that led him to miss the launch party for his 2012 debut album, “Dreams & Nightmares.”
His follow-up albums include the chart-topping “Dreams Worth More Than Money” and last year’s “Championships,” which includes performances from Jay-Z, his mentor, and former girlfriend Nicki Minaj.
On July 24, just hours before the Pennsylvania Superior Court threw out his conviction, Meek Mill and Jay-Z announced they were launching a new label and starting a $50 million criminal justice reform group.
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Beyoncé’s music director on ‘Homecoming’ Emmy nod : ‘It feels good’
In true Beyoncé fashion, when her music director learned he earned his first-ever Emmy nomination for his work on the pioneering project, “HOMECOMING: A Film by Beyoncé,” he was too busy to celebrate — because he was focused on producing the superstar’s next album.
Derek Dixie has worked with Beyoncé for almost a decade, rising through the ranks from assisting the music director to eventually holding the title himself. His first credit as an MD for Beyoncé was her first concert since giving birth to Blue Ivy in 2012, where former first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters Sasha and Malia were among the attendees.
Now, Dixie is competing for outstanding music direction — shared with Beyoncé — at the Emmy Awards, slated for Sept. 22 (the creative arts Emmys, a precursor to the main ceremony, takes place Sept. 14).
“It feels good obviously. I haven’t really digested it completely yet,” Dixie said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from Los Angeles. “My family’s looking at me like, ‘Wow, my son is Emmy-nominated, my brother Emmy-nominated, so that part of it is really good. Like, I’ve kind of accomplished something for the home team and for the family.”
When the Emmy nominations were announced in July, Dixie was adding the finishing touches to “The Lion King: The Gift,” released days after the nominations were revealed. The Beyoncé-curated album was inspired by the 2019 film version of “The Lion King,” where the singer voices the character Nala.
Though Dixie came on Beyoncé’s team in music direction, he’s also produced, engineered and arranged songs for the singer.
“Just being on the road all the time, sometimes you might have to record an idea or something and need somebody to hop in there and record something quick. And I had those skills,” said Dixie, who also produced songs on Beyoncé’s epic “Lemonade” album, earning him his first-ever Grammy nomination at the 2017 awards show. “I think it’s segued from the live world into the studio world in my case.”
For “HOMECOMING,” which captured Beyoncé’s brilliant and trailblazing 2018 Coachella performance that highlighted black college culture, Dixie said they planned months ahead of the performance, first by trading ideas over the phone. Then he went into the studio with a small band to churn out more concepts (the final performance included more than 100 performers onstage, including a full marching band, majorette dancers and steppers).
“Once she honed in on the HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) idea … it was a machine after that. It was just months and months of prep work, making it sound authentic,” he said. “She has tons and tons of classic records that when putting the show together, you have to maintain the classic feel of the record but make it feel like you’re in a stadium at homecoming.”
Beyoncé’s Coachella performance marked the first time a black woman headlined the famed festival and made the singer just the third woman to score the gig, behind Bjork and Lady Gaga. And it made history: “HOMECOMING” earned a whopping six Emmy nominations, including four for Beyoncé, giving the 23-time Grammy winner a good chance to snag her first-ever Emmy.
In addition to outstanding music direction, Beyoncé is nominated for outstanding directing for a variety special (shared with Ed Burke), outstanding writing for a variety special and outstanding variety special (pre-recorded), where she is nominated as the film’s performer and executive producer (she shares the nomination with fellow EPs Erinn Williams, Steve Pamon and Burke). “HOMECOMING” also earned nominations for outstanding production design for a variety special and outstanding costumes for variety, nonfiction or reality programming.
“I don’t think you can survive in her circle without being the hardest working person in the room,” Dixie said of working for Beyoncé. “I say, ‘Always be the hardest working person in the room and always hire the hardest working person in the room.’ Because you have to have that because that’s who she is. That’s what she’s going to do.”
“I think it’s a blessing and just like any situation you have your stresses and you have your chaos that exists,” he continued, “but because of who she is as an entertainer and as a person, you kind of find that fuel to keep going one more day.”
And for those who hope to work for Beyoncé one day, he has some advice: “Be ready to work. Yes. That’s it. The glamour part comes later but the work part is definitely real.”
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HBCUs hope gift from NBA star Steph Curry sparks a golf resurgence
Ernie Andrews looks out to the grounds of Washington’s historic Langston Golf Course and shrugs at the fact that fewer young black golfers are coming out to play these days.
As a black man and longtime pro at a place that was once one of the few courses in the U.S. where African Americans were allowed to play, Andrews is hoping a gift from NBA star Stephen Curry to re-establish a golf program at prominent and historically black Howard University is the start of an upward trend.
“This is a great sport, and we have too much tradition as a people trying to get into the sport to lose it now,” Andrews said.
Curry’s gift to Howard in Washington is bringing new attention to golf at historically black colleges and universities and spotlighting the harsh budget constraints that they face in keeping their programs alive.
Black colleges and universities are a crucial pipeline to increasing diversity in golf at a time when few African Americans are playing the sport at the college and professional levels.
Only about 300 of the NCAA’s more than 10,000 college golfers are black, according to association data. And just three African American golfers are on the PGA Tour: Tiger Woods, Harold Varner III and Cameron Champ.
More than half of the collegiate black golfers compete at HBCUs, but those programs are constantly struggling for survival. Only about a quarter of the more than 100 HBCUs have golf teams, said Craig Bowen, president and founder of the Black College Golf Coaches’ Association.
Howard abandoned its golf program in the 1970s before Curry, a two-time NBA MVP who has won three championships with the Golden State Warriors, intervened last week. He donated some of his fortune toward a six-year deal to help the school relaunch its men’s and women’s teams for the 2020-21 academic year.
Jackson State University in Mississippi made history in 2007 by becoming the first HBCU to compete in the NCAA Division I golf tournament. But the university suspended its men and women’s golf teams a decade later when it faced a budget crisis.
Some HBCUs struggle to find black golfers and end up fielding teams with white players, and the programs are among the first to get targeted during budget crunches.
“It’s not football or basketball generating dollars, and they don’t want to go out and spend money and actually have to go out and raise money for golf,” said Bowen, who used to coach golf at Chicago State and Benedict College in South Carolina, which are both HBCUs.
Many believed that Woods’ barrier-shattering ascent that started with his historic 1997 win at the Masters — at a club that once banned black golfers — would usher in a new generation of African American players on the PGA Tour.
But those projections didn’t materialize, in part because of the deep challenges that young African Americans still face when it comes to taking up a sport that requires considerable expense and travel to play at a high level.
“A lot of my golf organizations and clubs are really being challenged in attracting young people,” said Debert Cook, publisher of the African American Golfer’s Digest.
Curry, who has long been known as a passionate golfer, made the announcement about his Howard donation at Langston Golf Course, one of the few U.S. golf courses to allow African Americans when it opened in 1939. The course was home to the Royal Golf Club and the Wake Robin Golf Club, the nation’s first for African American men and women.
African Americans made steady progress in golf after Langston Golf Course was built, culminating with Woods’ domination of the sport in the early 2000s.
In 1964, Althea Gibson, a tennis pioneer who also played golf professionally, became the first black woman to play in the LPGA Tour. And Charlie Sifford joined the PGA Tour in 1961 after years of the organization’s whites-only clause that kept out golfers of color.
Andrews said young golfers still have to fight the perception that it’s “a white man’s” sport. He hopes that a resurgence of HBCU golf will help bring more African American youth into the sport.
Golf is a great way to teach discipline and perseverance, he said, as well as an avenue into the corporate world for students who may not otherwise have a way in.
“We use golf, but the real teaching is about life,” Andrews said.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Brely Evans talks groundbreaking role on ‘Ambitions’ and repping for real women
Brely Evans has been heating up the small screen on OWN’s addictive drama, Ambitions. theGrio sat down with the actress who plays Rondelle Lancaster to find out why she’s so passionate about the role.
“She is the mother, auntie, best friend, woman in the neighborhood that you want on your team. She is feisty, she is dramatic, she is on fire,” she says.
“She is the voice to the voiceless. She puts her life in front of things she believes in. She is a lover of family and friends. It has been amazing playing this role…she’s a whole person.”
Evans says she relates to her character’s passion for justice and finds herself in similar predicaments in real life as the ones her character navigates on the show.
5 reasons OWN’s sexy new series ‘Ambitions’ is your new guilty pleasure
“When I first read for the role, I knew her,” she explained. “She has a boldness and a big personality and I think that would be me too.”
Brely Evans is well aware that she’s repping for the real-looking women of the world in a way that we’re not used to seeing on television. Her character is curvy, sexy, attractive to men, and her life and storyline doesn’t revolve around her weight.
“I have been getting feedback from people loving Rondelle in a special way and I think it’s because they are getting to see the curvy girl in a whole other light. This is the girl who has men that are attracted to her. This is the girl who can stand up when something needs to be said…This woman is living. Rondelle is getting to show life in real curves and it is a beautiful thing. I’m giving a voice to every day women,” she said.
“I’m gonna get to explore the full rainbow of Rondelle. You guys are going to get to go on a journey with this woman… I get to explore every facet and I’ve never really had that opportunity in other roles I have played,” she continued. “I had to go to some dark places and I had to connect in a way that I haven’t done before.”
She also explained how her role opened her eyes to the real-life issue of gentrification currently affecting the country.
Check out the full interview above.
Watch Ambitions on Tuesdays at 10/9c on OWN.
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Health, wealth, and cities
Cities have wealth disparities: Picture fancy downtown condos and trendy shopping areas in contrast to, say, streets with rundown housing and boarded-up shops. Cities also have health disparities: People who live in well-off parts of metro areas are less exposed to many of the pollutants, risks, and stresses that lead to long-term health problems.
The health issues are easier to overlook, partly because they are less visible. We don’t necessarily see the factors that create health inequities, such as particulates from freeway pollution that settle in low-income neighborhoods, the lead pipes causing cognitive problems in people who drink from them, the added stress of being poor, or the lack of access to health care that exacerbates other problems for low-income people.
Still, the health gap in cities is real and demands significant scholarly attention. Enter Mariana Arcaya, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Arcaya is a specialist in urban health issues, with a broad research portfolio.
Arcaya has studied the health effects of efforts such as the federal Moving to Opportunity program, which relocated families within metropolitan areas (with mixed health effects). She has also examined issues as diverse as the health impact of foreclosure, the considerable prevalence of posttraumatic stress among New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and even the impact of public transportation on health.
“The human body is so sensitive to environmental and social conditions,” Arcaya notes. “The neighborhoods people live in help determine what we’re exposed to.”
Arcaya has also found that families in Moving to Opportunity program were less likely to move if they already had a sick child. Thus low-income families were, to an extent, trapped by health problems in economically deprived neighborhoods, which themselvs can harm health.
But if Arcaya’s research interests are complex, the moral foundations of her work are simple.
“We should be aiming for cities that are supportive of human health for everyone, rich or poor, and of any race or ethnicity,” says Arcaya.
“All kids should be born into a society where everyone has a fair shot of growing up healthy,” she continues. “When you’re saddled from the beginning with avoidable health problems caused by where you live, those can limit your potential, and that’s unfair.”
That ethical vision has long motived her work, since her days as a school student. Now, for her research and teaching, she has just been awarded tenure at MIT.
“What I’m doing is what I always thought I wanted to be doing,” Arcaya says. “I’m interested in how inequality in place-based opportunity follows people throughout their lives and sets people on different paths, in part by affecting their health.”
Arcaya, who grew up just outside of New York City, has long had a keen interest in environmental issues — “I ran for president of my middle school on basically an environmental platform,” she says, laughing — and in college at Duke University she majored in environmental science and policy. There, she learned about the health problems that environmental degradation can cause — but not necessarily about what to do in response. So she earned an MCP at MIT, from DUSP, focusing on city planning and health.
“A lot of the health problems I was studying stemmed from the built environment, and the way we disregarded the value of the natural environment,” Arcaya says. “I came to MIT to focus on the equity implications of trying to enact change: How do you intervene in a positive way?”
After completing her MIT master’s thesis, Arcaya then earned a PhD at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which helped build her public health knowledge and sharpen her scholarly tool kit. At this point — having studied the environment, cities, and health — Arcaya went on the academic job market, while starting a family. She joined the MIT faculty in 2015.
“I gave my job talk eight months pregnant, took advantage of parental leave after the birth of my second child, and bring my kids to work if they’re sent home from daycare sick,” Arcaya says. “Lots of working parents deal with everything from pregnancy discrimination to a lack of paid parental leave, which is simply wrong. I’ve only been able to do my job because I’ve had the benefit of an incredibly supportive environment and great policies.”
Arcaya has been engaged in multiple ambitious projects during her time at the Institute. Over the last couple of years, she has also intensified her interest in setting up long-term study programs that aim to reveal new, in-depth information about cities and health.
One of these, the Healthy Neighborhoods Study, is an in-depth quantitative and qualitative look at nine neighborhoods in Boston, taking what Arcaya calls “a resident-centered approach” to identifying public health problems.
Another is a long-term study of mothers in New Orleans recovering from Hurricane Katrina, extending some of Arcaya’s earlier work about posttraumatic stress. In this project as well, Arcaya and her research partners are collecting information about the life tradeoffs Katrina survivors have made, to understand what Arcaya calls the “realistic complexity” of the issue.
“Disasters have always been a part of life, but the severity and number are expected to go up,” Arcaya says. “What are we going to do about that? How can we expect individuals to respond, and how can we adapt?”
And as income and wealth inequality rises in the U.S., Arcaya has also become an advocate urging urban planners and scholars to develop studies that will further explore the inequities of urban conditions.
“We have become increasingly unequal socioeconomically in this country, which compounds some of the new and worsensing environmental threats we face,” Arcaya says. “That needs to factor into our research on neighborhods and health. Good planning may be one of the most effective public health tools we have.”
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Serena Williams shows no mercy against Maria Sharapova winning US Open game one
Serena Williams’ was back in her element playing like a champ and she beat Maria Sharapova handily during the first round of the US Open on Monday.
—Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka top Forbes list of highest paid female athletes—
Williams who recently had to retire from a match because of back spasms, seemed to be in optimum condition this go-round, finishing the game 6-1, 6-1, The Daily Mail reports.
“Obviously I am going against a player who has won five Grand Slams, every practice after the draw was super intense,” said Williams. “When you play her have to be super focused. She gets momentum and gets going, it was a fun match. The body is good, my back is a lot better, I’m excited.”
Williams was determined not to let her opponent get a win, making her victory the 19th time in a row she has dominated Sharapova.
“Every time I come up against her,” Williams said, “I just bring out some of my best tennis.”
Celebrities like Spike Lee were on hand at Arthur Ashe stadium to watch Williams serve up a butt whooping to Sharapova.
Williams is now readying to play Game 2 against Caty McNally as she seeks her 24th Grand Slam title.
—What made Serena Williams stop playing in the middle of an important match?—
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