Month: March 2017

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t care how “likable” she is. 

In an interview with The Washington Post published on International Women’s Day, Adichie discussed feminism and her new book, Dear Ijeawele. The acclaimed feminist author and mother initially wrote Dear Ijeawele as a letter to a friend asking for parenting advice. Adichie told WaPo the book includes suggestions on how to raise daughters in our sexist culture, including lessons like “teach her self-reliance” and “never speak of marriage as an achievement.”

“It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to be yourself,” Adichie told WaPo. “Someone will like you anyway.”

Adichie writes in Dear Ijeawele that she feels these conversations with children, but young daughters especially, are imperative to breaking down sexism, according to WaPo’s Nora Krug.

“I think it is morally urgent to have honest conversations about raising children differently, about trying to create a fairer world for women and men,” she wrote. 

Adichie told Krug that gender roles are so often learned from a young age. 

“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned,” she said, adding that she really dislikes the “Can women have it all?” conversation. “It’s a debate that assumes women do all of the child-raising and domestic work ― and we give her a special cookie when she works outside the home. When dad picks up a kid one time, he gets seven cookies.”

She pointed to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an example of how gender roles are much harsher for women. Clinton’s Twitter bio starts with “wife, mom, grandma,” Adichie told WaPo. But Bill Clinton’s first word in his Twitter bio is “founder.” 

“We want women seeking power to be tempered by a more domestic side. We don’t expect the same of men,” Adichie said. “Women have to straddle a line so that they are seen as not so forceful that they are a shrew or emasculating, but not weak. It’s a kind of juggling that men don’t even have to consider at all.” 

Head over to The Washington Post to read the full interview. 

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

O.J. Simpson is currently serving a 33-year prison sentence after he was found guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping in 2008. But the former football star could be free as early as this October. According to TMZ, if that happens, reality TV producers will be scrambling to sign him. 

The website reports that, after reaching out to various players in the reality TV industry, reactions ranged from some “recoiling in disgust” at the idea of working with him, to those eager to capitalize on his infamy.

Given the often-exploitative nature of reality TV, combined with recent renewed interest in Simpson — thanks to several projects from 2016 including FX’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” — this shouldn’t surprise anyone. 

Simpson is no stranger to reality TV. He once starred in a super low-budget rip-off of “Punk’d” called “Juiced,” which aired in the decade after he was acquitted in the murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

Those who watched the Oscar-winning doc “O.J.: Made In America” might remember clips of the prank show, filmed during Simpson’s time living in Florida. These clips felt like the darkest part of the documentary, which is strange, given much of the film dealt with a horrific and brutal murder.

There was also Simpson’s memoir, If I Did It, where he outlined how he would have hypothetically killed Brown and Goldman were he the murderer. Reviews of the ghost-written book (published by the family of Goldman, who seized the manuscript as part of a lawsuit payout) said that it essentially amounted to a confession. The former athlete also shot a TV special with Fox, which never aired due to public outcry.   

The producers TMZ spoke with say they know someone in the industry will probably attempt to re-create that unaired TV special. However, they acknowledged there would also be concerns that any project with Simpson could provoke public outrage, which could mean a harder time getting the show picked up on a network or cable channel — and finding willing advertisers. 

Of course, given what’s already on TV today, it’s safe to say there’s definitely someone out there willing to give Simpson his own reality show. 

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

With the abrupt resignation of its leader, the fate of the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice program appears to be practically sealed.

On Thursday, InsideClimate News reported that Mustafa Ali, who has been heading the EPA’s environmental justice work and helped found the program in 1992, had resigned from his post.

Ali told the site in an interview that he sees the work he was part of as critical to the EPA’s overall function, but indicated that he doesn’t believe the agency’s current leaders share that belief.

“My values and priorities seem to be different than our current leadership and because of that I feel that it’s best if I take my talents elsewhere,” Ali said.

The program, which helps disadvantaged communities push back against industry pollution, appears bound for a drastic, 78-percent funding cut according to preliminary Office of Management and Budget numbers reported by The Oregonian and confirmed by other media outlets last week. The cuts would essentially gut the program, reducing its funding from $6.7 million to just $1.5 million.

In his resignation letter, shared widely across Twitter on Thursday, Ali pleaded with EPA chief Scott Pruitt to continue to support the office. Ali credited it with bringing together community groups, government and industry interests “to find collaborative solutions to many of the country’s most serious environmental and public health issues and concerns” in more than 1,000 communities over the course of his time there.

“I strongly encourage you and your team to continue promoting agency efforts to validate these communities’ concerns, and value their lives,” Ali wrote in the letter.

EPA officials did not respond to a request for comment on Ali’s resignation, but Lisa Garcia, who previously headed up the agency’s environmental justice work, said she was “outraged” by the news.

“I think this shows that this administration has no idea how valuable the office of environmental justice is,” Garcia, who left the EPA in 2014 to work at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, told The Huffington Post.

The program has operated for years with a shoe-string staff and a tiny budget — just 0.08 percent of the agency’s $8 billion budget, which itself represented just 0.22 percent of federal spending last year.

So, Garcia added, if the agency is going to be tasked with doing more with less, the environmental justice program should be emulated — not eliminated.

“This decision shows how fiscally irresponsible they are and how they are absolutely making uneducated decisions,” Garcia said. “They aren’t looking at the facts and they really don’t care about people because this is the one program that focuses on some of the most vulnerable communities. It smacks of elitism and racism if this is where they think the cuts can come from.”

The EPA’s environmental justice program, which was originally called the environmental equity office, was established in 1992 following the release of a series of damning reports that found industry polluters like toxic waste sites were disproportionately located in low-income communities of color when compared to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

The program aimed to address the problem of minority and low-income communities’ heightened exposure to these pollutants, providing small grants to help communities both create and implement local solutions to environmental justice concerns where they live.

It’s had many achievements. In just one example, a community organization in Spartanburg, South Carolina, helped a neighborhood surrounded by Superfund sites and Brownfields leverage a $20,000 EPA grant into cleanup efforts that led to more than $270 million in investments like community health centers, affordable housing, a recreation center, gardens and green space.

In a 2015 agency blog post, former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called the Spartanburg effort “a shining beacon of what’s possible when folks impacted by community decisions have a seat at the table.”

Garcia cited other examples of the program’s success: A small EPA environmental justice grant helped the residents of Tonawanda, New York, study the level of toxic benzene in their air — information that they used to force an industry polluter to cut its emissions, resulting in improved air quality. Another similar grant helped Asian-American groups in Seattle develop stormwater retention solutions that helped them revitalize the city’s Chinatown district with urban gardens.

Improvements like these don’t appear to be a priority for the EPA under the Trump administration. Though Pruitt has commented in recent interviews that he will push back against certain agency cuts proposed by the OMB, he has not named environmental justice among them.

This would provide a stark contrast to the way in which environmental justice was prioritized at the EPA under the Obama administration, most plainly evidenced by the long-term goals set forth in the Plan EJ 2014 and 2020 EJ Action Agenda reports that mapped out a comprehensive, agency-wide environmental justice strategy.

The EPA clearly has a long way to go in that regard. A report released last year by the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights found that the agency has a long track record of extremely delayed responses to environmental justice concerns. A separate report from the Center for Public Integrity found that the agency has been “chronically unresponsive” to such complaints.

“This decision shows how fiscally irresponsible they are and how they are absolutely making uneducated decisions.”
Lisa Garcia, former head of the EPA’s environmental justice program

Despite the previous administration’s mixed record on environmental justice, advocates fear that the program’s gutting will cause the agency to backtrack on the progress that has been made at a time when situations like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, have shown how high the stakes in these matters can be.

Still, the cuts did not come as a surprise to some environmental justice advocates like Kay Cuajunco, a spokeswoman for the California Environmental Justice Alliance.

“We knew that environmental justice communities  — low-income communities and communities of color  — would be the first and worst hit under the new administration,” Cuajunco told HuffPost. “They have always been disproportionately impacted by pollution, and now the scale of attack will be bigger and the few backstops we’ve had will be gone.”

Other advocates are already preparing to push back against the cuts. And it starts with holding Pruitt to remarks he made during his Senate confirmation process, according to Michele Roberts, national co-coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance nonprofit.

In response to questions from Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Roberts noted, Pruitt indicated that he recognized the importance of environmental justice efforts and planned to “protect human health and the environment for all Americans.”

“We would think that whatever these programatic changes he’s proposing would uphold the words that he listed off that he would honor during his hearing,” Roberts told HuffPost. “If he’s committed to all those things, the environmental justice program is not on the chopping block. But I’m just using his words.”

The OMB’s proposed cuts to the EPA total about 25 percent of its overall budget and would eliminate 1 in 5 of the agency’s employees. Some programs — like beach water quality state grants and Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound restoration efforts— are essentially eliminated in the proposal, while climate and Brownfield programs are also slated for major cuts.

Many of these cuts beyond the environmental justice program would also disproportionately impact lower-income communities and communities of color, environmental groups have noted.

“While this ‘zero out’ strategy would impact nearly every community in the United States, a close examination shows the burden of these cuts will fall hardest on the health of low-income Americans and people of color,” Travis Nichols, Greenpeace USA spokesman, said in a previous statement. “This is environmental racism in action.”

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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

The feud between Nicki Minaj and Remy Ma continues as Minaj has thrown the latest jab.

Her new song, “No Frauds,” featuring Lil Wayne and Drake, is said to be her response to Remy Ma’s obvious diss track “shETHER.” There’s been a lot of questioning as to when Minaj would finally respond to Remy Ma’s repeated attacks; after “shETHER,” she went for the one-two punch and dropped “Another One.”

At least one fan suggested the song was merely “a business move” in a tweet shared hundreds of times, but we think there’s no question that “No Frauds” is about Remy.

In the first verse alone, we have, “Tried to drop ‘Another One,’ you was itchin’ to scrap / You exposed your ghostwriter, now you wish you were scrapped.” Then, “Back to back, oh you mean, back to wack? ‘Back to Back’? Me and Drizzy laughed at that.”

You can listen to “No Frauds” on Apple Music while we wait to see what Remy’s follow-up will be.

For its part, Twitter was up in arms about the drop, which left a lot of people unimpressed with Minaj:

Diehard Nicki fans still came out for her, though:

Whether you’re Team Minaj or Team Remy, we can’t wait to see how this ends.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

This speech to Congress was all good baby baby.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) used the House floor to pay tribute to New York rapper The Notorious B.I.G. on the 20th anniversary of his death Thursday.

The congressman began by reciting lyrics from his 1994 hit “Juicy,” before declaring how the words of the star, born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, would “live on forever.”

“I’ve got the privilege of representing the district where Biggie Smalls was raised,” Jeffries said. “We know he went from negative to positive and emerged as one of the world’s most important hip hop stars.”

He described the rapper’s “rags-to-riches life story” as “the classic embodiment of the American dream.”

“Biggie Smalls is gone but he will never be forgotten,” Jeffries added. “Rest in peace, Notorious B.I.G. Where Brooklyn at?”

Wallace was just 24 years old when he was gunned down and killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles on Mar. 9, 1997. The murder remains unsolved.

Watch Jeffries’ full speech in the clip above and see the music video for “Juicy” below:

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

On Thursday, a group of anonymous artists and activists dressed as MTA maintenance workers made some subtle yet powerful adjustments to the “If You See Something, Say Something” advertisements in New York subways. 

New Yorkers will immediately recognize the MTA’s iconic, orange campaign posters, which feature photos of “regular New Yorkers” like Gregg T., Jo M. and Officer Chin alongside testimonials that recount their supposed paths to becoming everyday heroes by reporting suspicious behavior from fellow passengers. 

The new campaign posters appear almost identical to the originals, but look closer and the testimonials have been changed to reflect the pressing fears stoked by our current political climate. 

“I felt like a hero reporting what I saw,” Melissa C.’s quote reads. “But what scares me more than an unattended package is an unattended politician. We have to keep an eye on how our representatives vote and hold them accountable.”

“I’m glad I was reminded to report that suspicious bag,” Jo says in her snippet. “But I wonder, when my own president uses a willing media to perpetuate a constant state of fear, who are the real terrorists and who profits off my panic?” 

The five replacement ads also feature the hashtag #Resist, and a phone number connecting to the MTA safety line. 

“I have no problem with the [original] MTA campaign,” an anonymous artist behind the subway ad remix explained in an interview with Hyperallergic. “It’s smart and it’s responsible — it was a backpack that was involved in the Boston bombing, so we should be on the lookout for suspicious bags, and I didn’t want to take that away from the ads. But to me, a campaign that’s telling you to be vigilant, but just say something when the problem’s already in front of you, is kind of useless. Let’s try to get a little bit more upstream from the problem. Where is the root of this problem?”

An artist also told Gothamist that the public intervention was inspired by President Donald Trump’s November victory. In the past few months, minorities in New York have been subject to violence and intimidation, from racist graffiti to bomb threats to fatal shootings. “I’m just more sensitive to every kind of message around me now that’s coming from a government agency,” the artist said.

Because the fake ads are technically illegal, the artists involved have elected to remain anonymous, a Gothamist reporter told The Huffington Post. And, in an effort to keep the posters circulating as long as possible, they ask the public not to disclose which subway lines they are on. 

New Yorkers, on your next Subway commute, be vigilant. Both in terms of the safety of your fellow commuters and the potential for compelling activist art. 

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Aldis Hodge believe WGN’s “Underground” can provide an important lesson about fighting societal injustices today.

The show follows a group of enslaved men and women, led by Harriet Tubman, as they navigate the Underground to freedom. Smollett-Bell and Hodge, who star as Rosalee and Noah, appeared at AOL Build to discuss the new season, which premiered Wednesday.

The actors told host Jacques Morel that, though the story is set in the Antebellum period, many of the themes resonate today. Hodge said that his character’s struggle to find freedom has similarities to the issues black people and other marginalized communities currently face.

“We’re still dealing with trying to find our value and walk in our value,” Hodge said. “[T]he enslaved Americans, this is what they fought for and fought through for a long, long time. How do we see ourselves as valuable when the world is telling us we’re not?”

The actors said the show’s themes related to identity are what makes the story so important. Smollett-Bell compared the plight of the characters in “Underground” to the moral duty Americans have to fight for equality in 2017.

“We all are capable of just living in our comfort zones when issues don’t affect us,” she said. “So you have the abolitionists in the north where you can argue the issue really didn’t affect them but it affected their conscious, it affected their values, their morals.”

Smollett-Bell reminded the audience that the slaves who rebelled put their life on the line, but the biggest thing people are asked to do today, is show up.

“We can ask ourselves nowadays ― obviously, with so many issues that affect us and so many issues that don’t affect us, that affect our Muslim brothers and sisters, our LGBT brothers and sisters ― where are we gonna stand in these battles? Where is history gonna say we stood? You wanna be standing on the right side of history,” she said.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

Surprise, surprise: Many of President Donald Trump’s comments about women pair quite well with sexist vintage advertisements. 

A new project by Syrian artist Saint Hoax reimagines some of Trump’s thoughts about women as slogans on old print advertisements. The series, titled “Make America Misogynistic Again,” highlights how easy it would be to confuse the president’s thoughts about women with sexist commentary from more than half a century ago. 

Saint Hoax said he was initially doing research for a different project, when he stumbled upon vintage sexist advertisements and was inspired to create “Make America Misogynistic Again.” 

“I decided to match the visuals with sexist Trump quotes and show them to my friends without actually telling them where I got the quotes from,” he told The Huffington Post. “I told them that these were the actual advertisements that were published in the 1950s and ‘60s and they believed it. When I revealed the truth, they were in complete shock.” 

There should be a stark contrast between sexist ads from 70 ago and our current president’s comments, but there isn’t. Trump’s now-infamous remarks about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and how “you have to treat [women] like shit” pair alarmingly well with ads that depict a husband spanking his wife, or a woman as an actual rug with a man standing on top of her. 

“The way women are represented in the media has shifted drastically since these advertisements were initially published,” Saint Hoax said. “Sadly, Donald Trump is trying to take America back to the ‘Mad Men’ era. I’m hoping that these posters would make people realize that Trump’s ‘locker room talk’ is extremely dangerous.”  

Scroll below to see all of the prints from Saint Hoax’s “Make America Misogynistic Again.” 

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

In late February, Yvonne Lin, a product designer who is currently about eight months pregnant, was riding the New York subway when a man got up to give her his seat. What that man didn’t know, was that he was the first man to offer Lin a seat throughout her two pregnancies. He also had no idea she had been carrying a trophy in her bag during her last trimester, ready for this exact occasion.

During her first pregnancy, Lin carried around “some Papyrus card” with the word “Congratulations” on the inside to give to the first man who offered her a subway seat. She told The Huffington Post she never got to use it. During her second pregnancy, she upped her game and bought a customized trophy with the words “#1 DECENT DUDE, First Man to Offer Subway Seat to Pregnant Woman throughout Two Pregnancies” on it. 

Lin told The Huffington Post that she bought a 7-inch trophy so it would be “big enough to make an impact, but small enough to fit in [her] work bag.”

Lin said that she dressed to “look as pregnant as possible” and that she commutes close to two hours on the subway every day from Washington Heights. She added that she gets seats from women while she’s pregnant “fairly often,” but never from men. 

That changed when Ricky Barksdale offered his seat.

“He was staring at his phone,” Lin said. “He looked up and looked around and was like, ‘Holy crap, you’re pregnant! You need to have a seat.’”

Lin then gave him his trophy.

Barksdale, an army veteran and stuntman, said he chuckled when he first saw it. The dad of two thought it was a joke, but realized what Lin meant after he read what was on the trophy.

“It was a nice gesture of her, but it’s also sad for my male counterparts to allow something like this to happen,” he told HuffPost, adding, “If you clearly see a visible pregnant woman, you’re okay to stand up. She needs that more than you.”

Lin posted a photo of Barksdale and the trophy on her Instagram on Feb. 28. She didn’t get his name during their subway encounter, but as sites like DNA Info and Mashable began picking up the story, someone recognized Barksdale. The two are now in touch on Instagram.

Lin learned about his veteran and stuntman background and called him a “real life superhero.” Barksdale hopes the story will encourage others to offer their seats to people who need them. 

“I just hope that this story motivates others to do the right thing,” he said. “Whether they’re pregnant, disabled, elderly, just do the right thing and be a decent human being.”

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

In 2014, Maryland Judge Robert Nalley ordered bailiffs to use a stun gun on a man in his courtroom via a device strapped to his ankle.

The man, Delvon King, had spoken out of turn ― an affront Nalley deemed worthy of 50,000 volts of electricity that left King screaming in agony on the ground, writhing in pain.

On Monday, nearly a year after the former Maryland Circuit Court judge pled guilty to a misdemeanor civil rights charge and was sentenced to one year of probation for his conduct, King filed suit against Nalley, who is now retired.

Under his earlier plea deal, Nalley agreed to acknowledge “that the use of the stun cuff was objectively unreasonable under the circumstances.” He never apologized to King, who was seated close by during the sentencing, or referenced his name, The Washington Post noted at the time.

The court fined Nalley $5,000 in March 2016 ― a far cry short of the $5 million King is seeking in his suit ― and ordered he take anger management classes.

A judge can only take this type of measure if the litigant is a danger to those in the court room.
King’s lawyer, Steve Silverman

“A judge can only take this type of measure if the litigant is a danger to those in the court room,” one of King’s lawyers, Steve Silverman, told The Huffington Post in an email Thursday. “Judges are not allowed to arbitrarily electrocute litigants. That is why the judge was convicted of a federal civil rights crime.”

A video of the original encounter opens with King, who was representing himself in court, reading a prewritten argument before the judge. Nalley, apparently agitated by the argument, asks him to stop twice in quick succession.

Seconds later, he addresses the bailiff instead: “Mr. Sheriff, do it,” he says, referring to the “stun-cuff” device strapped to King’s ankle. “Use it.”

The sheriff pulls back a chair that King would have fallen into, then activates the stun gun via remote control.

A rapid clicking emanates from device as King’s body stiffens and he falls to the floor in fetal position, yelling in pain. As the screams continue, the judge announces he’ll take a five-minute break.

Had the sheriff refused to use the stun gun on the defendant “he would have been subject to contempt of court or fired,” Silverman told HuffPost.

There’s little doubt the pain is real, says HuffPost reporter Andy Campbell, who volunteered to have a stun gun used on him as part of an assignment for a different publication. 

“The pain is excruciating, and I can imagine that getting a shock like that, relatively unexpectedly, would hurt a hell of a lot more,” he said. “The pain of that shock being executed by someone who doesn’t have authority to do so would be lifelong.”

Campbell noted, in his experience, the sheriff and sheriff’s deputies all had to be personally shocked by a stun gun before they themselves were authorized to use one.

“If this judge has an ounce of dignity, he’ll subject himself to a good ol’ fashioned illegal courtroom tasing himself,” he said.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices