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Culture & Living
Life Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / Pet Life / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Tania Israel, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, Last year, our family lost our beloved dog to old age. It took us all quite a bit of time to heal, and her death was particularly felt by a family member going through cancer treatment. After our family member went into remission, he wished for a puppy. He looked endlessly at shelters and rescues, but the particular breed he wanted was difficult to come by. In the meantime, I mentioned to a close friend that my family was seeking a puppy but wasn’t having much luck. The friend is a volunteer for a dog rescue and offered to find us a puppy. However, my family member ended up finding his dream puppy through a very reputable, longtime breeder. The breeder conducted interviews with our family and our veterinarian to make sure we were a good fit. Now, my close friend is no longer on speaking terms with us. I reminded her that my family has rescued numerous animals over the years, and this was not a decision that we took lightly. I received no response. I don’t know if I should try to salvage this friendship or let it go. — Ruff stuff On whether to let your friendship go, remember that we can always set up boundaries around who we want to have in our lives and who we don’t. But we can also find ways of growing in a relationship by acknowledging that people can see things from a different perspective. Having a complex and grounded understanding of where other people might be coming from helps us in our relationships as partners, parents, coworkers and community members. We don’t know how that friend is feeling. But we do know that the writer is emphasizing the details that put them in the right. They say the breeder was reputable and responsible. They had rescue dogs in the past and were trying to help someone with cancer. They’re generating these responses to try to show that their behavior was justifiable. When we see things from only one perspective, we miss out on the opportunity to broaden our understanding of different views. And that’s actually disempowering. The next step for the writer is to find out how the friend is feeling and lead a conversation with curiosity rather than a justification for their own behavior. Maybe start with something like, “You offered help and we went in a different direction. And I wonder how that’s sitting with you.” Then listen to what they have to say. Listen to Tania Israel’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis with help from our intern Jamal Michel. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Life Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Maya Lau, creator and host of the podcast Other People’s Pockets, a show that asks people to talk about their finances with radical transparency. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I love my boyfriend’s parents. They’re the kind of people you meet and think, “There’s no way they’re like this all the time.” Except, they are. They wake up every day at 4:30 a.m. so they can drink coffee and garden before they leave for work. They’re kind, passionate, generous people and they have treated me like family since day one. I know many people will think it’s ridiculous to have any complaints about my situation, but here it is: They’re way too nice. We live in different states, and when they come to visit they stay for a week or two, and they pay for everything. Literally everything. Anything we do, anywhere we go, anything I even think about buying, they somehow sense it and beat me to it. They once found my shopping list while I was out, and they did my shopping for me. They picked up everything … from the groceries right down to the very personal items I would have really preferred they left alone. I’m deeply uncomfortable with it, but I have no idea how to politely say “I am a real adult with a real adult job, and I would like to buy my own sandwich at lunch today.” My boyfriend fundamentally doesn’t understand where I’m coming from. He says thing like, “Your parents buy us stuff too.” Sure, they send gifts on holidays. They might pick up the tab at dinner, but this feels very different. So my question is: Am I crazy to complain? And if not, what can I do? — A Real Adult I would say, don’t always assume that other people’s attitudes towards money are the same as your own. The fact that somebody wants to cover something for you does not mean that they’re trying to assert that they’re more of an adult and you are just some small child. It’s OK if you feel that way, but it’s not a universal truth. So try to interrogate where that comes from. his parents come in from out of state and stay with you for two weeks, which in my book is a really long period of time to have houseguests. There might be an element of his parents feeling like, ‘Look, we’re saving all this money on a hotel, the least we can do is pay for everything.’ Maybe they don’t want to be a burden, so covering everything is a way to compensate for that. I think comes from a good place. Now, does that mean you can’t say anything? No. I think you need to have a real discussion before they visit. Either a casual conversation with your boyfriend present, where the two of you have gotten on the same page ahead of time. Or maybe it’s just a conversation you have with your boyfriend and then you ask your boyfriend to have this conversation with his parents. I wouldn’t come at it from the stance of being aggrieved and offended and infantilized, but more like, ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are so generous. I love spending time with you. I just want to say, maybe there are certain things we can agree on ahead of time that you can cover if you want. Beyond that, we’re good.’ And, if this is really how this person feels, ‘I just want to let you know that when you come to stay here, you are welcome here. And it is not a burden for us to have you for two weeks.’ I also wouldn’t necessarily bring up them finding the note and buying all these personal things. I would just that it makes you feel more comfortable and like there’s less of an imbalance if you all agree on some of these things ahead of time. And hopefully, if they’re generous, they’re also good listeners. Listen to Maya Lau’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Family / Life Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Berna Anat, author of Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I just finished my first semester of college. I grew up in a conservative household with high academic standards. My first semester at college was a little rocky as I realized that I have emotional trauma from my childhood, and I’m likely dealing with some unaddressed mental health issues. I want my independence, and I’m increasingly pulling away from my family. But they’re funding a good portion of my education. When my parents asked for my grades at the end of the first semester, I told them that I was doing well but that I’d preferred not to give them my exact grades. I’m trying to move away from depending on their approval and towards being self-motivated. My parents’ response was, “As long as we’re paying for your college career we will be asking you for your grades every semester.” I’m afraid I’ll lose my college funding if I refuse to show them. I don’t have time to get a job that could cover my remaining expenses should my parents withdraw their financial support. I want to assert my independence, but I’m not sure how to do so. What’s my best course of action? — Freshman Finances I think the issue is that expectations were not defined between you and your family. And that’s hard because when do we sit down and go, “Hello, Mom and Dad, Let’s define our financial expectations for each other”? I know that sounds really stale and stiff, but maybe there’s some version of that conversation where you can actually define those expectations. College is a time of growth for you. Your parents didn’t hire you to do a job – they’re investing in your growth. So try to get on the same page of what that growth means to you and what your parents’ return on investment means to them. The conversation might be difficult. Because the power dynamic is they’re the parents, you’re the kid. Parents are used to having control, and they might feel a little bit threatened. I believe hard conversations need to be sandwiched. Like, “I want to express my gratitude and love.” And then the meat of the sandwich is: “I want to express my goals for this financial relationship.” And then the last piece of bread is “I want to repeat my gratitude. This is coming from a place of love.” And then open up the conversation. I would want to hear you saying something like, “You know, one of my main goals in college is to learn to become more independent and self-motivated. If we do this grades thing, that actually wouldn’t help me reach my goals. You gave me this money because you wanted to invest in my growth. And this is how I see myself growing. Is there a different way we can achieve your goals, too, that doesn’t have to be grades related?” I have a dreamy hope that if you were to approach your parents with respect and trust, they might give the same back. Then again, there are emotionally immature parents who are not ready to give up that kind of control. It may be that the stipulations of them giving you money for college means that you have to adhere to their rules. And unfortunately, if they’re the purse holders, they’re the ones holding the power in this situation. Talking with loved ones about money can be extremely awkward. As awkward as it is, I think it’s incredibly important to put it down on paper somewhere – just to get everybody on the same page. You might want to talk about what if things go wrong. “What can we agree on now, so that if something goes wrong and everyone’s emotions are heightened, we don’t make any rash decisions that ruin our relationship?” Listen to Berna Anat’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Life Hacks / Lifestyles / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose a few of your most pressing questions to an expert. These questions were answered by clinical psychologists Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman, authors of Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Read more of The Gottmans’s research-backed tips about how to have fights that result in “compassion and connection.” Dear Life Kit,  I’m almost 25 and about to graduate with my bachelor’s degree. I live in my parents’ house and my boyfriend and I hope to move in together soon. However, he wants me to either live on my own or with a roommate first. He wants to ensure that I know how to be independent.  My boyfriend’s requirement makes me feel like a child. As someone who worked for most of my life, lived with a roommate for a year (before I transferred schools and moved back in with my parents) and grew up helping to care for a sibling with special needs, I feel that I have done a lot of growing up already.  How can we come up with a compromise? — Moving on First of all, it sounds like you are being patronized. Indeed, that is why you feel like a child. He is saying “You’re not mature enough to live with me.” And he’s placing himself in a superior position to you. So it’s a form of condescension, even contempt. He’s saying, “You’re too immature for me.” So it’s no wonder you feel resentment. Before you reach a compromise, there needs to be more discussion to try to understand what his position is. What is he afraid of in terms of moving in with you? Obviously, there’s some anxiety on his part and he’s not expressing it. Why is he feeling so anxious about you moving in and you having to change yourself in order to suit him? Then share with him what it means to be asked to do these things. How it might feel insulting to you. Then recount your own experiences of having lived with a roommate and the maturing you’ve already done. Dear Life Kit,  My husband and I are in a fun and committed relationship, but he doesn’t express his love through words or physical touch, which is important to me. When I bring it up, he says he’s too shy. Should I just accept that our ways of showing affection are different? Or should he make more of an effort? — Feeling touchy There are a lot of people who are not comfortable with touch or expressing things in words depending on their cultural background, their family background and so on. As far as communication goes, maybe he can start by looking for what you’re doing right and saying “thank you.” For example, “Thank you very much for emptying the dishwasher.” You can also model, if you’re not already, lots of compliments and appreciation for him. Then try and understand his world around touch. Is he uncomfortable with touch in public or also in private? This is something you might want to explore with him. Ask him some questions about it. For example, “What do you feel when I reach out and touch your shoulder? What do you feel when I take your hand? What does touch mean to you?” Once you’ve done that, then perhaps you can ask him, “Is there any form of touch that you feel comfortable with? For example, just holding my hand?” I would add: How does he express affection and respect toward you? Does he do it through texting? Gifts? Service? Like cleaning the gutters or mowing the lawn or something like that. Look for the other ways he’s expressing affection and respect. I’ve been dating my girlfriend for over five months. It’s going really well, but I have irrational anxiety that something will go wrong. What if we have a big miscommunication? What if she doesn’t actually love me? What if she thinks I’m too clingy? I’ve told her about my worries and she’s very reassuring. Are these thoughts normal? — Trouble in paradise After five months of a relationship, they’re totally normal. It probably took me (Julie) about two years to feel secure with John, that I was well-loved — and I had to hear those reassurances over and over again. A lot of times we are so terribly self-critical that we cannot take in the reassurance that our partner is giving us because it doesn’t fit with our impressions of ourselves. So work hard to crack open your chest and take in the love and reassurance your partner is giving you, because indeed that is a gift, and it is real. Dear Life Kit, I love spending time with my partner, but he doesn’t like to admit when he’s wrong and often blames anything that goes awry on me or someone else. How can I help him break this pattern? — Losing the blame game  If he wants you to hear him, he’s sabotaging getting listened to. Let him know that you feel blamed and that puts you on the defensive. What he needs to do is describe his own feelings about the situation (not about a personality flaw in you, but the situation he’s upset about) and what his positive need is. Say this: “Describe what you’re feeling, like ‘I’m angry, I’m upset, I’m stressed’ about what situation,” and then he needs to say what he needs from you in order to feel better about the relationship. Have a question you want to ask Dear Life Kit? Whether it’s about family, friendship, work conflict or something else, share it here. This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Culture / Family / TrendingIt’s 9:15 on a cold Monday morning, and six Girl Scout parents are giving full-on military op vibes. Five moms and I are standing on a sidewalk, holding mugs of coffee and tea as we run through logistics. We have an action plan, and a goal: We’re picking up nearly 3,300 packages of cookies for our Girl Scout troop and taking them to our homes-turned-mini-warehouses. “We’ll probably need a sort of Checkpoint Bravo, a place to regroup in case we get separated,” our cookie manager, Ali Ray Cavanaugh, says. Today, we’re part of the Girl Scouts Army. We’ll drive in a convoy across Washington, D.C., to a massive parking lot where our vehicles — two minivans, two Subarus and two SUVs — will be crammed with as many cookies as they can hold. As a lifelong fan of Girl Scout Cookies but also a never-scout (a term no one, as far as I can tell, uses), I’m low-key buzzing at being let into the inner circle, where we’re relied on to Do The Thing. A successful run today means all the cookie promises our Daisies, Brownies and Juniors made will be kept, on schedule. As we head out, I hold two not-necessarily conflicting ideas in my mind: I’m glad I can do this for my two daughters; and this is one way Girl Scouts outsources core functions to parent volunteers. Cookies rule everything around me Our cookie pickup objective might sound fun, but we’re all about the mission. After all, this task requires at least three hours — and we’re taking time away from our (paying) jobs to do this (nonpaying) work. We have a special group chat for this trip. When we get separated in traffic, we use Google Map pins and phone calls to ensure our team can recombine before entering the pickup zone. There, we join a snake of cars pulsing down a long incline into a huge lot, where we coil our way between 18-wheelers with trailers full of Thin Mints, Samoas and Adventurefuls. If you were picturing the Girl Scouts inner circle like a Wonka-like scene of Tagalong rainbows and Do-si-do stools, this ain’t it. It reminds me of large-scale relief efforts I’ve visited for NPR, where the sole objective is to distribute massive quantities of food. At this one delivery site, 170,000 packages of cookies are being dispersed. “Last year, our Girl Scouts sold 4.4 million packages across the entire council” in the Washington, D.C., area, council chief financial officer, Jessica McClain, told me. After picking up hundreds of cardboard cases, we hand-carry the precious cargo into cookie manager Cavanaugh’s large basement. From there, cookies are portioned out to Girl Scouts to deliver to their customers. Hundreds more boxes are earmarked for cookie booth sales. Our houses are transformed into glorified cookie cupboards. Reader, as I write this story at home, four cases of cookies sit by my elbow. Girl Scout Cookies are a $1 billion industry “The thing with these cookies is, they’re really good,” a Girl Scout dad told me, as we watched our daughters rake in money at a cookie booth. In a normal year, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America will sell about 200 million boxes of cookies, as NPR’s Scott Horsley reported last year. The national organization calls it “the largest girl-led entrepreneurship program in the world,” with nearly 700,000 Girl Scouts participating. You’ve probably heard about cookie prices going up. The vast majority of troops are now selling boxes for between $5 and $7. If the girls hit that 200 million mark this year, cookie revenue would eclipse $1 billion. So, I asked, how much do the girls see in profits? “Last year, our troops earned over $4.5 million in proceeds,” McClain said. For perspective, our council, Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital, is pretty large, she added, with about 4,000 troops. In some ways, the Girl Scouts operates with top-down control of what are essentially local franchises. But the cookie-business aspect of the nonprofit is distributed pretty widely. To buy cookies in bulk, each council makes its own contract with one of the two big baking companies, ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers — which in turn pay licensing fees to the national organization. The amount of proceeds each troop is able to keep varies. I asked McClain how it breaks down for our council. “I would start with saying none of it goes to the national organization,” she said. “About 25% to 30% of the price goes to the troops themselves,” to use as they choose. Another chunk goes to direct costs — the cookies themselves, and transportation. “That can be up to about 40% with that piece of it,” McClain said. Some money goes toward activities, she said: “We use about 10% of those funds to support the outdoor program for all of our Girl Scouts in our council.” “There’s also about 14, 15% that goes to customer support,” such as technology underpinning the sales operation, she said. Money also goes toward things like the rewards girls earn by hitting sales goals, and for operational costs. Parents are a multiskilled volunteer workforce The reality of Girl Scout Cookies may not be Wonka-like, but parents can be forgiven for feeling like Oompa Loompas — the hardworking cogs in a well-oiled machine. Whatever a troop’s parents do for a living, Girl Scouts calls on them to hone a very specific set of skills, from making accurate sales projections (each troop is on the hook to pay for every cookie box they order) to managing spreadsheets and deliveries as late orders come in. Finally, they’ll reconcile a mix of cash, online orders and Venmo payments to ensure everything adds up. “We know it’s a lot of work. We know it is a heavy lift,” McClain told me, calling volunteers the lifeblood of the system. Parents tout their kid’s online cookie store, sharing links on Facebook, in emails, at work — wherever a possible sale is lurking. They help girls sort the orders and make deliveries. They volunteer at cookie booths. Some, like me, also make surplus orders to cover all the folks who didn’t realize Girl Scout cookie season was coming. Those packages can go fast: When my girls brought about 25 boxes — or about $120 worth — of cookies to NPR’s headquarters, they sold out in 45 minutes. All of this happens in parallel to the actual work of running the troop — setting up meetings and activities, ensuring the girls have the right materials, and planning what to do with the proceeds from cookie sales. So, why do parents do it? First of all: I’m glad to be able to support my daughters’ troop, to put time and money toward their experience. I enjoy learning what it’s all about, and seeing my daughters spend time with friends in their troop. As for the cookie program, the Girl Scouts traditionally emphasizes the business training — things like setting goals, making marketing and spending decisions, and being responsible and ethical. “We’re trying to teach entrepreneurial skills,” McClain said. Then there are the rewards for their labor. While some parents I’ve talked to say they wish the kids got a bigger share of the revenue, our troop does get enough money to do special things. And while adults do a lot of work to make it happen, we’re fine with the girls deciding how to spend it — they usually hold a vote to decide on the best options. If you ever visit a cookie booth and want to know where the girls’ money goes, just ask. “We are raising money to go camping and horseback riding,” Eva Kelly, a junior in our troop, told me at our sale. They also want to learn how to cook, my daughter Mattie added: “We’ve got to learn how to make basic meals while we’re camping.” If all goes well, they’ll be at that camp this summer — and some Girl Scout parents will be able to take a break, as well. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Art & Living / Culture / Reviews / TrendingTwo things can be true at the same time. We’re in a time of backlash to ideas that challenge white America’s perception of itself, and we’re also living through a great reevaluation of what American society can and should look like. It’s also true that some of the most important leaders on the frontlines of these battles are Black women, people like law professor Kimberle Crenshaw who helped develop the concept of intersectionality and the much debated and maligned and misunderstood critical race theory and a new wave of thinkers picking up that inheritance. Black feminists are also some of the most astute observers and theorists of American mass culture right now. Scholars and writers like Patricia Hill Collins, Joan Morgan, and the late bell hooks have long understood that oppression and injustice is perpetrated and enacted through customs and cultural practices as well as law. At it’s root, Black feminism is an ideology of liberation rooted in Black women’s experience, with the inclusive aim of disrupting oppressive social hierarchies for all people. Black feminist theory is arguably now a key part of how all of us make sense of the world. At the same time, the kind of cultural analysis that Black feminists promote continues to be controversial. Between the numerous attacks on library collections and school curricula — a 2021 NBC News analysis found at least 165 local and national groups are trying to disrupt or block lessons on race and gender — and the recent passing of the foundational cultural theorist bell hooks, questions of culture and identity bubbled up with renewed urgency. A silver lining in this time of contradictions, of creativity, and precarity, has been the bumper crop of new books at the intersection of Black feminist thought, culture, and politics. Even better, this great flowering is not isolated to the proverbial ivory tower. With Nichole Perkins’ popular memoir Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be and Zeba Blay’s essay collection Care-Free Black Girls, I was struck by how vibrant, wide ranging and central the conversation is right now around Black women, feminism and culture. Looking at these books it’s immediately clear how relevant they are to people’s lives. Choosing a short list from the recent bounty is a daunting task, but these five books stand out in conversation and contrast with each other. Though they target different audiences and sit within different genres of nonfiction – from memoir to cultural analysis to theory – they share certain hallmarks: a celebration of marginalized, unruly Black women and concurrent rejection of the politics of respectability; the not so secret realization that as dissatisfied as we are with our exclusion and distorted depictions, popular culture plays a big role in all our lives; and a keen awareness of the complex connections between representation and reality. Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins No one writes better about the personal relationship between culture and girlhood than Nichole Perkins, a popular cultural commentator and writer. Her first book is a page turner, a singular and seamless blend of memoir and cultural analysis. I found her words heart-wrenching. As a former host of “The Thirst-Aid Kit,” a podcast aimed at analyzing the intersection of sexual desire and popular culture, the way Perkins writes about her burgeoning sexuality and the awareness of how that’s different when you’re Black is particularly effective. She exposes the pervasive shaming around sex, and how it’s not equally distributed. Societal rules differ by race (for Black girls versus white girls) and gender (for Black boys and Black girls). Too often, Black girls have been relentlessly shamed, and that formative personal experience has been reinforced by the culture. That experience can be crushing. So, unlike the dearth of love stories for Black girls in film and television when Nichole was growing up: “There were plenty of sassy Black teenagers on television, in characters like Dee Thomas on What’s Happening!! or Tootie on The Facts of Life. These girls always had a smart remark ready on their lips and got plenty of laughs, but just like in real life around my way, every crush they had led to lectures or scolds… Images of white girls in love came easily, but everywhere I turned black girls were warned.” That passage is just one example of how Perkins’ work blends passion and analysis. My list of highlights is endless. Like in a confessional conversation, albeit one that is as incisive as it is emotional, Perkins is adept at connecting personal experience to cultural and social practices. Not everything hits perfectly, but there is no doubt that this memoir is very real and candid. The passages where Perkins writes about her family are also especially powerful. One part that just about broke me was Perkins’ discussion with her aunt of Tenessee Williams’ American classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Her insights resonated far and wide on her podcast, and readers will nod along to these words as well. Carefree Black Girls by Zeba Blay Though the concept spread like wildfire in 2013, the idea of the “carefree Black girl” was always more of an aspiration than reality. It spoke to a hunger and lack in the images and discourse around Black women. As author Zeba Blay notes in her book: “Social media has always been a great place for pretending, for playing, for projecting some idealized version of self. A way to hide in plain sight. I posted the selfie and the hashtag. An attempt to be carefree.” Expanding on the concept and archetype Blay originated, Blay’s first book is similarly aspirational, but also deeper and more confessional. Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture is “a meditation on a single idea: what it means to be a Black woman and truly be ‘carefree.'” With a clarity of mission that Blay executes masterfully, the book hangs together with admirable cohesion. One of the more personal subjects Blay explores is her struggle with depression, and the role that art and culture plays in her recovery: “Turning to art and turning to Black women has always been the road by which I come back to myself.” As personal as those revelations are, like the other authors on this list, Blay is also clear on the connections she makes to larger cultural trends and phenomena outside of herself. The stories she relates are specific, but not isolated. Staking a claim and underscoring her point in the most direct way possible, she writes, “Our stories are culturally and historically relevant.” There’s beauty in Zeba Blay’s style and substance in her ideas. I was struck by the poignance of her plea and how familiar it sounded: “Hopefully, whoever you are, reading this, you find inspiration in that beauty. And hopefully you are reminded that Black women are essential.” That this message pops up so consistently across these books, and that so many of these authors feel it needs to be repeated, speaks volumes. Bad Fat Black Girl by Sesali Bowen Both manifesto and memoir, Sesali Bowen’s Bad Fat Black Girl is another standout. It’s written from the perspective of someone who’s both a media scholar and activist, and it shows. Like the other authors, Bowen weaves together observations about cultural expression with broader social attitudes and ideas. But there’s more of an urgency and grit and an irrepressible, profane irreverence to a book titled “Bad Fat Black Girl.” Bowen also brings more of an outsider perspective. She grew up working class and she’s not trying to aspire or fit into white dominated “mainstream” culture. Influenced by Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (about reconciling feminism and hip-hop) and trap music, Sesali Bowen weaves together feminist theory and hip-hop analysis from the perspective of someone who loves and lives for it. Citing trap artists like Yo Gotti, Gucci Mane and Travis Porter alongside Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, Bowen articulates a vision of what she calls “trap feminism,” a music and street-inflected ethos of empowerment. Despite trap being known as reductive, Bowen refused to “accept the idea that no good could come out of trap music. I wanted to reconcile the fact that some of my favorite trap songs made me, a queer Black woman, feel good, proud, and even inspired.” Bowen also effectively argues that a lot of what is dismissed as “ratchet” or uncouth is really a conscious aesthetic of rebellion, a way of eschewing still white-centered patriarchal conventions that fail girls like herself. With behavior and style choices that make sense for their environment and circumstances, “ghetto girls,” she says, perform gender in rebellious ways that are often disrespected and yet envied and eventually emulated. Bowen is a versatile and agile commentator, equally convincing and expert in her explication of the idea of the “bad bitch” as an expression of power in hip-hop and citing bell hooks on why beauty is a “politicized concept” that maintains what hooks called “imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy.” The latter may seem like a long list of “isms” and labels, but Bowen shows that these dimensions of social hierarchy and control have real-world implications. She names and shames a system of cultural gatekeeping in which hip-hop and even Bowen’s beloved trap culture is complicit, assigning value and affording respect and opportunity to a select group. And, in keeping with that, as Bowen shows, even when Black girls are celebrated, it’s within a narrow range of acceptable images of Black femininity. Existing outside those “aesthetic rules” (as Bowen herself does) has consequences: “It means that you’ve committed an egregious act against the social order. Women who find themselves too far away from the center of beauty norms are often treated as if they’ve committed treason, our aesthetic a public-facing betrayal of our refusal to conform…” Complicating that analysis, Bowen also calls out the classism and cultural biases even within Black media circles where so many of her colleagues come from privilege and “have had to untangle their Blackness from the web of whiteness they were socialized in.” This is one reason Bowen is powerful; she takes no prisoners. Going against every tide, Bowen’s trap feminism enthusiastically celebrates “ghetto girl culture.” More than reconciling feminism with hip-hop, she marshalls its power. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance by Moya Bailey Known for coining the term misogynoir, a portmanteau of the words “misogyny,” meaning the hatred of women, and noir, the French word for Black, Northwestern professor Moya Bailey has already made a mark on the landscape of American culture that extends beyond academia. The term and its implications have penetrated popular consciousness. With her first solo-authored book, Bailey expands this impact. As seen in the books on this list, the work of Patricia Hill Collins has influenced many writers in the Black feminist tradition, but with Bailey, that legacy is more direct. Building on works like Collins’ Black Feminist Thought and bell hooks’ Black Looks, Bailey expands our understanding of the link between media portrayals of Black women, which people like to think of as merely symbolic or superficial, and real world, material consequences: “…the media that circulate misogynoir help maintain white supremacy by offering tacit approval of the disparate treatment that Black women negotiate in society. Whether the Jezebel, mammy, Sapphire, and later the ‘welfare queen’ or even the ‘strong Black woman’ archetype, misogynoiristic portrayals of Black women shape their livelihoods and health.” In other words, contrary to those who would dismiss the weight of culture, Black feminist theory “articulates the power of the image.” By shaping the way that society views marginalized groups and how we view ourselves, cultural images help shape our social relations. By design and necessity, this project is inherently political. Like Collins before her, Bailey’s work is significant on its own. But such work also adds essential perspective and depth to the efforts of political scientists like Angie Hancock, author of “The Politics of Disgust” whose research established in quantifiable terms the impact of the welfare queen image on public policy debates around the social safety net. Today, it’s hard to understand American politics without coming to grips with the concepts Bailey’s grappling with. Bailey’s aims are ambitious. She’s not interested in just shining a light on misogynoir; she’s interested in its destruction. In a voice that is scholarly yet accessible, she tackles media culture from television and film to Tumblr to YouTube web series, to hashtags, revealing how different media contribute to, transform and/or challenge the pervasive circulation of misogynoir and, importantly, how Black people deploy digital activism to resist. Though expansive, Bailey’s scope is also strategic; she privileges those too often marginalized in feminist conversations: “Black women as well as Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks’ work and voices.” The penultimate chapter, “Alchemists in Action against Misogynoir, ” which is Bailey’s most personal, focuses on Tumblr. It’s a particular treat. Digital Black Feminism by Catherine Knight Steele In Digital Black Feminism, Catherine Knight Steele centers Black women unapologetically within the study of digital culture. “Digital Black feminism is a mechanism to understand how Black feminist thought is altered by and alters technology,” she writes. This work has multiple dimensions. First and fundamentally, Steele exposes the frequent oversight of Black women’s contributions as a distortion that limits deeper understanding of the dynamics of the digital world. As Steele establishes, Black women’s involvement in digital spaces has been broad-based, influential and persistent. Understanding that digital culture requires getting this part of it right. So one contribution of Steele’s work is as a course correction to the work that’s been done before. At the same time, this book also recognizes and builds on the significant inroads made by scholars studying race and technology including Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression,) Sarah Florini, and Andre Brock. Steele has two core aims. First, she positions Black women online as central to the future of communication technology just as they’ve been central to its past. Second, per its title, Digital Black Feminism traces and critically examines a evolutionary shift in Black feminism thought, one driven and enabled by new technology. As both a researcher and a member of these spaces, she’s well-equipped for these tasks. Diving into a wide-ranging digital archive six years in the making, she demonstrates how online spaces expand and shape the work of Black feminist liberation while making insightful connections to the Black thinkers and writers that came before. In one chapter, Steele explores the parallels between hip-hop’s formative influence on an earlier generation of feminists and the role of digital technology in Black feminism today, noting how money changed both of those relationships. For a book with heft, it strikes an impressive balance of accessibility and intellectual innovation. A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Art & Living / Culture / TrendingAfter we wrapped the shoot on this episode of Amplify, I called an Uber to take me from the Stony Island Arts Bank on Chicago’s South Side back to my downtown hotel. The 30-minute ride along Lakeshore Drive was beautiful, with Lake Michigan shining a bright and hopeful blue. I started chatting with my driver, and it was one of those conversations between strangers that quickly goes deep. We talked about life in her city and in mine, how people are getting along, or not, and how these are far from the best of times for many Americans. This led to a reflection about inherited trauma, the passing down of troubles from one generation to the next, and how, within the Black community especially, so much damage is caused by a legacy of buried truths and untold stories, the wounds we bear from not knowing the fullness of our history. And so I told her about the Arts Bank. This 100-year-old building, once slated for demolition and now restored thanks to the imagination, vision and tireless efforts of Theaster Gates and his Rebuild Foundation, is a shelter for our history. Gates has housed an immense archive – thousands of books, periodicals, images and objects that provide a multi-faceted documentation of Black life spanning centuries. It’s a place to find our stories, to understand our past and then to dream our future. Singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae is one of many artists and scholars who have found revelation and inspiration in this space. An entire album has come from her experience at the Arts Bank – an initial visit in 2017 that she calls life-changing, and then her engagement as an inaugural Mellon Archives Innovation Fellow. The narratives and images she explored in the archives informed the songs on her bold and emotionally charged new release, Black Rainbows. This conversation with Corinne and Theaster centers on the necessity of knowing the stories of our people so we can celebrate their triumphs and mourn their tragedies, so we can heal the scars we’ve inherited, make ourselves strong and healthy, and feel the freedom to write our own stories, in the fullness of our own truth. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit Classical California. [...] Read more...
Art & Living / Culture / TrendingThe PBS program Antiques Roadshow sparked something in Dr. Lonnie Bunch III. The reality television show depicts dealers touring the country to give free appraisals of the objects people bring to them. They could be family heirlooms or thrift store finds, and the appraisers often give historical context to the items. Well, in 2005, Bunch, who is now the secretary of the Smithsonian, had been tasked with leading the latest addition to its family – the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. He decided to emulate the PBS television show to help add acquisitions to the museum. “You know, it’s almost as if someone said, ‘The time is now,’ and what I found fascinating is that, as we went around the country and collected artifacts – which is one of the revolutionary things we did – people were almost waiting for this,” Bunch said. “Suddenly, they opened up their trunks and their drawers and their attics, and they told their stories, and so I knew there would be great interest.” The museum on Saturday celebrated the 20th anniversary of the signing of legislation that created the NMAAHC. It is being commemorated with an interactive, online history that will run through Christmas, and the display of “Bruise Painting ‘Message to Our Folks,'” a painting by Rashid Johnson, in the museum. Long before the NMAAHC had its 10 millionth visitor in September, or Bunch and his staff set out on the road, the journey to the museum had been a lengthy one. A dream deferred The legislation that approved the NMAAHC, the 19th Smithsonian museum, was signed on Dec. 16, 2003. The building opened on Sept. 24, 2016. But the idea for the museum went back more than 100 years. In 1915, Black veterans who fought for the Union Army in the Civil War met in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war’s end. During that meeting, they assembled a committee that would lead the efforts in building a memorial to honor Black people’s service to the U.S., as they had often faced racism within the military and from civilians. Their work hit a major milestone – Congress signed a bill in 1929 authorizing the memorial, although it came with a caveat: it had to be privately funded. But 1929 was also the year of the Wall Street Crash that contributed to the Great Depression, so the memorial project fell through due to a lack of funding. There was more talk of the museum in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly by Rep. Mickey Leland, a Democrat from Texas. Then, in came the storied activist and congressman John Lewis. “When I think about this anniversary, I have to think about John Lewis, that on the one hand, we all know this is an amazing, courageous civil rights leader — almost lost his life to help transform the nation,” Bunch said. “But the other side of John Lewis is a kind of resiliency and political savviness.” The creation of a national African American museum was a mission Lewis took on shortly after being sworn into Congress in 1987. He introduced legislation to build the museum the next year, but the bill was blocked. Lewis introduced legislation for the museum during every congressional session for 15 years, and was blocked all but once. He faced opposition about the funding and location of the building, and criticism that it was unnecessary. One former Smithsonian secretary suggested putting it in a wing of an existing museum, while another questioned the validity of an “ethnic” museum. Some on the Smithsonian Board of Regents doubted there would be enough artifacts to fill a museum. In 1994, Sen. Jesse Helms refused to let the bill onto the Senate floor, despite bipartisan support. The Smithsonian eventually warmed up to the idea. Under new leadership, a commission hired by the Smithsonian and approved by former President George W. Bush in April 2003, said a standalone museum was necessary. They recommended 350,000 square feet of space (it has about 400,000 now) and estimated it would cost $360 million, of which half would be from the federal government and half would be from private funds. (It actually costed $540 million.) Based on the report, Sen. Sam Brownback introduced new legislation to the Senate, while Lewis again introduced legislation to the House. Bush signed off on the bill in December 2003. “This museum is a testament to the dignity of the dispossessed in every corner of the globe who yearn for freedom,” Lewis said at the museum’s opening ceremony in 2016. “It is a song to the scholars and scribes, scientists and teachers, to the revolutionaries and voices of protest, to the ministers and the authors of peace. It is the story of life, the story of our lives, wrapped up in a beautiful golden crown of grace.” Getting it off the ground Bunch worked at Smithsonian in the 1990s, left to serve as president of the Chicago Historical Society and was called back to lead the NMAAHC in 2005. “I knew what a big challenge this was,” Bunch said. “I told everybody we’d pull it off, but I also knew how hard it was. But I also knew that even if we fail – although I’d never put that in my mind – I thought the process would change the way the Smithsonian did work, it would change the way people thought about African American history.” As the story is told, it was just Bunch and one staff member, Tasha Coleman. But that isn’t entirely true, said Kinshasha Conwill, the longtime former deputy director of the museum. Conwill advised Bunch to use the one-employee line to tug at the heartstrings of potential donors. “I said, ‘When we’re going to Congress, and we’re going to these donors, tell them, ‘When I started, I only had one staff person, and I didn’t have a collection, and I didn’t have a building,'” Conwill said. “And that kind of came back to haunt me because people often thought that was me.” Conwill wore many hats: attending town hall meetings to find a site, making sure the museum met Smithsonian requirements, accompanying Bunch to meet with congressional members, moderating discussions at college campuses, hiring staff and collaborating with divisions, such as facilities, legal and public affairs, among other things. “I was the chief cook and bottle washer for Lonnie, making sure that all those meetings took place, that all the I’s got dotted, the T’s got crossed, helping to put out fires here and there…I felt sometimes I was everywhere,” Conwill said. In many of the rooms Conwill was in, she was one of few Black women in executive positions. But Bunch had made it a point to hire women in leadership roles, a reputation that made it easy for others to identify Conwill as being an employee of the NMAAHC. In addition to Conwill being the deputy director, Adrienne Brooks was the director of advancement, Jacquelyn Serwer was the chief curator, Esther Washington was the director of education and Elaine Nichols was the senior curator for culture. Conwill said when talking to young women, she thought, “When I was their age, there would not have been a Black woman, and there probably would not have been a woman in a senior position at a very, very large national museum. It just didn’t happen. So this was an intentional act on Lonnie’s part and I think it was very meaningful.” Bunch also had to garner support for the museum through three presidents: Bush, Obama and Trump. During Bush’s tenure, there was a shortlist of four locations for the museum: the National Mall (where it is today), Banneker Overlook, the Liberty Loan Building and the Arts and Industries Building. Bush strongly expressed his desire for the museum to be on the Mall. “George Bush made it really clear this was important to him and that helped me because it helped me gather Republican support,” Bunch said. “And whenever I see him, he talks about this is one of the proudest things he’s supported.” Obama was more quiet with his support, as he didn’t “want to simply be seen as the Black president…then as we moved into the second term, he became extremely supportive,” Bunch said. Trump was fairly ambivalent. “President Trump was an opportunity for me to engage someone who didn’t really understand the importance of this history,” Bunch said. “In some ways, his administration didn’t stand in the way of the museum. But nor were they the biggest supporters I’ve ever had.” The museum’s opening in 2016 was a three-day event that included spoken word, dance and musical performances. Free passes were all booked up on opening weekend, and for months after. Obama later spoke at the opening ceremony for the museum, saying it helps us to understand “the keeper of the status quo but also the activist seeking to overthrow that status quo.” While the museum tells the story of African American history, it was always Bunch’s goal for the museum to be a place for all. “I thought that it had to be a two-sided coin, that one side was this opportunity to sort of help America – to force America – to confront its tortured racial past,” he said. “Where I think I added real value was the recognition that if this was a museum for black people, then it failed. And that in essence, the story of Black America was too big to be just in the hands of Black America.” Living in the present and looking to the future The museum’s current director, Kevin Young, began his term in January 2021, while the museum was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NMAAHC typically boasts millions of visitors a year, but in 2020 and 2021, the number of visits dropped to the 300,000 range. The museum closed in early 2020, temporarily reopened, then closed again until May 2021. During that time, Young spearheaded the Searchable Museum, a platform that allows users to explore exhibits online with added elements, such as videos, podcasts and “constellations” — interactive diagrams that link historical events, figures and objects. Young was there to welcome the people lined up to enter when the museum opened its doors again. One family had with them an artifact of the first woman killed in combat in the U.S. “I was thinking so much about that day,” Young said. “It was all those family members, seeing them, and they had waited, and they had saved up and they had come to the museum, come together, and it was a site of pilgrimage, and I’m always struck by that.” The pandemic emphasized the need to capture major events as they continue to happen, Young said. “I think living history is all the more important to help people understand that we’re living through history, but they can also — especially with our young people — make history, and that history is all around us. And it’s alive,” he said. For Conwill, her goal in beginning work on the museum was rooted in her desire for young people to feel seen. “I want it to be a place that helps my nieces and nephews walk tall on this earth,” she said. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Cover / Culture / Featured / Politics / TrendingTo move forward, the United States must confront its history of racial inequality. This hour, three perspectives on looking to the past to build a better future for Black Americans. Guests include author Joseph McGill Jr., Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker and opinion columnist Charles Blow. This episode of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Harsha Nahata, Katie Monteleone and Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier and Fiona Geiran. Our audio engineers were Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez and Ted Mebane. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...

 

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Family / Health Life / Religion / TrendingJournalist and author Steven Petrow remembers his sister Julie Petrow-Cohen as a self-described troublemaker with a huge smile. She loved the beach, gardening and her wife and two kids. Petrow called his younger sister his “co-conspirator in life,” recalling how they would sneak out together when they were younger and go to their respective queer bars and cover for each other with their parents. In 2017, Julie was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. After six years of treatment – surgery, chemo, recurrences and Hail Mary clinical trials – Julie made the decision to end her life using what’s known as “medical aid in dying.” Medical aid in dying — or MAID — is legal in 10 states and Washington, D.C. These laws allow terminally ill patients to get a prescription for life-ending medications from a doctor. More than a dozen other states are considering similar legislation. To use these laws, people must go through several steps. Most states require a person to be mentally capable and have two doctors confirm that they’re within 6 months of death. They then must make multiple requests — oral and written — and wait for a period of several days between those requests. Surveys show roughly 70% of Americans support people having this option, but the laws remain controversial. Opponents include many religious groups who argue humans should not take steps to end their lives. Pope Francis has said he supports palliative care that comforts people who are dying but opposes anything that “provoke death.” Some disability rights advocates worry people with disabilities could be coerced into ending their lives, and a coalition of groups are suing to overturn California’s law. Supporters argue these laws prevent unnecessary pain and suffering. Steven Petrow said for his sister Julie, having this option gave her a sense of agency and control that often eludes people with a terminal illness. ” didn’t want to die,” Petrow said. “But she didn’t want to suffer.” Petrow said his sister wanted him to write about her decision to end her life, which he did for the New York Times. Petrow talked about his family’s experience and what he’d learned reporting on the issue with Dan Gorenstein, executive editor of the nonprofit health policy news organization Tradeoffs. Interview highlights: On his reaction to Julie’s decision to end her life I had to undergo a bit of a journey when it came to medical aid in dying, and the idea that Julie might exercise that choice. There was part of me that didn’t want her to do that. The idea that in the same way you could plan a vacation or you can plan a cesarean, you can plan your death. That was very novel. That was upsetting, and I just couldn’t even imagine how one prepares for that. I couldn’t imagine how she prepared for that. The first time I was in their living room and they had a hospice social worker over, and they were talking about “MAID” or “the MAID.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. I knew they didn’t have a maid. And it’s true for so many people, I’ve come to realize after talking and writing about Julie, that we don’t really understand what it is. Therefore, when things are not familiar, they’re threatening in some way. So that was a big part of it. And then the other was this sort of intertwined notion that to say I’m pro-MAID, I’m pro Julie making this choice, it felt like I was also saying, well, I’m pro Julie dying. And I had to tease them apart. I had to get some help in teasing them apart. And Julie helped me do that. And talking to others did as well. On what helped him accept Julie’s decision I really kind of moved along as I saw her suffer. She was the kind of person who could withstand a lot of pain. She was not a complainer. And she didn’t even complain about this, but I would just hear her upstairs in her bedroom really crying out when she moved. And then very, very close to the end, her shirt just happened to sort of ride up a little bit and I hadn’t seen her abdomen in a while. And that’s where many of the tumors were. It looked like the lunar landscape, because you could see them pushing out, and you could see these rounds and mounds. It’s like, oh my God, you know. No wonder there’s so much pain. Initially I wasn’t going to talk about whatever conflicts I had about medical aid in dying. But I evolved because I see so much in our culture, when we talk about an issue, that it’s black and white. And I’m not black or white on this. I’m not an advocate. I’m not carrying a sign. I’m Julie’s brother, and I’m complicated and confused and have tried to speak openly and authentically about that in talking about medical aid in dying. On barriers to more people using MAID, including needing to make multiple requests over several weeks Time is often not an asset that dying people have. Fortunately for Julie, she moved things ahead early enough that none of these were encumbrances to her, but for some people it certainly is. I actually think one of the biggest issues is public awareness about medical aid in dying. It’s so low. When I first wrote that Times piece, I heard from a medical ethicist who was now going to start teaching in his classes about this because it had never come up as an issue in medical ethics. And I heard from an oncologist in Washington, D.C., where it is legal, that he was unaware of it. And what happens too often is that when it does pass in a state, there are not PSAs all over the place saying, “Come to the booth and get your medical aid in dying medication.” It’s kept , and I think that hinders educational campaigns for sure. On concerns raised by some disability rights advocates that medical aid in dying could lead people with disabilities to being pressured to end their lives Of course we have to listen to all these groups. Nobody should be pushed to make this kind of decision. And so how do you balance those two aspects? When you look at the numbers — 186 individuals in New Jersey, that’s since 2019, less than 9,000 nationwide — it does not seem that people are being pushed. But it’s a conversation that needs to take place as part of this larger conversation because we need to make sure that we protect everybody. On the memories of his sister that have stayed in his mind since her death I have this sort of continuous loop going on in my head these days. What I think about often is we were in Rhode Island after she was diagnosed. The whole family is enjoying themselves in kayaks — Julie and I are racing everywhere, trying to beat each other. And there’s a photograph of us sort of getting to the imaginary finish line in our heads, each of us raising our paddles and claiming victory. And then I remember the night before she died. She had been in a lot of pain, and they had tried more and more fentanyl, morphine to alleviate that. It was not working, and she had already made the decision that she would exercise medical aid in dying the following day, and the whole family was there. We lay in bed together. I was holding her from behind. And I was very much aware that was going to be the last time I would be holding her like that, that I would be able to for sure know that she heard me say I love her. I asked her if we had any unfinished business, and she said no. And she also thanked me for being, not her number one fan, but being her number one researcher and an instigator, because whenever there was a problem getting something at the hospital or getting approval, I have pretty good resources and a lot of resilience, and I put it all to work for her. On why Julie asked Steven to write about her experience She wanted more people to have that choice. … She felt she was lucky, by circumstance and happenstance, to live in New Jersey, . She felt she was lucky to have certain privileges. They had the income to pay the $900 that it cost to buy the end-of-life medications, which are often generally not covered by either public or private insurance plans. She was a lawyer. She had been involved in social justice issues her whole life. She was involved with the fight for marriage equality in New Jersey and nationally. These matters of parity and access mattered so much to Julie. She knew would be a gift in the strangest way. She worried about how I would be after she died. She worried about how all of us would be, but I know she worried about me. So this gift allows me to be present with her a lot, which I’m grateful for. And even as emotionally challenging as some of this interview has been, it makes me feel closer to her. This story comes from the health policy podcast Tradeoffs. Dan Gorenstein is Tradeoffs’ executive editor, and Ryan Levi is a reporter/producer for the show, where a version of this story first appeared. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit TRADEOFFS. [...] Read more...
Family / Health Life / TrendingMary Gachoki had learned about autism spectrum disorder from a caregiving course she’d taken in college. When her son was 2 years old, she recognized that he was displaying traits associated with this neurological condition. He wasn’t making eye contact, he stopped talking and he began flapping his fingers – a common behavior for people with autism as they seek to calm themselves. Deep down, the 34-year-old single mom knew he likely had autism. But, she says, she was in denial. When she did get a diagnosis, she says, the news “felt burdensome because I am a single mother. I am not strong mentally. I need support and reassurance that will be okay someday.” (Editor’s note: We are not naming the children in this story to protect their privacy as we discuss their condition.) Challenges for parents Around the world, parents like Gachoki often struggle to find reliable information and affordable support for a child with autism. The challenges in Africa – and in Kenya, where she lives – are daunting. A review of current literature on autism in Africa, published in 2023 in The Annals of Medicine & Surgery, found that “diagnosis and treatment access remains limited due to various challenges.” An article in The Journal of Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health published in 2022 points to “limited access to resources and trained professionals” for children in Africa with autism spectrum disorder. The authors are now conducting a review of existing studies on the issue to “inform health-care policies direction and facilitate the creation of early interventions.” One result of this shortage of local services is that many children with autism don’t get a diagnosis in their first years of life. Research has shown that early interventions make a huge difference in outcomes for children with autism, so delays in diagnosis can have a lifelong impact. And even as caregivers struggle to find help they must cope with misconceptions and stigma about the condition. When Gachoki’s relatives learned of Mary’s son’s diagnosis, they blamed witchcraft. “Preachers and traditional healers believe that autism is caused by witchcraft,” says Dr. Lillian Kerubo of Kiambu County Hospital, a pediatrician and behavioral therapist who has for years worked with children who have autism. These preachers and healers tell parents that therapeutic intervention is not needed. Instead they might offer an herbal concoction with a promise that it will help the child or they’ll advise the parents to pray and fast. Other misbeliefs and myths circulate: Some families believe that if a mother eats eggs during pregnancy that can bring on autism, and that boys typically miss developmental milestones so there shouldn’t be a need to consult a physician in such cases. “Many parents, especially in the rural areas, need to know that an autistic child is a normal child. They should accept them for who they are and support them in life, but most importantly, they need to learn more about autism, understand autism, and manage their expectations,” says Kerubo. For this story, we interviewed parents from several families who had made the decision to seek support – with mixed results. A struggle to get help for her son Mary Gachoki lives with her son in a tiny single room in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi. She finally decided to seek a diagnosis last year. She visited a doctor at the Kenyatta National Hospital in Kenya, who referred her to the Kenya Institute of Special Education for assessment. The staff tested her son and informed her that he had autism. There was no charge for the assessment but the Institute does charge for its therapeutic services. Gachoki, who earns money by doing day work for local families, signed her son up for a session of heated pool therapy; studies have found it helpful in improving behaviors and social interactions in children with autism. It cost 1,500 Kenyan shillings – about $10. She says she didn’t have the money to pay for follow-up sessions. Nor are there any programs for children with autism at the small, unheated public school that her son attends – and where, she says, the teacher points a cane at her son if he’s restless (but doesn’t administer physical punishment, which is prohibited in Kenyan schools). Mary Gachoki’s dilemma is common, says Luke Laari, a lecturer at the University of Ghana in the Department of Public Health and lead author of the The Journal of Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health article on autism in Africa. He says that in cities, most of the parents he surveyed said they were unable to afford fees charged for therapies and services. Specialists who provide therapy for children with autism are in “limited in supply” in Africa – and inaccessible to the rural poor, he adds. “Parents of autistic children must be pragmatic in their expectations regarding their children’s development,” Laari says, urging governments to provide specialized materials for teachers and students as well as financial aid for parents of children with autism. Jumping for therapy In a middle-class residential neighborhood Nairobi, two young brothers are jumping and giggling with their dad on an indoor trampoline. Their little sister is jumping, too. Caroline Ndebu, their mom, is on the couch, recording them on her phone and cheering them on. Her two sons, ages 5 and 3, were both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and are receiving physical and behavioral therapy. The jumping activity aims to improve balance and motor skills. The older son works with his therapist on identifying colors and other visual tasks. His parents say his eye contact has improved – he now looks his therapist in the eye. The parents brought him for diagnostic testing after he began regressing at age 2 – losing his speech, showing signs of antisocial behavior and hyperactivity and exhibiting behavior associated with autism, such as pulling his ears. Ndebu says her siblings had suggested the doctor’s visit. The younger brother’s case was less pronounced than his brother’s, but he, too, around age 2, started regressing in speech, stopped pointing at things and became unsociable. Trained assessors at his school tested the child and said he also has autism. Ndebu says that the family immediately put the younger son on occupational therapy and speech therapy to build his cognitive ability. “He picked up well and they do therapy together,” she says. Fortunately, she says, her family has the resources to pay for these services. “It can get overwhelming. Some days are tough, and others are easy. It does not end with therapy as we have to put in a lot of work for the boys,” she says with a smile. She has gone on to join Autism Mums KE, a caregivers’ WhatsApp group with over 700 members, for support. “We encourage each other especially if one had an overwhelming day,” she says. She has created her own nonprofit group to help parents and caregivers: Gifted Gems. Her goals are to raise awareness about autism, build a repository of online information, train caregivers and provide support systems for them. An upcoming zoom session is entitled “Accepting and Embracing the Diagnosis.” “The worries that keep caregivers up at night can be resolved by bridging the knowledge gaps, especially in rural regions,” says Peter Mucheru, a speech and language therapist at Tower Valley School, where a number of the students have autism. He believes the WhatsApp group and Gifted Gems are both good examples of programs that educate parents. Even with support, parents face many challenges. Evelyne Kiarie’s 4-year-old son began exhibiting signs of autism a week before his 3rd birthday. He regressed in speech, avoided eye contact, didn’t interact with others. The changes confused Kiarie. “I didn’t know anything about autism, and neither did my husband,” she says. “You know, autism is not spoken about a lot in this country.” Her husband’s brother, who is a doctor, saw the signs and advised the parents to seek support. Since then, therapy has helped the child build his social skills, says his mom – as have swimming lessons. “It can be overwhelming. Sometimes one wishes to have a break. I envision what the future will be like for him, wondering if he will be independent,” Kiarie adds. Hope for a better future It is not just parents who need a greater awareness, says Dr. Kerubo. She emphasizes that health-care professionals need to learn more about autistic children as well – to understand them and to empathize with them rather than feeling sorry for them. And society may be changing to provide more help for families. The Kenya Institute of Special Education plans to roll out online classes for caregivers, says its director, educator Norman Kiogora. “We do not have any scholarship programs for children with autism currently,” he says, but he hopes private partners will make this possible. At present, even without financial aid, Mary Gachoki is hopeful that someday she will be able to provide more therapy sessions for her child. “He is a good son, very sharp and I love him,” she says. Right now, she says, he only smiles, grunts and cries. “I wish to hear him speak.” Based in Kenya, Scovian Lillian is a science and health freelance journalist with a focus on Africa. She covers higher education, women’s empowerment, human rights, persons with disabilities, climate change and the environment. Her articles have been published by The Continent, Nature Africa, Democracy in Africa, Talk Africa, The Mail & Guardian, SciDev.net (Sub-Saharan Africa), Technology and Innovation and University World News. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / TrendingEvery year, nearly 500,000 children die from an easily curable condition: diarrhea. There’s a simple and effective treatment: mixing oral rehydration salts — which are basically a mix of sugar and salt in the form of glucose and electrolytes — for the child to drink to restore the body fluids that are lost during bouts of diarrhea. It works by keeping the body hydrated. These salts are available in small plastic pouches. But a new study published in the journal Science this month found that though doctors knew about oral rehydration salts (ORS), they just weren’t prescribing them enough. The study was conducted by researchers from RAND, the University of Southern California, Duke University and Indian Institute of Management in the Southern Indian city of Bengaluru. Zachary Wagner, one of the study’s lead authors and an economist and professor at the Pardee RAND graduate school in California, says this is a subject he’s been researching for the last ten years. “The problem is massive,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of kids die from diarrhea, when none of them should be dying. There’s a treatment that’s been around for decades that we know is really effective. When you ask doctors in surveys, what they would do for a hypothetical case of diarrhea, most of them say they would prescribe ORS. If that’s the case, why wasn’t it being used? That’s what we set out to find,” he says. The study took place in two Indian states: Karnataka and Bihar. The authors chose states that were very different in literacy levels, socioeconomic status and diarrhea care. Bihar in the east is one of India’s poorest states, with 46% of the adult population having very little schooling and only 42% having completed high school. By contrast, Karnataka in the South has above average per capita income. Only 26% of the adult population have little schooling and 62% have completed high school. Additionally, Bihar was chosen because of its below average use of oral rehydration salts (57% of diarrhea cases are treated with ORS compared to the national average of 61%); Karnataka has above average ORS use with 70% of the cases being treated with ORS. Recruiting ‘fathers’ The way they conducted the study was a little unusual. The study employed data collectors, who were trained to pose as the father of a 2-year-old child with diarrhea symptoms. Meagan Phelan, communications director for the Science family of journals that published the study says, “In health economics experiments, use of actors is typical to avoid biases and ensure the results are as reliable as possible.” In each state, the study authors recruited 40 people to pose as caregivers for patients. They approached 2,282 health-care practitioners in 253 medium-sized towns. “Though we call them actors, these are people trained to collect data,” Wagner says. “In many cases, they were fathers of young children, so the role we were training them to play was very similar to their own selves.” All of the actors presented a case of diarrhea in their “children” that were similar to the symptoms caused by the common viral germ — rotavirus. Half of these actors presented a moderate case of diarrhea (describing four to five loose stools the previous night) and the other half were told to present a severe case (10 -12 loose stools the previous night and symptoms of dehydration). According to the standard of care in the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, both types of cases would require ORS treatment. Though antibiotics are deemed appropriate for some cases of child diarrhea – where there’s blood in the stools or sticky or “smelly” feces. The actors steered clear of these symptoms, so that it would be clear to doctors that they approached that antibiotics would not be necessary. At first, the authors were concerned that not having a real child to assess would affect the outcome of what the doctors prescribed. But surveys show this is a common way to seek care for child diarrhea in India. “We designed the study to see what was really driving the problem. One theory: “patients were driving the problem by demanding antibiotics,” says Wagner. Other possibilities: physicians assumed young patients would not like the taste of oral salts; parents didn’t think ORS were serious medication; the salts were out of stock (they’re not as lucrative as other medicines); and doctors were perhaps making more money by prescribing antibiotics, even though, says Wagner, they’re not as effective as ORS in treating diarrhea. An unexpected finding The study’s results were a surprise, Wagner says. The under-prescription wasn’t due to the interference of parents. Lack of supply accounted for only a 6% dip in prescriptions; financial incentives for doctors accounted for only a 5% dip. But there was one dominant reason for not prescribing oral rehydration salts: Nearly half of the cases of failure to prescribe were because the health-care provider assumed the parents would not be satisfied with ORS. But if the caregiver were to express their willingness to use the ORS – some of the actors in the study for instance, showed the doctors a picture of the ORS on their cellphones and mentioned how they’d been prescribed it on a previous occasion — ORS prescriptions rose by as much as 27%. The study also found that other factors play a role in under-prescribing the ORS in India. In the two states, the study conducted household surveys. “We surveyed 1,200 households where there was a case of diarrhea over the last four weeks,” says Wagner. They learned that 400 of these patients went to a pharmacy rather than a doctor – and pharmacies had the worst record in over-prescribing antibiotics and under-prescribing ORS, Wagner says. ORS was recommended for only 17% of the 400 pharmacy patients. “Surveys showed that this wasn’t because pharmacists lacked the knowledge that ORS would work, but that they had clear financial incentives to sell antibiotics,” he says. And that’s an important takeaway, says Wagner. With efforts to curb antibiotic overuse, “we want to highlight that a lot of inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions are coming from child diarrhea.” Dr. Prashant Nuggehalli Srinivas, a public health researcher and clinician who was not a part of the study, says the findings are important, because for the first time, it shifts the responsibility from the patient to the health-care provider. Srinivas lives and works in rural Chamarajanagar, a town adjoining forest areas with a high population of tribal villages in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Blaming the parents In many cases, he’s seen health authorities blame parents when a child dies from an easily curable disease like diarrhea. The parents are characterized as either considered uneducated or superstitious to understand the value of rehydration salts. But in this study, that responsibility is shifted to the practitioner. “The study has made it clear that health-care providers are not doing enough to convince people of the dangers of severe dehydration and the restorative ability of oral salts,” he says . This information is critical in rural areas, Srinivas says, because diarrhea can progress in a matter of hours into a life-threatening condition and the family may find it difficult to access care. “If a child has severe diarrhea, and is not prescribed an ORS, the family would have to consider taking him to the nearest hospital because they would need to administer intravenous fluids— that would mean walking three to four hours while carrying the sick child on your back.” There may be other reasons for the underprescribing of ORS: We still need more evidence as to why so many children fail to receive oral rehydration salts, says Dr. Santhosh Rajagopal, a pediatrician and surveillance medical officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) who was not a part of the study. “Nevertheless, millions of young lives could be saved if we can find ways to increase their use,” he says. It’s a reminder of how even small interventions can have a huge, life changing impact in global health, says Srinivas. Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, Southern India. She reports on global health, science and development and has been published in The New York Times, The British Medical Journal, the BBC, The Guardian and other outlets. You can find her on X @kamal_t Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / On Air / TrendingHumanitarian aid groups around the world can agree on one thing: The number of people in need, from Gaza to Haiti to Afghanistan, is higher than any time in recent memory. “I live in fear of opening up my email every morning and seeing what else has happened that is going to make things worse,” says Leslie Archambeault, managing director of humanitarian policy at Save the Children U.S. So then why is the United Nations asking governments to give less humanitarian aid money in 2024 than they asked for in 2023? The U.N. has called for $46 billion in its annual appeal for this year, down from $57 billion last year, acknowledging a chilly atmosphere among donors. “This is the first time that this has happened in recent years. And it’s not because there is no need, it is because we have had to prioritize urgent life-saving need as our core business,” said Martin Griffiths, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, at a December event. Griffiths said the U.N. has had to narrow its focus to the most urgent crises, “looking at life-saving needs as the overwhelming priority.” And keep in mind, the U.N. typically does not get all it asks for. In 2023, the U.N. received just 40% of the donations it requested to fund worldwide humanitarian efforts, down from 68% the year before. There is almost always a gap between the funds requested and what governments give. But this year the gulf between the growing needs and thriftier donors could be especially large. “I think the outlook for humanitarian funding globally is pretty bad right now. I am pretty concerned. I think everybody is very concerned,” says Archambeault. Humanitarian donations are vulnerable in part because so few countries shoulder so much of the burden. “It’s really three donors that fund around 50% to 60% of that, so you’re looking at the U.S., Germany and the EU,” says Kate Katch, a practitioner fellow at the University of Virginia and a former humanitarian affairs officer at the U.N. “We’re not seeing a decrease in humanitarian needs, and we’re not seeing those top three donors giving significantly more. And the signals would suggest that’s going to stay that way or it could even slow down.” The U.N. estimates that some 300 million people worldwide are in urgent need of food, shelter, health care and other essential resources. That number has grown as protracted crises stack up in places like Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myannmar, and acute emergencies in Gaza and Ukraine pile on the need. Besides wars and conflicts, natural disasters accelerated by climate change and global economic struggles are adding to the toll. “It’s this compounding vulnerability that is really making crises much more protracted and much more expensive,” says Katch. “At the end of the day, we have to look at longer-term solutions about how we really assist these communities as opposed to just leaving it to the humanitarians to try and keep essentially putting Band-Aids on the problem.” A stretched humanitarian sector Humanitarian funding tends to be short-term and limited in what it can pay for, aimed at emergencies rather than grinding, long-term turmoil. Kaela Glass, head of partnerships at the Norwegian Refugee Council, says a classic example is water trucking – driving tanks of clean drinking water to a distribution point where people line up to fill their jerry cans. “Expensive water trucking to a population who has been in the same place for five years doesn’t make any sense. But because of some of the restrictions we have on humanitarian financing, you can’t install a permanent water source.” Long-term fixes have typically been the province of the international development sector, led by organizations such as the World Bank. But development funding tends to move slowly and is often subject to political considerations. The U.N. and NGOs who rely on international funders are preparing for donations to stay flat – or even, for the first time since 2010, decrease from the previous year’s sum. “I heard someone say, did we hit peak humanitarian in 2022?” says the NRC’s Glass. “There is a bit of pessimism that we kind of reached as high as we could reach, and now we’re on the other side of the mountain.” Aid groups face impossible choices Glass says in places like Chad and South Sudan, where millions of Sudanese refugees have fled, the funding shortfall means you can’t always help both the displaced people and the often poor host communities struggling to meet their own basic needs. “We’re basically choosing which type of needs to address, and ultimately having to choose which populations are going to be receiving assistance. There’s just not enough to go around,” Glass says. Katch says it’s especially damaging to some of the dire situations that don’t make headlines: the chronic violence in Honduras, an economic meltdown in Lebanon or persistent armed conflict in the Sahel. “There’s more risk of starvation. Food rations have to be halved. People get more waterborne diseases. They can’t get access in remote areas to health care. It’s very tangible. And I think it’s really important for people to understand how destitute it is for a lot of these communities when the funding doesn’t come in,” she says. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / On Air / TrendingBirth professionals from around the country gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to heal, to learn and to honor the lives and sacrifices of three women: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the Mothers of Gynecology. These towering mothers built of scrap metal were the cornerstone of a two-day conference in late February centered on Black maternal health inside Old Ship A.M.E Zion Church. “There’s so much that people don’t know about,” says Dr. Veronica Maria Pimentel, an obstetrician gynecologist based in Hartford, Ct., who began a petition two years ago asking those in her field to recognize the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. “The history is told from the point of view of those in power and those who were in power were men and those who were in power were also white,” she says. “And we’re talking about women, we’re talking specifically about Black women, and we’re talking about enslaved Black women. So it is important for us to go back and look at this history because the history informs what we’re doing today when we talk about inequalities in health care.” Local artist Michelle Browder has thought about the Mothers of Gynecology since she was 18. That’s when she learned of a white doctor named J. Marion Sims, who experimented on the bodies of enslaved Black women without offering any pain relief. He claimed to have cured them of ailments that arose from pregnancy. Browder built the massive sculptures from donated metal on land her family owns, a response to the statue of Sims that sits a few miles away. She dedicated this public monument to every mother who ever lost a child. Welded to the metal bodies are names like Serena Williams and words like beauty and resilience. African beads adorn their necks. Browder took the tool Sims invented — the speculum — and created a tiara for Betsey. “They were birthed out of pain, but also because I wanted to change the narrative,” Browder says. “I wanted to change the conversation about Black women in this country and what we have to contribute and the infant mortality rate, reproductive justice and maternal health. We are in a crisis. And we’re hoping to elevate the conversation.” She led a group in song as they walked to the park. They gathered in a circle around the mothers. “All of these women are bigger than life for me,” Browder says. “Anarcha is 15 feet tall. Betsy is about … 12 and Lucy is 9 feet tall.” Anarcha’s hips are crafted from the spades of shovels. She faces the sky, defiant and hopeful. At the center of her body, her womb is a chasm for the world to see. That was Deborah Shedrick’s responsibility. She helped construct all three, but Anarcha’s womb “was her baby.” “All of my feelings went into that piece,” Shedrick says. “I wanted it to encompass their spiritual pain, the mental pain, their physical pain.” Visitors place flowers at the feet of the sculptures. This is, after all, what doulas and midwives do. They protect mothers. “We see our clients in this art,” says Denise Bolds, president of Doulas of North America or DONA International. “We see the losses, we see the victories, we see the ones that make it just by the skin of our teeth and we see the fear. It’s all here, it’s all here, it’s all here.” The goal is always to empower families. Black mothers die in childbirth at disproportionate rates and are three to four times more likely to suffer complications during pregnancy. “I had a mother message me this morning,” says Ravae Sinclair, former president of DONA International. “She ‘I have seven days my expected due date.’ And I said, ‘You made it and you will continue to make it.’ She’s with us because she’s afraid to die. And I said not on our watch.” The group was brought to the place where these experiments occurred. They listened to Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian of U.S. slavery medicine, describe how this legacy of medical racism persists. Though these women’s bodies literally allow for the United States to be placed on a global medical map, they aren’t acknowledged. They are erased from their own life experience, Owens says. “And so the embodied experiences of the legacy of medical racism is that we’re not believed,” Cooper Owens says. “And we’re thought to be able to withstand pain more. We’re thought to be over dependent on either government assistance or narcotics. We’re sexually irresponsible. We’re blamed when there are negative medical outcomes. And class doesn’t protect you. Education doesn’t protect you, your relationship status doesn’t protect you.” One of the last speakers was Charles Johnson, an Atlanta-based father who began the nonprofit 4Kira4Moms after the loss of his wife from hemorrhage following the birth of their second son. In 2018, Johnson worked with lawmakers to pass the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which provides funding to better investigate and review incidents of maternal mortality. “As we work to protect women and babies and put an end to the maternal mortality crisis, it’s also equally as important, if not more, important that we protect our history and that these stories are told,” Johnson says. There’s a line Michelle Browder uses for the Mothers of Gynecology. It’s from the playwright Ntozake Shange’s work “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.” It reads: “Let her be born / Let her be born & handled warmly.” Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit WBUR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / On Air / TrendingThe start of a new year can push us to think about how we take care of ourselves – our bodies or our minds. And for some people that can mean seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. In some ways, being open about pursuing treatment for mental health concerns is becoming more commonplace. But seeking therapy may feel taboo for men who are socialized not to express vulnerability and keep emotions in check. Black men must also contend with the long history of neglect and abuse that has influenced how generations of African-Americans feel about health services, a lack of Black mental health professionals, and the understanding that shielding emotions are a way to face the pressures and dangers of racism. Host Michel Martins talks with writer Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays, and psychologist Earl Turner of Pepperdine University, on making therapy more accessible for Black men. In participating regions, you’ll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what’s going on in your community. Email us at considerthis@npr.org. This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Natalie Winston. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / TrendingCopyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Health Life / TrendingLincoln Mondy grew up in a mixed race family in Texas, where his white mother’s family used regular tobacco, unlike his Black father. “My dad exclusively smokes menthol cigarettes,” he says. “Menthol was such a part of Black culture. And I knew that Black people smoked menthol and that was just a fact.” The 29-year-old filmmaker turned his curiosity about race and menthol tobacco into a documentary on the topic he produced for the Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking advocacy group. He then realized how menthol’s popularity with the Black community came from decades of racially targeted marketing, including ads (such as the Kent Menthol ad shown above) depicting Black models in Black magazines like Ebony, and cultural events in Black neighborhoods — like the KOOL Jazz festival, sponsored by the menthol brand. “They really created menthol as a Black product,” Mondy says. Now, as a proposed ban on menthol remains in limbo since the Biden administration put it on hold in December, lobbying and debate continues about how the ban would impact Black smokers. Not only is the minty, cooling flavored tobacco most heavily marketed and consumed in Black communities, where over 80% of smokers use menthol, it is a big reason Black men face the highest rate of lung cancer, says Phillip Gardiner, a public health activist and co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. Latino and LGBTQ communities as well as women were also targeted, he says. The minty, cooling flavor of menthol masks the smoke and soothes the throat, making it easier to inhale deeply. “The more deeply you inhale, the more nicotine and toxins you take and the more addicted you become,” and the more lethal the product, Gardiner says. That history is why efforts to ban menthol cigarettes and cigars have always been entwined with race. Menthol has become a flashpoint of controversy, dividing Black leaders and their communities. The Food and Drug Administration was set to enact a long-awaited ban on menthol cigarettes and cigars last August. The rule detailing the ban has already been written but needed to be approved by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget before it could be finalized. The White House since delayed it until March, and agreed to hold meetings with groups opposed to the rule. This angered activists like Gardiner. “It’s ridiculous; thousands of lives are being lost because of the inactivity of the FDA and now the White House,” he says. Gardiner says the delays are the result of the industry wielding its financial influence within the Black community. Late last year, tobacco giant Altria recently sponsored a poll finding a menthol ban would sway more Black voters against President Biden. Details of that poll have not been released, and NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson refutes its findings, saying in a video statement, “we’re the largest civil rights organization in the Black community in 47 states across the country; no one has raised this as a political issue.” One of the most vocal and influential voices against menthol bans is Reverend Al Sharpton. Sharpton and his group, National Action Network, didn’t respond to requests for comment, but in the past, they’ve acknowledged working with and receiving funding from tobacco companies— including in fighting in New York state, which has considered a menthol ban. “Smoking is bad for you, no question about it, but if it’s a health health issue, why aren’t you banning all cigarettes,” Sharpton says to a cheering crowd, in a video from a speech at a 2019 National Action Network event. Implied in a menthol ban, he says is the notion that “whites know how much to smoke and we don’t know how much to smoke.” More recently, in lobbying against a federal ban, Sharpton has also repeated his argument, including in a letter to White House’s domestic policy advisor Susan Rice that it would lead to more over-policing of Black people. He cites the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police during an arrest on suspicion of selling loose untaxed cigarettes. In fact, a federal menthol ban would not outlaw individuals from possessing or using those cigarettes, but bar the manufacture and sale of them. But Lincoln Mondy, the filmmaker, says coming from respected leaders like Sharpton, messages that tap into existing fears about aggressive policing can be deeply confusing and divisive for the Black community. “My granny has pictures of Al Sharpton on her mantle, along with Jesus,” he says. “Especially for our elders, you have Black leaders who are selling this tobacco PR line around policing and : ‘They’re just trying to take things away from Black people.'” He and others say the delays in the federal menthol ban have already handed the industry a win. In places like California and Massachusetts that already banned menthol, the tobacco industry is now selling menthol-like flavors that aren’t technically menthol, and therefore not subject to those new laws. A similar end run, he says, would be likely if any national ban were to take effect. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...

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Aelia Raza Sportz DivaFeatured / God Money & Power / Tech / TrendingNew EVs aren’t cheap. At least, not in the United States. In other parts of the world, bargain electric vehicles from China abound, but a 27.5% tariff has kept those cars out of the United States. Arvind Srinivasan, who recently shopped around for an EV under $25,000, feels conflicted about that. “As a consumer, yeah, I would buy a Chinese EV, probably without question,” he says. “But as a person who cares about the country, in that view, I feel like, no, we should either tariff or ban them.” Even higher tariffs and outright bans are both real possibilities. That’s because cheap Chinese EVs could be devastating to a key sector of the U.S. economy: auto manufacturing. And the Biden administration’s climate strategy, which would benefit from cheaper EVs, also prioritizes U.S. jobs. Climate, national security, American jobs: This is why Srinivasan is torn. Even if he’s not a fan of big auto companies, exactly. “At some point, if we don’t support U.S. auto manufacturers, are just going to come in, undercut it,” he says. “Then we’re dependent on China for cheap EVs. And I don’t think that’s sustainable for the country long term.” Plenty of filet mignon but no hamburger EV prices have been falling, but cheap ones remain elusive. That might sound paradoxical, but steak at a discount costs a lot more than hamburger meat. Right now, luxury electric SUVs — the filet mignon of the automotive world — are on sale. But small, cheap cars? That hamburger case is empty. Well, almost empty. Srinivasan, who wanted an EV to save on gas, found exactly one option. After poring over the new and used offerings, he went with a new Chevy Bolt — just $23,500 after a tax credit. “It was like, ‘OK, this car isn’t great, but it’s cheap,'” he says. “No one sells anything remotely close to its price target.” In fact, right now, not even Chevy sells anything close. General Motors is moving on from the older battery that powers the modest-sized, never-profitable hatchback. The Bolt is not currently in production. Larger vehicles carry larger price tags. As companies pour billions of dollars into making electric vehicles, they’re trying to offset those huge expenses. So even though EV prices have fallen about 10% from last year, they’re still averaging about $54,000, according to Kelley Blue Book. Companies say they’re working on cheaper options. Ford has a “skunkworks” team tackling the project; GM has pledged to bring back the Bolt with a new battery; Stellantis has said a profitable $25,000 EV is key. Tesla, the undisputed market leader for EVs, says it’s bringing a cheaper model to market by next year. But they don’t have much time to waste. Volvo, the Swedish carmaker owned by a Chinese company, plans to sell a Chinese-made EV in the U.S. beginning this summer, at a relatively budget-friendly starting price of under $35,000. (Volvo says it’s paying the tariff; the company did not comment when asked about reports that it will be refunded that money in exchange for exporting U.S.-made vehicles.) How is an “impressive” car just $10,000? Meanwhile, cheap — really cheap — Chinese EVs are proliferating. The BYD Seagull costs just $10,000 in China. Chinese-made cars used to be a punchline. Economist Sue Helper, who has spent decades tracking globalization and auto manufacturing, remembers seeing BYD vehicles a few years ago that were, in a word, “terrible.” But she recently took a Seagull for a test drive in a parking lot in Detroit. (They are not allowed on U.S. streets.) “It’s impressive,” she says. “It’s cute.” The Seagull would cost more than $10,000 in the U.S., given that it would have to be modified to meet U.S. safety standards. But you could double the price of the Seagull and it would still be a steal. In fact, you could double the price and pay the 27.5% tariff, and it would still undercut every EV for sale in the United States. Why? Helper points out that, first, it’s a very small car, a rare beast in the U.S. these days. And China has economies of scale and clever design. There’s also, she says, “the Chinese playbook of ‘let’s subsidize and repress labor and get ourselves a foothold in an international market and take it over.'” For instance, she says, the Chinese government heavily subsidizes China’s EV industry to give it an international advantage. Wages in the Chinese auto industry are lower. And some companies in the Chinese auto-supply chain almost certainly use forced labor, or modern-day slavery, according to human rights groups. Why aren’t cheap Chinese EVs for sale in the U.S.? National security concerns and old-fashioned protectionism have kept these cars out of the U.S. so far. When president, Donald Trump imposed a heavy tariff on Chinese-made vehicles, which the Biden administration has extended and could increase. This year, the U.S. Commerce Department launched an investigation into whether Chinese vehicles’ navigation and communication features could spy on Americans. The department’s investigation could result in a prohibition on certain Chinese-made vehicles. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has proposed hiking tariffs on Chinese vehicles, while Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has proposed an outright ban. Scott Paul of the Alliance for American Manufacturing is lobbying for higher tariffs and says he’d back an outright ban. His organization represents unionized steelworkers and companies in the auto-supply chain. “We’ve seen this play out in the past in other industries,” he says. “We need to get ahead of this instead of responding to it after the fact, when we’re just cleaning up the mess and we’re seeing these factories wiped out, these jobs displaced and these communities devastated.” Meanwhile, a different “Alliance” — the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents automakers — also recognizes the risk but couches it differently. “The overall competitiveness of the auto industry in the U.S. will be harmed if heavily subsidized Chinese vehicles can be sold at below-market prices to U.S. consumers,” John Bozzella, the president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told NPR in a statement. The group declined to state a position on banning Chinese autos. There’s good reason for the more measured tone: Major automakers operate globally, not just in the United States. China is a rival, sure, but it’s also the world’s largest auto market, as well as a major supplier. As Bozzella has previously put it, where China is seen by policymakers as “binary” — good or bad, friend or foe — for automakers, “‘China’ is complicated.” Climate impacts are complicated too Bonnie Dixon, another frustrated car shopper, is also torn over Chinese EVs. Dixon, who works part time as a research scientist and is on a tight budget, drives an older gas pickup she’d love to swap for a zero-emission car. She’s wary of used cars so is looking at new ones. She needs a car capable of driving long distances — she can’t have a short-range EV that works only around town. New, affordable, long range: no dice. She doesn’t know much about the politics of tariffs, she says. “What I am aware of is just the great urgency of needing to reduce carbon emissions.” If she could buy a Chinese EV, wouldn’t that help the planet? The answer, according to some climate advocates, is complicated. They argue that buying time for U.S. automakers to change — to make more EVs, at cheaper prices, with cleaner supply chains — could be better for the climate in the long run. “We are trying to move the market so that all automakers are making vehicles as sustainably as possible,” says Katherine García of the Sierra Club. And when it comes to things like greener steel and electricity, American companies rank much better than Chinese ones. Meanwhile, labor groups and green groups have united around the argument that decarbonizing will be good for the planet and U.S. workers. García emphasized that people can take public transit, bike and drive used EVs to help fight climate change. But she also sees an urgent need for cheaper new EVs — just maybe not cheap Chinese EVs. It’s a position that resonates with Dixon. “Definitely the best solution would be if we could build them in the U.S.,” Dixon says. “That’s what I’m hoping — that the U.S. car manufacturers will get their act together and produce these more affordable EVs that we need.” In the meantime, when she needs to drive, she hops in her old gas pickup. Copyright 2024 SNC247. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonLifestyles / Trending / Work LifeNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Anne Helen Petersen, a journalist and the host of the podcast Work Appropriate. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I’m a people pleaser and an empath. I’m often told that I’m a good listener, and I do love to listen. I feel energized when a co-worker opens up and shares their frustrations both in and out of the office. Being that trusted confidant and providing emotional support is something I believe strengthens connections and improves the quality of our work. However, my supervisor has developed a habit of routinely sharing charged emotional issues in their life: their health struggles, their relationship with their children and partner, etc. On top of this, they tend to be a negative Nancy about the projected success of our shared work projects. This pattern has developed to a point where I often come home exhausted. The issue with this predicament is twofold: One, I interact closely with my supervisor every day, making it difficult to take emotional breaks throughout the week. And two, my supervisor is in a position of power, and I feel unsure about how to articulate my need to set emotional boundaries. I don’t want to harm our working relationship, but I’m nearing my wit’s end. — Emotional overload There’s nothing in a job description that says you have to be incredibly emotionally invested and you have to be friends with everyone. Being friends with someone involves sharing everything that this letter writer is talking about. I’m not saying that if you’ve developed those relationships at work you’re somehow unprofessional or doing something wrong, but that’s a decision that each person can make. As long as you’re friendly, courteous, kind and not a butt, then that can make you a really good co-worker. This question-writer seems to think that sharing emotional closeness with someone makes them better co-workers, but I would say that the rest of their question indicates that’s not necessarily the case. She seems to be recruiting these sorts of responses. The first part of her question is, “I’m a people-pleaser and an empath.” This person has created this scenario and then is surprised I think she has two options. She can either decide, “I did this to myself. I said that this gives me energy, so I just have to deal with it. I recruited this behavior.” Or, she can figure out how to corral the energy that she’s invited into one place. So maybe like, Friday lunch — save all of that information, all of that struggle for lunch. And then, when this person starts to bring something up, she can say, “This is Friday lunch material.” And if it’s exhausting, then it’s the end of the week. next time this person starts dumping that emotional feeling on you in conversation, you can be like, “I’ve realized I’ve struggled with talking about our personal lives during the workday. Do you feel like we could try storing it up and putting it into a big lunch that we have together on Fridays?” Make it about the two of you, our conversations are overloading me, and that’s true. And if it feels like the negativity is making it hard for you to do your job, one piece of advice that Josh Gondelman had when he came on my show, was that you can always try to redirect the conversation. If someone says, “Oh, this isn’t going well. This isn’t going to work no matter what we try. Blah, blah, blah.” You can pepper questions throughout the day or your relationship like, “What is working really well? What’s a win that we’ve had this week?” Inserting a different frame into the conversation about the things you’re doing well can be useful. I think women, in particular, are socialized to believe that we’re just supposed to be listeners and absorb everything that everyone throws our way. And just because you feel overloaded or don’t like that, it doesn’t make you any worse of a co-worker. It doesn’t make you not a nice or kind of person. Setting up boundaries is an act of love for everyone involved. Listen to Anne Helen Petersen’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis with help from our intern Jamal Michel. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonFamily / Health Life / Religion / TrendingJournalist and author Steven Petrow remembers his sister Julie Petrow-Cohen as a self-described troublemaker with a huge smile. She loved the beach, gardening and her wife and two kids. Petrow called his younger sister his “co-conspirator in life,” recalling how they would sneak out together when they were younger and go to their respective queer bars and cover for each other with their parents. In 2017, Julie was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. After six years of treatment – surgery, chemo, recurrences and Hail Mary clinical trials – Julie made the decision to end her life using what’s known as “medical aid in dying.” Medical aid in dying — or MAID — is legal in 10 states and Washington, D.C. These laws allow terminally ill patients to get a prescription for life-ending medications from a doctor. More than a dozen other states are considering similar legislation. To use these laws, people must go through several steps. Most states require a person to be mentally capable and have two doctors confirm that they’re within 6 months of death. They then must make multiple requests — oral and written — and wait for a period of several days between those requests. Surveys show roughly 70% of Americans support people having this option, but the laws remain controversial. Opponents include many religious groups who argue humans should not take steps to end their lives. Pope Francis has said he supports palliative care that comforts people who are dying but opposes anything that “provoke death.” Some disability rights advocates worry people with disabilities could be coerced into ending their lives, and a coalition of groups are suing to overturn California’s law. Supporters argue these laws prevent unnecessary pain and suffering. Steven Petrow said for his sister Julie, having this option gave her a sense of agency and control that often eludes people with a terminal illness. ” didn’t want to die,” Petrow said. “But she didn’t want to suffer.” Petrow said his sister wanted him to write about her decision to end her life, which he did for the New York Times. Petrow talked about his family’s experience and what he’d learned reporting on the issue with Dan Gorenstein, executive editor of the nonprofit health policy news organization Tradeoffs. Interview highlights: On his reaction to Julie’s decision to end her life I had to undergo a bit of a journey when it came to medical aid in dying, and the idea that Julie might exercise that choice. There was part of me that didn’t want her to do that. The idea that in the same way you could plan a vacation or you can plan a cesarean, you can plan your death. That was very novel. That was upsetting, and I just couldn’t even imagine how one prepares for that. I couldn’t imagine how she prepared for that. The first time I was in their living room and they had a hospice social worker over, and they were talking about “MAID” or “the MAID.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. I knew they didn’t have a maid. And it’s true for so many people, I’ve come to realize after talking and writing about Julie, that we don’t really understand what it is. Therefore, when things are not familiar, they’re threatening in some way. So that was a big part of it. And then the other was this sort of intertwined notion that to say I’m pro-MAID, I’m pro Julie making this choice, it felt like I was also saying, well, I’m pro Julie dying. And I had to tease them apart. I had to get some help in teasing them apart. And Julie helped me do that. And talking to others did as well. On what helped him accept Julie’s decision I really kind of moved along as I saw her suffer. She was the kind of person who could withstand a lot of pain. She was not a complainer. And she didn’t even complain about this, but I would just hear her upstairs in her bedroom really crying out when she moved. And then very, very close to the end, her shirt just happened to sort of ride up a little bit and I hadn’t seen her abdomen in a while. And that’s where many of the tumors were. It looked like the lunar landscape, because you could see them pushing out, and you could see these rounds and mounds. It’s like, oh my God, you know. No wonder there’s so much pain. Initially I wasn’t going to talk about whatever conflicts I had about medical aid in dying. But I evolved because I see so much in our culture, when we talk about an issue, that it’s black and white. And I’m not black or white on this. I’m not an advocate. I’m not carrying a sign. I’m Julie’s brother, and I’m complicated and confused and have tried to speak openly and authentically about that in talking about medical aid in dying. On barriers to more people using MAID, including needing to make multiple requests over several weeks Time is often not an asset that dying people have. Fortunately for Julie, she moved things ahead early enough that none of these were encumbrances to her, but for some people it certainly is. I actually think one of the biggest issues is public awareness about medical aid in dying. It’s so low. When I first wrote that Times piece, I heard from a medical ethicist who was now going to start teaching in his classes about this because it had never come up as an issue in medical ethics. And I heard from an oncologist in Washington, D.C., where it is legal, that he was unaware of it. And what happens too often is that when it does pass in a state, there are not PSAs all over the place saying, “Come to the booth and get your medical aid in dying medication.” It’s kept , and I think that hinders educational campaigns for sure. On concerns raised by some disability rights advocates that medical aid in dying could lead people with disabilities to being pressured to end their lives Of course we have to listen to all these groups. Nobody should be pushed to make this kind of decision. And so how do you balance those two aspects? When you look at the numbers — 186 individuals in New Jersey, that’s since 2019, less than 9,000 nationwide — it does not seem that people are being pushed. But it’s a conversation that needs to take place as part of this larger conversation because we need to make sure that we protect everybody. On the memories of his sister that have stayed in his mind since her death I have this sort of continuous loop going on in my head these days. What I think about often is we were in Rhode Island after she was diagnosed. The whole family is enjoying themselves in kayaks — Julie and I are racing everywhere, trying to beat each other. And there’s a photograph of us sort of getting to the imaginary finish line in our heads, each of us raising our paddles and claiming victory. And then I remember the night before she died. She had been in a lot of pain, and they had tried more and more fentanyl, morphine to alleviate that. It was not working, and she had already made the decision that she would exercise medical aid in dying the following day, and the whole family was there. We lay in bed together. I was holding her from behind. And I was very much aware that was going to be the last time I would be holding her like that, that I would be able to for sure know that she heard me say I love her. I asked her if we had any unfinished business, and she said no. And she also thanked me for being, not her number one fan, but being her number one researcher and an instigator, because whenever there was a problem getting something at the hospital or getting approval, I have pretty good resources and a lot of resilience, and I put it all to work for her. On why Julie asked Steven to write about her experience She wanted more people to have that choice. … She felt she was lucky, by circumstance and happenstance, to live in New Jersey, . She felt she was lucky to have certain privileges. They had the income to pay the $900 that it cost to buy the end-of-life medications, which are often generally not covered by either public or private insurance plans. She was a lawyer. She had been involved in social justice issues her whole life. She was involved with the fight for marriage equality in New Jersey and nationally. These matters of parity and access mattered so much to Julie. She knew would be a gift in the strangest way. She worried about how I would be after she died. She worried about how all of us would be, but I know she worried about me. So this gift allows me to be present with her a lot, which I’m grateful for. And even as emotionally challenging as some of this interview has been, it makes me feel closer to her. This story comes from the health policy podcast Tradeoffs. Dan Gorenstein is Tradeoffs’ executive editor, and Ryan Levi is a reporter/producer for the show, where a version of this story first appeared. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit TRADEOFFS. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonLife Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / Pet Life / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Tania Israel, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, Last year, our family lost our beloved dog to old age. It took us all quite a bit of time to heal, and her death was particularly felt by a family member going through cancer treatment. After our family member went into remission, he wished for a puppy. He looked endlessly at shelters and rescues, but the particular breed he wanted was difficult to come by. In the meantime, I mentioned to a close friend that my family was seeking a puppy but wasn’t having much luck. The friend is a volunteer for a dog rescue and offered to find us a puppy. However, my family member ended up finding his dream puppy through a very reputable, longtime breeder. The breeder conducted interviews with our family and our veterinarian to make sure we were a good fit. Now, my close friend is no longer on speaking terms with us. I reminded her that my family has rescued numerous animals over the years, and this was not a decision that we took lightly. I received no response. I don’t know if I should try to salvage this friendship or let it go. — Ruff stuff On whether to let your friendship go, remember that we can always set up boundaries around who we want to have in our lives and who we don’t. But we can also find ways of growing in a relationship by acknowledging that people can see things from a different perspective. Having a complex and grounded understanding of where other people might be coming from helps us in our relationships as partners, parents, coworkers and community members. We don’t know how that friend is feeling. But we do know that the writer is emphasizing the details that put them in the right. They say the breeder was reputable and responsible. They had rescue dogs in the past and were trying to help someone with cancer. They’re generating these responses to try to show that their behavior was justifiable. When we see things from only one perspective, we miss out on the opportunity to broaden our understanding of different views. And that’s actually disempowering. The next step for the writer is to find out how the friend is feeling and lead a conversation with curiosity rather than a justification for their own behavior. Maybe start with something like, “You offered help and we went in a different direction. And I wonder how that’s sitting with you.” Then listen to what they have to say. Listen to Tania Israel’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis with help from our intern Jamal Michel. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonFamily / Health Life / TrendingMary Gachoki had learned about autism spectrum disorder from a caregiving course she’d taken in college. When her son was 2 years old, she recognized that he was displaying traits associated with this neurological condition. He wasn’t making eye contact, he stopped talking and he began flapping his fingers – a common behavior for people with autism as they seek to calm themselves. Deep down, the 34-year-old single mom knew he likely had autism. But, she says, she was in denial. When she did get a diagnosis, she says, the news “felt burdensome because I am a single mother. I am not strong mentally. I need support and reassurance that will be okay someday.” (Editor’s note: We are not naming the children in this story to protect their privacy as we discuss their condition.) Challenges for parents Around the world, parents like Gachoki often struggle to find reliable information and affordable support for a child with autism. The challenges in Africa – and in Kenya, where she lives – are daunting. A review of current literature on autism in Africa, published in 2023 in The Annals of Medicine & Surgery, found that “diagnosis and treatment access remains limited due to various challenges.” An article in The Journal of Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health published in 2022 points to “limited access to resources and trained professionals” for children in Africa with autism spectrum disorder. The authors are now conducting a review of existing studies on the issue to “inform health-care policies direction and facilitate the creation of early interventions.” One result of this shortage of local services is that many children with autism don’t get a diagnosis in their first years of life. Research has shown that early interventions make a huge difference in outcomes for children with autism, so delays in diagnosis can have a lifelong impact. And even as caregivers struggle to find help they must cope with misconceptions and stigma about the condition. When Gachoki’s relatives learned of Mary’s son’s diagnosis, they blamed witchcraft. “Preachers and traditional healers believe that autism is caused by witchcraft,” says Dr. Lillian Kerubo of Kiambu County Hospital, a pediatrician and behavioral therapist who has for years worked with children who have autism. These preachers and healers tell parents that therapeutic intervention is not needed. Instead they might offer an herbal concoction with a promise that it will help the child or they’ll advise the parents to pray and fast. Other misbeliefs and myths circulate: Some families believe that if a mother eats eggs during pregnancy that can bring on autism, and that boys typically miss developmental milestones so there shouldn’t be a need to consult a physician in such cases. “Many parents, especially in the rural areas, need to know that an autistic child is a normal child. They should accept them for who they are and support them in life, but most importantly, they need to learn more about autism, understand autism, and manage their expectations,” says Kerubo. For this story, we interviewed parents from several families who had made the decision to seek support – with mixed results. A struggle to get help for her son Mary Gachoki lives with her son in a tiny single room in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi. She finally decided to seek a diagnosis last year. She visited a doctor at the Kenyatta National Hospital in Kenya, who referred her to the Kenya Institute of Special Education for assessment. The staff tested her son and informed her that he had autism. There was no charge for the assessment but the Institute does charge for its therapeutic services. Gachoki, who earns money by doing day work for local families, signed her son up for a session of heated pool therapy; studies have found it helpful in improving behaviors and social interactions in children with autism. It cost 1,500 Kenyan shillings – about $10. She says she didn’t have the money to pay for follow-up sessions. Nor are there any programs for children with autism at the small, unheated public school that her son attends – and where, she says, the teacher points a cane at her son if he’s restless (but doesn’t administer physical punishment, which is prohibited in Kenyan schools). Mary Gachoki’s dilemma is common, says Luke Laari, a lecturer at the University of Ghana in the Department of Public Health and lead author of the The Journal of Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health article on autism in Africa. He says that in cities, most of the parents he surveyed said they were unable to afford fees charged for therapies and services. Specialists who provide therapy for children with autism are in “limited in supply” in Africa – and inaccessible to the rural poor, he adds. “Parents of autistic children must be pragmatic in their expectations regarding their children’s development,” Laari says, urging governments to provide specialized materials for teachers and students as well as financial aid for parents of children with autism. Jumping for therapy In a middle-class residential neighborhood Nairobi, two young brothers are jumping and giggling with their dad on an indoor trampoline. Their little sister is jumping, too. Caroline Ndebu, their mom, is on the couch, recording them on her phone and cheering them on. Her two sons, ages 5 and 3, were both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and are receiving physical and behavioral therapy. The jumping activity aims to improve balance and motor skills. The older son works with his therapist on identifying colors and other visual tasks. His parents say his eye contact has improved – he now looks his therapist in the eye. The parents brought him for diagnostic testing after he began regressing at age 2 – losing his speech, showing signs of antisocial behavior and hyperactivity and exhibiting behavior associated with autism, such as pulling his ears. Ndebu says her siblings had suggested the doctor’s visit. The younger brother’s case was less pronounced than his brother’s, but he, too, around age 2, started regressing in speech, stopped pointing at things and became unsociable. Trained assessors at his school tested the child and said he also has autism. Ndebu says that the family immediately put the younger son on occupational therapy and speech therapy to build his cognitive ability. “He picked up well and they do therapy together,” she says. Fortunately, she says, her family has the resources to pay for these services. “It can get overwhelming. Some days are tough, and others are easy. It does not end with therapy as we have to put in a lot of work for the boys,” she says with a smile. She has gone on to join Autism Mums KE, a caregivers’ WhatsApp group with over 700 members, for support. “We encourage each other especially if one had an overwhelming day,” she says. She has created her own nonprofit group to help parents and caregivers: Gifted Gems. Her goals are to raise awareness about autism, build a repository of online information, train caregivers and provide support systems for them. An upcoming zoom session is entitled “Accepting and Embracing the Diagnosis.” “The worries that keep caregivers up at night can be resolved by bridging the knowledge gaps, especially in rural regions,” says Peter Mucheru, a speech and language therapist at Tower Valley School, where a number of the students have autism. He believes the WhatsApp group and Gifted Gems are both good examples of programs that educate parents. Even with support, parents face many challenges. Evelyne Kiarie’s 4-year-old son began exhibiting signs of autism a week before his 3rd birthday. He regressed in speech, avoided eye contact, didn’t interact with others. The changes confused Kiarie. “I didn’t know anything about autism, and neither did my husband,” she says. “You know, autism is not spoken about a lot in this country.” Her husband’s brother, who is a doctor, saw the signs and advised the parents to seek support. Since then, therapy has helped the child build his social skills, says his mom – as have swimming lessons. “It can be overwhelming. Sometimes one wishes to have a break. I envision what the future will be like for him, wondering if he will be independent,” Kiarie adds. Hope for a better future It is not just parents who need a greater awareness, says Dr. Kerubo. She emphasizes that health-care professionals need to learn more about autistic children as well – to understand them and to empathize with them rather than feeling sorry for them. And society may be changing to provide more help for families. The Kenya Institute of Special Education plans to roll out online classes for caregivers, says its director, educator Norman Kiogora. “We do not have any scholarship programs for children with autism currently,” he says, but he hopes private partners will make this possible. At present, even without financial aid, Mary Gachoki is hopeful that someday she will be able to provide more therapy sessions for her child. “He is a good son, very sharp and I love him,” she says. Right now, she says, he only smiles, grunts and cries. “I wish to hear him speak.” Based in Kenya, Scovian Lillian is a science and health freelance journalist with a focus on Africa. She covers higher education, women’s empowerment, human rights, persons with disabilities, climate change and the environment. Her articles have been published by The Continent, Nature Africa, Democracy in Africa, Talk Africa, The Mail & Guardian, SciDev.net (Sub-Saharan Africa), Technology and Innovation and University World News. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonLifestyles / On Air / Relationships / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Emily Nagoski, sex educator and author of Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I’ve been in a loving relationship with my husband for years. We’re incredibly compatible, happy and feel fulfilled except for our sex life. The sex started off great, became less interesting over the years, and now it’s non-existent. When we try, it feels awkward. I’ve developed a negative association with sex due to so many failed attempts. We’ve discussed options like therapy, playing with a third together, playing with a third separately, scheduling sex, pills, couple massage. You name it, we’ve tried it. Nothing works. I’m considering divorce even though the rest of our relationship is fine. Initiating a divorce feels cruel, but I also feel like I’m settling and watching time slip away. — Bored in the Bedroom It is normal not to want sex you do not like. One thing that fascinates me about the question is, “First, the sex was great, then it got less interesting.” Do you mean interesting, or do you mean pleasurable? Do you like the sex you’re having? And if not, what kind of sex is worth wanting? A couple of the questions I encourage people to think through and talk to their partner about are: “What is it that I want when I want sex? What is it that I like when I like sex?” Those kinds of questions give us a lot more information about what might be happening. It sounds like you’re dissatisfied with the kind of sex you’re having. Sex can be challenging to talk about. Try the sandwich method of criticism but with ninety percent bread and ten percent critique. “I love our relationship. I love our erotic connection. It really matters to me that we can connect in this way. I’m going to say something, and I worry it will feel like I’m criticizing you, but I’m just trying to connect with you. Before I say it, can we agree that our relationship is not at stake?” I know that’s a lot of buffer language, but we’re so tender, so that’s how much it takes. When people have negative associations with initiating sex, the first rule is to take sex off the table. No sex for a set period of time. Instead, focus on exploring different experiences of pleasure: food pleasure or play in other parts of your life. Figure out how to connect and share time outside of sexuality. Gradually, you’ll build your body’s access to knowing what pleasure feels like. So when you begin to move in the direction of erotic touch, your body can recognize, “Oh, that’s pleasure.” And if it feels pleasurable, you’re probably going to be interested in experiencing more of it. Sex is not important for all relationships, and it’s normal for it to be important during some phases of a relationship and then not important for a while and then come back. People often think that you can assess a sex life in terms of spontaneous desire, how many orgasms people have, what positions you use, or whether or not you do adventurous things. But the research tells us none of those things are good predictors of a couple’s long-term sexual satisfaction. If there is a single specific thing, it’s cuddling after sex. Listen to Emily Nagoski’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / TrendingEvery year, nearly 500,000 children die from an easily curable condition: diarrhea. There’s a simple and effective treatment: mixing oral rehydration salts — which are basically a mix of sugar and salt in the form of glucose and electrolytes — for the child to drink to restore the body fluids that are lost during bouts of diarrhea. It works by keeping the body hydrated. These salts are available in small plastic pouches. But a new study published in the journal Science this month found that though doctors knew about oral rehydration salts (ORS), they just weren’t prescribing them enough. The study was conducted by researchers from RAND, the University of Southern California, Duke University and Indian Institute of Management in the Southern Indian city of Bengaluru. Zachary Wagner, one of the study’s lead authors and an economist and professor at the Pardee RAND graduate school in California, says this is a subject he’s been researching for the last ten years. “The problem is massive,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of kids die from diarrhea, when none of them should be dying. There’s a treatment that’s been around for decades that we know is really effective. When you ask doctors in surveys, what they would do for a hypothetical case of diarrhea, most of them say they would prescribe ORS. If that’s the case, why wasn’t it being used? That’s what we set out to find,” he says. The study took place in two Indian states: Karnataka and Bihar. The authors chose states that were very different in literacy levels, socioeconomic status and diarrhea care. Bihar in the east is one of India’s poorest states, with 46% of the adult population having very little schooling and only 42% having completed high school. By contrast, Karnataka in the South has above average per capita income. Only 26% of the adult population have little schooling and 62% have completed high school. Additionally, Bihar was chosen because of its below average use of oral rehydration salts (57% of diarrhea cases are treated with ORS compared to the national average of 61%); Karnataka has above average ORS use with 70% of the cases being treated with ORS. Recruiting ‘fathers’ The way they conducted the study was a little unusual. The study employed data collectors, who were trained to pose as the father of a 2-year-old child with diarrhea symptoms. Meagan Phelan, communications director for the Science family of journals that published the study says, “In health economics experiments, use of actors is typical to avoid biases and ensure the results are as reliable as possible.” In each state, the study authors recruited 40 people to pose as caregivers for patients. They approached 2,282 health-care practitioners in 253 medium-sized towns. “Though we call them actors, these are people trained to collect data,” Wagner says. “In many cases, they were fathers of young children, so the role we were training them to play was very similar to their own selves.” All of the actors presented a case of diarrhea in their “children” that were similar to the symptoms caused by the common viral germ — rotavirus. Half of these actors presented a moderate case of diarrhea (describing four to five loose stools the previous night) and the other half were told to present a severe case (10 -12 loose stools the previous night and symptoms of dehydration). According to the standard of care in the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, both types of cases would require ORS treatment. Though antibiotics are deemed appropriate for some cases of child diarrhea – where there’s blood in the stools or sticky or “smelly” feces. The actors steered clear of these symptoms, so that it would be clear to doctors that they approached that antibiotics would not be necessary. At first, the authors were concerned that not having a real child to assess would affect the outcome of what the doctors prescribed. But surveys show this is a common way to seek care for child diarrhea in India. “We designed the study to see what was really driving the problem. One theory: “patients were driving the problem by demanding antibiotics,” says Wagner. Other possibilities: physicians assumed young patients would not like the taste of oral salts; parents didn’t think ORS were serious medication; the salts were out of stock (they’re not as lucrative as other medicines); and doctors were perhaps making more money by prescribing antibiotics, even though, says Wagner, they’re not as effective as ORS in treating diarrhea. An unexpected finding The study’s results were a surprise, Wagner says. The under-prescription wasn’t due to the interference of parents. Lack of supply accounted for only a 6% dip in prescriptions; financial incentives for doctors accounted for only a 5% dip. But there was one dominant reason for not prescribing oral rehydration salts: Nearly half of the cases of failure to prescribe were because the health-care provider assumed the parents would not be satisfied with ORS. But if the caregiver were to express their willingness to use the ORS – some of the actors in the study for instance, showed the doctors a picture of the ORS on their cellphones and mentioned how they’d been prescribed it on a previous occasion — ORS prescriptions rose by as much as 27%. The study also found that other factors play a role in under-prescribing the ORS in India. In the two states, the study conducted household surveys. “We surveyed 1,200 households where there was a case of diarrhea over the last four weeks,” says Wagner. They learned that 400 of these patients went to a pharmacy rather than a doctor – and pharmacies had the worst record in over-prescribing antibiotics and under-prescribing ORS, Wagner says. ORS was recommended for only 17% of the 400 pharmacy patients. “Surveys showed that this wasn’t because pharmacists lacked the knowledge that ORS would work, but that they had clear financial incentives to sell antibiotics,” he says. And that’s an important takeaway, says Wagner. With efforts to curb antibiotic overuse, “we want to highlight that a lot of inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions are coming from child diarrhea.” Dr. Prashant Nuggehalli Srinivas, a public health researcher and clinician who was not a part of the study, says the findings are important, because for the first time, it shifts the responsibility from the patient to the health-care provider. Srinivas lives and works in rural Chamarajanagar, a town adjoining forest areas with a high population of tribal villages in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Blaming the parents In many cases, he’s seen health authorities blame parents when a child dies from an easily curable disease like diarrhea. The parents are characterized as either considered uneducated or superstitious to understand the value of rehydration salts. But in this study, that responsibility is shifted to the practitioner. “The study has made it clear that health-care providers are not doing enough to convince people of the dangers of severe dehydration and the restorative ability of oral salts,” he says . This information is critical in rural areas, Srinivas says, because diarrhea can progress in a matter of hours into a life-threatening condition and the family may find it difficult to access care. “If a child has severe diarrhea, and is not prescribed an ORS, the family would have to consider taking him to the nearest hospital because they would need to administer intravenous fluids— that would mean walking three to four hours while carrying the sick child on your back.” There may be other reasons for the underprescribing of ORS: We still need more evidence as to why so many children fail to receive oral rehydration salts, says Dr. Santhosh Rajagopal, a pediatrician and surveillance medical officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) who was not a part of the study. “Nevertheless, millions of young lives could be saved if we can find ways to increase their use,” he says. It’s a reminder of how even small interventions can have a huge, life changing impact in global health, says Srinivas. Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, Southern India. She reports on global health, science and development and has been published in The New York Times, The British Medical Journal, the BBC, The Guardian and other outlets. You can find her on X @kamal_t Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonLife Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Maya Lau, creator and host of the podcast Other People’s Pockets, a show that asks people to talk about their finances with radical transparency. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I love my boyfriend’s parents. They’re the kind of people you meet and think, “There’s no way they’re like this all the time.” Except, they are. They wake up every day at 4:30 a.m. so they can drink coffee and garden before they leave for work. They’re kind, passionate, generous people and they have treated me like family since day one. I know many people will think it’s ridiculous to have any complaints about my situation, but here it is: They’re way too nice. We live in different states, and when they come to visit they stay for a week or two, and they pay for everything. Literally everything. Anything we do, anywhere we go, anything I even think about buying, they somehow sense it and beat me to it. They once found my shopping list while I was out, and they did my shopping for me. They picked up everything … from the groceries right down to the very personal items I would have really preferred they left alone. I’m deeply uncomfortable with it, but I have no idea how to politely say “I am a real adult with a real adult job, and I would like to buy my own sandwich at lunch today.” My boyfriend fundamentally doesn’t understand where I’m coming from. He says thing like, “Your parents buy us stuff too.” Sure, they send gifts on holidays. They might pick up the tab at dinner, but this feels very different. So my question is: Am I crazy to complain? And if not, what can I do? — A Real Adult I would say, don’t always assume that other people’s attitudes towards money are the same as your own. The fact that somebody wants to cover something for you does not mean that they’re trying to assert that they’re more of an adult and you are just some small child. It’s OK if you feel that way, but it’s not a universal truth. So try to interrogate where that comes from. his parents come in from out of state and stay with you for two weeks, which in my book is a really long period of time to have houseguests. There might be an element of his parents feeling like, ‘Look, we’re saving all this money on a hotel, the least we can do is pay for everything.’ Maybe they don’t want to be a burden, so covering everything is a way to compensate for that. I think comes from a good place. Now, does that mean you can’t say anything? No. I think you need to have a real discussion before they visit. Either a casual conversation with your boyfriend present, where the two of you have gotten on the same page ahead of time. Or maybe it’s just a conversation you have with your boyfriend and then you ask your boyfriend to have this conversation with his parents. I wouldn’t come at it from the stance of being aggrieved and offended and infantilized, but more like, ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are so generous. I love spending time with you. I just want to say, maybe there are certain things we can agree on ahead of time that you can cover if you want. Beyond that, we’re good.’ And, if this is really how this person feels, ‘I just want to let you know that when you come to stay here, you are welcome here. And it is not a burden for us to have you for two weeks.’ I also wouldn’t necessarily bring up them finding the note and buying all these personal things. I would just that it makes you feel more comfortable and like there’s less of an imbalance if you all agree on some of these things ahead of time. And hopefully, if they’re generous, they’re also good listeners. Listen to Maya Lau’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / On Air / TrendingHumanitarian aid groups around the world can agree on one thing: The number of people in need, from Gaza to Haiti to Afghanistan, is higher than any time in recent memory. “I live in fear of opening up my email every morning and seeing what else has happened that is going to make things worse,” says Leslie Archambeault, managing director of humanitarian policy at Save the Children U.S. So then why is the United Nations asking governments to give less humanitarian aid money in 2024 than they asked for in 2023? The U.N. has called for $46 billion in its annual appeal for this year, down from $57 billion last year, acknowledging a chilly atmosphere among donors. “This is the first time that this has happened in recent years. And it’s not because there is no need, it is because we have had to prioritize urgent life-saving need as our core business,” said Martin Griffiths, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, at a December event. Griffiths said the U.N. has had to narrow its focus to the most urgent crises, “looking at life-saving needs as the overwhelming priority.” And keep in mind, the U.N. typically does not get all it asks for. In 2023, the U.N. received just 40% of the donations it requested to fund worldwide humanitarian efforts, down from 68% the year before. There is almost always a gap between the funds requested and what governments give. But this year the gulf between the growing needs and thriftier donors could be especially large. “I think the outlook for humanitarian funding globally is pretty bad right now. I am pretty concerned. I think everybody is very concerned,” says Archambeault. Humanitarian donations are vulnerable in part because so few countries shoulder so much of the burden. “It’s really three donors that fund around 50% to 60% of that, so you’re looking at the U.S., Germany and the EU,” says Kate Katch, a practitioner fellow at the University of Virginia and a former humanitarian affairs officer at the U.N. “We’re not seeing a decrease in humanitarian needs, and we’re not seeing those top three donors giving significantly more. And the signals would suggest that’s going to stay that way or it could even slow down.” The U.N. estimates that some 300 million people worldwide are in urgent need of food, shelter, health care and other essential resources. That number has grown as protracted crises stack up in places like Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myannmar, and acute emergencies in Gaza and Ukraine pile on the need. Besides wars and conflicts, natural disasters accelerated by climate change and global economic struggles are adding to the toll. “It’s this compounding vulnerability that is really making crises much more protracted and much more expensive,” says Katch. “At the end of the day, we have to look at longer-term solutions about how we really assist these communities as opposed to just leaving it to the humanitarians to try and keep essentially putting Band-Aids on the problem.” A stretched humanitarian sector Humanitarian funding tends to be short-term and limited in what it can pay for, aimed at emergencies rather than grinding, long-term turmoil. Kaela Glass, head of partnerships at the Norwegian Refugee Council, says a classic example is water trucking – driving tanks of clean drinking water to a distribution point where people line up to fill their jerry cans. “Expensive water trucking to a population who has been in the same place for five years doesn’t make any sense. But because of some of the restrictions we have on humanitarian financing, you can’t install a permanent water source.” Long-term fixes have typically been the province of the international development sector, led by organizations such as the World Bank. But development funding tends to move slowly and is often subject to political considerations. The U.N. and NGOs who rely on international funders are preparing for donations to stay flat – or even, for the first time since 2010, decrease from the previous year’s sum. “I heard someone say, did we hit peak humanitarian in 2022?” says the NRC’s Glass. “There is a bit of pessimism that we kind of reached as high as we could reach, and now we’re on the other side of the mountain.” Aid groups face impossible choices Glass says in places like Chad and South Sudan, where millions of Sudanese refugees have fled, the funding shortfall means you can’t always help both the displaced people and the often poor host communities struggling to meet their own basic needs. “We’re basically choosing which type of needs to address, and ultimately having to choose which populations are going to be receiving assistance. There’s just not enough to go around,” Glass says. Katch says it’s especially damaging to some of the dire situations that don’t make headlines: the chronic violence in Honduras, an economic meltdown in Lebanon or persistent armed conflict in the Sahel. “There’s more risk of starvation. Food rations have to be halved. People get more waterborne diseases. They can’t get access in remote areas to health care. It’s very tangible. And I think it’s really important for people to understand how destitute it is for a lot of these communities when the funding doesn’t come in,” she says. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / On Air / TrendingBirth professionals from around the country gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to heal, to learn and to honor the lives and sacrifices of three women: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the Mothers of Gynecology. These towering mothers built of scrap metal were the cornerstone of a two-day conference in late February centered on Black maternal health inside Old Ship A.M.E Zion Church. “There’s so much that people don’t know about,” says Dr. Veronica Maria Pimentel, an obstetrician gynecologist based in Hartford, Ct., who began a petition two years ago asking those in her field to recognize the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. “The history is told from the point of view of those in power and those who were in power were men and those who were in power were also white,” she says. “And we’re talking about women, we’re talking specifically about Black women, and we’re talking about enslaved Black women. So it is important for us to go back and look at this history because the history informs what we’re doing today when we talk about inequalities in health care.” Local artist Michelle Browder has thought about the Mothers of Gynecology since she was 18. That’s when she learned of a white doctor named J. Marion Sims, who experimented on the bodies of enslaved Black women without offering any pain relief. He claimed to have cured them of ailments that arose from pregnancy. Browder built the massive sculptures from donated metal on land her family owns, a response to the statue of Sims that sits a few miles away. She dedicated this public monument to every mother who ever lost a child. Welded to the metal bodies are names like Serena Williams and words like beauty and resilience. African beads adorn their necks. Browder took the tool Sims invented — the speculum — and created a tiara for Betsey. “They were birthed out of pain, but also because I wanted to change the narrative,” Browder says. “I wanted to change the conversation about Black women in this country and what we have to contribute and the infant mortality rate, reproductive justice and maternal health. We are in a crisis. And we’re hoping to elevate the conversation.” She led a group in song as they walked to the park. They gathered in a circle around the mothers. “All of these women are bigger than life for me,” Browder says. “Anarcha is 15 feet tall. Betsy is about … 12 and Lucy is 9 feet tall.” Anarcha’s hips are crafted from the spades of shovels. She faces the sky, defiant and hopeful. At the center of her body, her womb is a chasm for the world to see. That was Deborah Shedrick’s responsibility. She helped construct all three, but Anarcha’s womb “was her baby.” “All of my feelings went into that piece,” Shedrick says. “I wanted it to encompass their spiritual pain, the mental pain, their physical pain.” Visitors place flowers at the feet of the sculptures. This is, after all, what doulas and midwives do. They protect mothers. “We see our clients in this art,” says Denise Bolds, president of Doulas of North America or DONA International. “We see the losses, we see the victories, we see the ones that make it just by the skin of our teeth and we see the fear. It’s all here, it’s all here, it’s all here.” The goal is always to empower families. Black mothers die in childbirth at disproportionate rates and are three to four times more likely to suffer complications during pregnancy. “I had a mother message me this morning,” says Ravae Sinclair, former president of DONA International. “She ‘I have seven days my expected due date.’ And I said, ‘You made it and you will continue to make it.’ She’s with us because she’s afraid to die. And I said not on our watch.” The group was brought to the place where these experiments occurred. They listened to Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian of U.S. slavery medicine, describe how this legacy of medical racism persists. Though these women’s bodies literally allow for the United States to be placed on a global medical map, they aren’t acknowledged. They are erased from their own life experience, Owens says. “And so the embodied experiences of the legacy of medical racism is that we’re not believed,” Cooper Owens says. “And we’re thought to be able to withstand pain more. We’re thought to be over dependent on either government assistance or narcotics. We’re sexually irresponsible. We’re blamed when there are negative medical outcomes. And class doesn’t protect you. Education doesn’t protect you, your relationship status doesn’t protect you.” One of the last speakers was Charles Johnson, an Atlanta-based father who began the nonprofit 4Kira4Moms after the loss of his wife from hemorrhage following the birth of their second son. In 2018, Johnson worked with lawmakers to pass the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which provides funding to better investigate and review incidents of maternal mortality. “As we work to protect women and babies and put an end to the maternal mortality crisis, it’s also equally as important, if not more, important that we protect our history and that these stories are told,” Johnson says. There’s a line Michelle Browder uses for the Mothers of Gynecology. It’s from the playwright Ntozake Shange’s work “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.” It reads: “Let her be born / Let her be born & handled warmly.” Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit WBUR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonFamily / Life Hacks / Lifestyles / On Air / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Berna Anat, author of Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, I just finished my first semester of college. I grew up in a conservative household with high academic standards. My first semester at college was a little rocky as I realized that I have emotional trauma from my childhood, and I’m likely dealing with some unaddressed mental health issues. I want my independence, and I’m increasingly pulling away from my family. But they’re funding a good portion of my education. When my parents asked for my grades at the end of the first semester, I told them that I was doing well but that I’d preferred not to give them my exact grades. I’m trying to move away from depending on their approval and towards being self-motivated. My parents’ response was, “As long as we’re paying for your college career we will be asking you for your grades every semester.” I’m afraid I’ll lose my college funding if I refuse to show them. I don’t have time to get a job that could cover my remaining expenses should my parents withdraw their financial support. I want to assert my independence, but I’m not sure how to do so. What’s my best course of action? — Freshman Finances I think the issue is that expectations were not defined between you and your family. And that’s hard because when do we sit down and go, “Hello, Mom and Dad, Let’s define our financial expectations for each other”? I know that sounds really stale and stiff, but maybe there’s some version of that conversation where you can actually define those expectations. College is a time of growth for you. Your parents didn’t hire you to do a job – they’re investing in your growth. So try to get on the same page of what that growth means to you and what your parents’ return on investment means to them. The conversation might be difficult. Because the power dynamic is they’re the parents, you’re the kid. Parents are used to having control, and they might feel a little bit threatened. I believe hard conversations need to be sandwiched. Like, “I want to express my gratitude and love.” And then the meat of the sandwich is: “I want to express my goals for this financial relationship.” And then the last piece of bread is “I want to repeat my gratitude. This is coming from a place of love.” And then open up the conversation. I would want to hear you saying something like, “You know, one of my main goals in college is to learn to become more independent and self-motivated. If we do this grades thing, that actually wouldn’t help me reach my goals. You gave me this money because you wanted to invest in my growth. And this is how I see myself growing. Is there a different way we can achieve your goals, too, that doesn’t have to be grades related?” I have a dreamy hope that if you were to approach your parents with respect and trust, they might give the same back. Then again, there are emotionally immature parents who are not ready to give up that kind of control. It may be that the stipulations of them giving you money for college means that you have to adhere to their rules. And unfortunately, if they’re the purse holders, they’re the ones holding the power in this situation. Talking with loved ones about money can be extremely awkward. As awkward as it is, I think it’s incredibly important to put it down on paper somewhere – just to get everybody on the same page. You might want to talk about what if things go wrong. “What can we agree on now, so that if something goes wrong and everyone’s emotions are heightened, we don’t make any rash decisions that ruin our relationship?” Listen to Berna Anat’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonArt & Living / Featured / TrendingKATHMANDU, Nepal — Sunita Kumari Chaudhary quietly weaves together lengths of rope, binding them with grass collected from the riverbank in her village of Dang. She skillfully shapes the materials into a jewelry box. As she weaves, she’s instructing a small group of women how to work with the materials. The ropes that Chaudhary and the others are using were once the lifeline for mountain climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then tossed. Government initiatives to clean up discarded materials on the mountains have ramped up since 2019. The waste, including the ropes, is now finding new life, transformed by skilled hands like Chaudhary’s into items to sell such as boxes and table mats. “At first, I wasn’t aware that these ropes were collected from the mountains,” Chaudhary says as she expertly bends and coils a blue-colored rope into an oval-shaped box. To her left, a container holds her tools – scissors and metal nails. Scattered on the floor are several mats she’d made, each a vibrant mix of golden yellow, purple and blue. “Later, I learned that collected during a mountain cleaning campaign. And people like me, who are far from the mountains but belong to the indigenous Tharu community, are using our traditional skills to transform this waste into something entirely new.” The Himalayan mountains are increasingly laden with mounting waste left by mountaineering activities over the years. There is no official data, but Nepal’s Department of Tourism estimates that on Mt. Everest alone, there is nearly 140,000 tons of waste. In 2019, the government launched an initiative led by the Nepal Army to clean up the mountains. Waste collected from the “Safa Himal Aviyan” (Clean Mountain Campaign) is either securely dumped if it’s biodegradable or reused/recycled if it’s not biodegradable. Now some of that material is finding its way to Indigenous craftswomen like Chaudhary, thanks to an initiative led by Shilshila Acharya. No waste to the landfill Acharya owns Avni Center for Sustainability, a waste processing business in Kathmandu, and is an advocate for sustainable waste management. She has been working with the cleaning campaign since 2019, targeting mountains such as Everest, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Ama Dablam and Annapurna. “Aluminum waste and other metals go through the recycling process, but we were not able to find a way these ropes and small cooking gas cans,” she says. It occurred to her that the non-recyclable waste could be reused, but it wasn’t until she met Maya Rai at an event that a solution emerged. Rai, who leads Nepal Knotcraft Centre, helped connect Acharya with Sunita Chaudhary and her team of Tharu craftswomen in hopes of turning the mountain waste into economic opportunity. “While this may seem insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start,” Acharya says. “We aim to connect local expertise, mountain waste and the local economy,” says Acharya, proudly displaying a dinner mat made from ropes left on Mt. Everest by climbers. She says the goal is to ensure that no waste collected from Mt. Everest and other mountains ends up in a landfill again. Going through the ropes There’s a lot of waste to sort through. According to Nepal Army’s Information officer, the Clean Mountain Campaign has successfully retrieved 108 tons of waste from Mt. Everest and nine other mountains. “After collecting garbage, including human waste, food remnants, cooking and oxygen gas cylinders, mountaineering gears, ropes and tents, our role begins,” Acharya explains as workers diligently sort through the material in her warehouse. On a cold, sunny day in the mid-December, Tingay Rai is carefully organizing ropes, shoes, gas cans and tent stands at the waste storage site in Tokha, Kathmandu. He comes from the area around base camp of Mt. Everest, says Acharya. The 49-year-old Rai was a trekking guide for more than 10 years in his village in the Solukhumbu district. He then worked for a period in Malaysia but lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Now I am working here, and it is far better and more satisfying than before,” Rai says, even if turning mountain trash into usable materials “is time-consuming work.” “We are not able to supply as much raw material because the segregation and cleaning processes are costly and time-consuming,” Acharya says. The project is still small-scale, involving around 15 craftswomen. Finished crafts are sold at Nepal Knotcraft Center’s outlet in Kathmandu and at craft exhibitions. The craftswomen are paid according to how many items they make and sell, earning an average of 400 Nepali Rupees per half-day’s work — the equivalent of about $3 and a bit more than Nepal’s minimum wage. With flexible hours, the project gives women an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain their household responsibilities. A lot of work ahead Eventually, Acharya hopes to expand the program to involve more women and process more waste. But progress has been slow. “We still have not found a sustainable business plan so that we can make these boxes, mats, key holders in large quantities,” Acharya says. “We need investment to mechanize the cleaning and processing of waste in the initial phase so we can provide the crafting team with enough materials to meet their demand.” So far, 55 tons of non-biodegradable waste have come to Acharya’s processing center, and they still have around 15 tons at the storage house. “We received glass, plastics, packaging wrappers, ropes, tents, shoes and metals,” she says. “For easily recyclable wastes, it will take three to six months to process, but for those wastes that need reuse like butane gas cans, cylinders, ropes, it will take one year or more to process and segregate.” Nepal Knotcraft Centre is helping Acharya’s Avni Center for Sustainability to connect with more Indigenous women. “I can train other women in my community on crafting,” Chaudhary says, smiling. For now, Acharya says they are searching for collaborators to make this a model that serves not only the mountain but also the communities. “After all, we are trying to craft a sustainable future.” To her, each rope that’s turned into a decorative item is a way to help local women earn a living — and to keep their mountain clean. Tanka Dhakal is an independent journalist based in Kathmandu Nepal. He reports on the environment, climate change, science, health, labor migrations and marginalized communities, including LGBTQIA+. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / On Air / TrendingThe start of a new year can push us to think about how we take care of ourselves – our bodies or our minds. And for some people that can mean seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. In some ways, being open about pursuing treatment for mental health concerns is becoming more commonplace. But seeking therapy may feel taboo for men who are socialized not to express vulnerability and keep emotions in check. Black men must also contend with the long history of neglect and abuse that has influenced how generations of African-Americans feel about health services, a lack of Black mental health professionals, and the understanding that shielding emotions are a way to face the pressures and dangers of racism. Host Michel Martins talks with writer Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays, and psychologist Earl Turner of Pepperdine University, on making therapy more accessible for Black men. In participating regions, you’ll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what’s going on in your community. Email us at considerthis@npr.org. This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Natalie Winston. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonFamily / Lifestyles / On Air / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose one of your most pressing questions to an expert. This question was answered by Jody Adewale, a clinical psychologist who specializes in family conflict. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Dear Life Kit, My boyfriend and I live together, and we both work from home. He doesn’t like his current low-paying job, but he doesn’t know what he wants to do long term. Because he works remotely and doesn’t have much to do, he spends hours of every workday playing video games. I feel like he’s wasting an opportunity to learn a new skill or . I’ve voiced this a few times and he half-heartedly agrees, but he never acts on it. He swears he only plays one or two video games a day, but I know this isn’t true because I can see his account activity online. Beyond the fact that I don’t think is healthy, I’m starting to feel a little put off by his lack of motivation and the additional household labor I do on top of my full-time job while he games. How do I talk to my boyfriend about his professional motivation and his problematic gaming without starting a fight or making him feel bad? I just want him to reach his potential and feel good about his occupation. — Game over it There’s no quick fix for trying to motivate someone. Most long-term behavior change comes from intrinsic motivation. positive reinforcement. You can give him praise for behaviors you like. For example, you can say, “Thank you so much for spending time with me” or “I appreciate you submitting that resumé.” You could also try . For example, you might say: “Come on, let’s look at some of these training programs together.” I would consider gaming like drugs, gambling or porn — in excess, too much can create a problem. Is it causing problems with your physical health, your work, your finances or your relationships? Is it causing legal problems? If gaming isn’t causing you problems in any of those areas, I would say keep going. But it sounds like gaming is starting to cause problems in your relationship. Excessive gaming, just like excessive alcohol, can be a sign of an underlying mental health condition that might need to be addressed. Could there be some depression or anxiety there? Is this a form of avoidance that’s helping him get through the day? Try to understand what’s motivating the behavior. I hear this from couples all the time: “I don’t want to say anything because it’s going to turn into a fight.” But there needs to be more assertive communication where you stand up and speak your needs while respecting his needs. , it’s important to understand your boundaries with your partner. Are you trying to create a life for them that they don’t want? Couples therapy would be good for you as a couple. Having a safe space to talk about where both of you are at can help facilitate a more constructive conversation. Listen to Jody Adewale’s full response in the audio at the top of the page or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a question for Dear Life Kit? Share it anonymously here. Dear Life Kit is hosted by Andee Tagle and produced by Beck Harlan and Sylvie Douglis with help from our intern Jamal Michel. Bronson Arcuri is the managing producer and Meghan Keane is the supervising editor. Alicia Zheng produces the Dear Life Kit video series for Instagram. Love Dear Life Kit? You can catch us on NPR’s Instagram in a weekly reel. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / TrendingCopyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonLife Hacks / Lifestyles / TrendingNeed some really good advice? Look no further than Dear Life Kit. In each episode, we pose a few of your most pressing questions to an expert. These questions were answered by clinical psychologists Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman, authors of Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Read more of The Gottmans’s research-backed tips about how to have fights that result in “compassion and connection.” Dear Life Kit,  I’m almost 25 and about to graduate with my bachelor’s degree. I live in my parents’ house and my boyfriend and I hope to move in together soon. However, he wants me to either live on my own or with a roommate first. He wants to ensure that I know how to be independent.  My boyfriend’s requirement makes me feel like a child. As someone who worked for most of my life, lived with a roommate for a year (before I transferred schools and moved back in with my parents) and grew up helping to care for a sibling with special needs, I feel that I have done a lot of growing up already.  How can we come up with a compromise? — Moving on First of all, it sounds like you are being patronized. Indeed, that is why you feel like a child. He is saying “You’re not mature enough to live with me.” And he’s placing himself in a superior position to you. So it’s a form of condescension, even contempt. He’s saying, “You’re too immature for me.” So it’s no wonder you feel resentment. Before you reach a compromise, there needs to be more discussion to try to understand what his position is. What is he afraid of in terms of moving in with you? Obviously, there’s some anxiety on his part and he’s not expressing it. Why is he feeling so anxious about you moving in and you having to change yourself in order to suit him? Then share with him what it means to be asked to do these things. How it might feel insulting to you. Then recount your own experiences of having lived with a roommate and the maturing you’ve already done. Dear Life Kit,  My husband and I are in a fun and committed relationship, but he doesn’t express his love through words or physical touch, which is important to me. When I bring it up, he says he’s too shy. Should I just accept that our ways of showing affection are different? Or should he make more of an effort? — Feeling touchy There are a lot of people who are not comfortable with touch or expressing things in words depending on their cultural background, their family background and so on. As far as communication goes, maybe he can start by looking for what you’re doing right and saying “thank you.” For example, “Thank you very much for emptying the dishwasher.” You can also model, if you’re not already, lots of compliments and appreciation for him. Then try and understand his world around touch. Is he uncomfortable with touch in public or also in private? This is something you might want to explore with him. Ask him some questions about it. For example, “What do you feel when I reach out and touch your shoulder? What do you feel when I take your hand? What does touch mean to you?” Once you’ve done that, then perhaps you can ask him, “Is there any form of touch that you feel comfortable with? For example, just holding my hand?” I would add: How does he express affection and respect toward you? Does he do it through texting? Gifts? Service? Like cleaning the gutters or mowing the lawn or something like that. Look for the other ways he’s expressing affection and respect. I’ve been dating my girlfriend for over five months. It’s going really well, but I have irrational anxiety that something will go wrong. What if we have a big miscommunication? What if she doesn’t actually love me? What if she thinks I’m too clingy? I’ve told her about my worries and she’s very reassuring. Are these thoughts normal? — Trouble in paradise After five months of a relationship, they’re totally normal. It probably took me (Julie) about two years to feel secure with John, that I was well-loved — and I had to hear those reassurances over and over again. A lot of times we are so terribly self-critical that we cannot take in the reassurance that our partner is giving us because it doesn’t fit with our impressions of ourselves. So work hard to crack open your chest and take in the love and reassurance your partner is giving you, because indeed that is a gift, and it is real. Dear Life Kit, I love spending time with my partner, but he doesn’t like to admit when he’s wrong and often blames anything that goes awry on me or someone else. How can I help him break this pattern? — Losing the blame game  If he wants you to hear him, he’s sabotaging getting listened to. Let him know that you feel blamed and that puts you on the defensive. What he needs to do is describe his own feelings about the situation (not about a personality flaw in you, but the situation he’s upset about) and what his positive need is. Say this: “Describe what you’re feeling, like ‘I’m angry, I’m upset, I’m stressed’ about what situation,” and then he needs to say what he needs from you in order to feel better about the relationship. Have a question you want to ask Dear Life Kit? Whether it’s about family, friendship, work conflict or something else, share it here. This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonCulture / Family / TrendingIt’s 9:15 on a cold Monday morning, and six Girl Scout parents are giving full-on military op vibes. Five moms and I are standing on a sidewalk, holding mugs of coffee and tea as we run through logistics. We have an action plan, and a goal: We’re picking up nearly 3,300 packages of cookies for our Girl Scout troop and taking them to our homes-turned-mini-warehouses. “We’ll probably need a sort of Checkpoint Bravo, a place to regroup in case we get separated,” our cookie manager, Ali Ray Cavanaugh, says. Today, we’re part of the Girl Scouts Army. We’ll drive in a convoy across Washington, D.C., to a massive parking lot where our vehicles — two minivans, two Subarus and two SUVs — will be crammed with as many cookies as they can hold. As a lifelong fan of Girl Scout Cookies but also a never-scout (a term no one, as far as I can tell, uses), I’m low-key buzzing at being let into the inner circle, where we’re relied on to Do The Thing. A successful run today means all the cookie promises our Daisies, Brownies and Juniors made will be kept, on schedule. As we head out, I hold two not-necessarily conflicting ideas in my mind: I’m glad I can do this for my two daughters; and this is one way Girl Scouts outsources core functions to parent volunteers. Cookies rule everything around me Our cookie pickup objective might sound fun, but we’re all about the mission. After all, this task requires at least three hours — and we’re taking time away from our (paying) jobs to do this (nonpaying) work. We have a special group chat for this trip. When we get separated in traffic, we use Google Map pins and phone calls to ensure our team can recombine before entering the pickup zone. There, we join a snake of cars pulsing down a long incline into a huge lot, where we coil our way between 18-wheelers with trailers full of Thin Mints, Samoas and Adventurefuls. If you were picturing the Girl Scouts inner circle like a Wonka-like scene of Tagalong rainbows and Do-si-do stools, this ain’t it. It reminds me of large-scale relief efforts I’ve visited for NPR, where the sole objective is to distribute massive quantities of food. At this one delivery site, 170,000 packages of cookies are being dispersed. “Last year, our Girl Scouts sold 4.4 million packages across the entire council” in the Washington, D.C., area, council chief financial officer, Jessica McClain, told me. After picking up hundreds of cardboard cases, we hand-carry the precious cargo into cookie manager Cavanaugh’s large basement. From there, cookies are portioned out to Girl Scouts to deliver to their customers. Hundreds more boxes are earmarked for cookie booth sales. Our houses are transformed into glorified cookie cupboards. Reader, as I write this story at home, four cases of cookies sit by my elbow. Girl Scout Cookies are a $1 billion industry “The thing with these cookies is, they’re really good,” a Girl Scout dad told me, as we watched our daughters rake in money at a cookie booth. In a normal year, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America will sell about 200 million boxes of cookies, as NPR’s Scott Horsley reported last year. The national organization calls it “the largest girl-led entrepreneurship program in the world,” with nearly 700,000 Girl Scouts participating. You’ve probably heard about cookie prices going up. The vast majority of troops are now selling boxes for between $5 and $7. If the girls hit that 200 million mark this year, cookie revenue would eclipse $1 billion. So, I asked, how much do the girls see in profits? “Last year, our troops earned over $4.5 million in proceeds,” McClain said. For perspective, our council, Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital, is pretty large, she added, with about 4,000 troops. In some ways, the Girl Scouts operates with top-down control of what are essentially local franchises. But the cookie-business aspect of the nonprofit is distributed pretty widely. To buy cookies in bulk, each council makes its own contract with one of the two big baking companies, ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers — which in turn pay licensing fees to the national organization. The amount of proceeds each troop is able to keep varies. I asked McClain how it breaks down for our council. “I would start with saying none of it goes to the national organization,” she said. “About 25% to 30% of the price goes to the troops themselves,” to use as they choose. Another chunk goes to direct costs — the cookies themselves, and transportation. “That can be up to about 40% with that piece of it,” McClain said. Some money goes toward activities, she said: “We use about 10% of those funds to support the outdoor program for all of our Girl Scouts in our council.” “There’s also about 14, 15% that goes to customer support,” such as technology underpinning the sales operation, she said. Money also goes toward things like the rewards girls earn by hitting sales goals, and for operational costs. Parents are a multiskilled volunteer workforce The reality of Girl Scout Cookies may not be Wonka-like, but parents can be forgiven for feeling like Oompa Loompas — the hardworking cogs in a well-oiled machine. Whatever a troop’s parents do for a living, Girl Scouts calls on them to hone a very specific set of skills, from making accurate sales projections (each troop is on the hook to pay for every cookie box they order) to managing spreadsheets and deliveries as late orders come in. Finally, they’ll reconcile a mix of cash, online orders and Venmo payments to ensure everything adds up. “We know it’s a lot of work. We know it is a heavy lift,” McClain told me, calling volunteers the lifeblood of the system. Parents tout their kid’s online cookie store, sharing links on Facebook, in emails, at work — wherever a possible sale is lurking. They help girls sort the orders and make deliveries. They volunteer at cookie booths. Some, like me, also make surplus orders to cover all the folks who didn’t realize Girl Scout cookie season was coming. Those packages can go fast: When my girls brought about 25 boxes — or about $120 worth — of cookies to NPR’s headquarters, they sold out in 45 minutes. All of this happens in parallel to the actual work of running the troop — setting up meetings and activities, ensuring the girls have the right materials, and planning what to do with the proceeds from cookie sales. So, why do parents do it? First of all: I’m glad to be able to support my daughters’ troop, to put time and money toward their experience. I enjoy learning what it’s all about, and seeing my daughters spend time with friends in their troop. As for the cookie program, the Girl Scouts traditionally emphasizes the business training — things like setting goals, making marketing and spending decisions, and being responsible and ethical. “We’re trying to teach entrepreneurial skills,” McClain said. Then there are the rewards for their labor. While some parents I’ve talked to say they wish the kids got a bigger share of the revenue, our troop does get enough money to do special things. And while adults do a lot of work to make it happen, we’re fine with the girls deciding how to spend it — they usually hold a vote to decide on the best options. If you ever visit a cookie booth and want to know where the girls’ money goes, just ask. “We are raising money to go camping and horseback riding,” Eva Kelly, a junior in our troop, told me at our sale. They also want to learn how to cook, my daughter Mattie added: “We’ve got to learn how to make basic meals while we’re camping.” If all goes well, they’ll be at that camp this summer — and some Girl Scout parents will be able to take a break, as well. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonEntertainment / Review / TrendingThere’s no way to soften the truth about this year’s five Oscar nominees for outstanding documentary feature: They are all hard to watch. You should watch them anyway — all of them. This is not only because they are all excellent, but because they are all imaginatively and thoughtfully made from strong points of view. It would be easy to think of films about war and violence, about oppressive governments and medical fragility, as themselves medicinal — pieces you should watch to become a better person. And it’s true that you will likely learn a lot about some of the most urgent issues we’re facing. But these are beautiful pieces of filmmaking, created with patience and care, and they’re moving even when they’re painful. All five are international films, which has led to some very silly grousing about the absence of a couple of high-profile American hopefuls, but it would be absurd to watch the films in this category and believe that a single one did not fully earn its spot. I’ve been watching this category for years, and this is easily the most fascinating and vibrant list I’ve seen. With every one of them, if someone asked me, “Should I watch this?”, I would enthusiastically say yes. 20 Days in Mariupol This collaboration between Frontline and the Associated Press gathers footage collected by Ukrainian AP reporter Mstyslav Chernov and freelancer Evgeniy Maloletka during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. They were among the few journalists able to carry on with documenting the attack on Mariupol, a major port city, and their footage became indispensable to news organizations around the world. The focus of the film is on hospitals and other medical facilities, and the team filmed as injured civilians were brought into facilities where supplies were dwindling, power and internet could not be relied upon, and medical personnel was exhausted and traumatized, day in and day out. The power of the footage would be enough reason to watch the film, but there are some very smart decisions in the way it’s structured and edited. Because there was so little video out of Mariupol at the time, the team’s footage often appeared in news segments, and sometimes we see the full story of, for example, a patient being treated, and then we see how a small snippet of the story was used as part of a larger report on a network. It’s a vital look at how every glimpse you see on the news represents a much longer and deeper story. The act of editing all this footage down to about an hour and a half has to have been hugely challenging, but the result is outstanding. To Kill a Tiger To Kill a Tiger is about trauma and survival but also, discordantly, an extraordinarily beautiful film to look at. The use of color, light, and composition can be overlooked in considerations of documentary filmmaking when the themes are this powerful, but they are hard to miss here. For all of the pain in the story, director Nisha Pahuja deals tenderly with the people in it and the place where it’s set. Watch it with the sound off, and you will see a stunning portrait of a family, a house, a village, and a city. The film centers around a 13-year-old girl who has been raped by three men. Her father, Ranjit, blames himself for failing to protect her and is determined to get a measure of justice for her. (A side note: The filmmakers take pains to point out that she is now over 18, and made the decision after she turned 18 to allow them to show her face and to use interviews with her.) But neighbors and local leaders pressure Ranjit, repeatedly, not only to “compromise” with his daughter’s attackers rather than pursue a case through the police, but to marry her to one of them. When his resolve flags, he gets steady support from local activists and attorneys who are working tirelessly on behalf of victims of sexual violence. While the particulars of Ranjit’s daily life are specific to him, it’s easy to see parallels between his village and a town or a college that also pressures survivors and their supporters to think of the interests of just about everyone else above themselves. Four Daughters The most formally experimental of these nominees, Four Daughters is the story of Olfa, a Tunisian woman who lives with two of her daughters, but tells us early in the film that the other two were “devoured by the wolf.” To tell the story of what that means, filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania uses three techniques. The first is interview footage with Olfa and her two remaining daughters, Eya and Tayssir. The second is what are essentially reenactments of important scenes from their lives. And the third is a behind-the-scenes account of the filming of those reenactments, in which Eya and Tayssir play themselves, while two actresses play their sisters. There is also an actress who plays Olfa in more difficult scenes, though she plays herself in others. This is the story of Olfa’s daughters who disappeared. But it’s also the story of how making this film allows Eya and Tayssir to reveal things to their mother that they’ve never told her, and to talk about things they’ve kept to themselves. Olfa is a trauma survivor, but she is not a saintly, grieving mother; she is a complicated woman whose treatment of her daughters as she and they recount it often seems very harsh, even abusive. And perhaps the most fascinating element in the film is the way Olfa interacts with the strong-minded actress who’s playing her, and the way Eya and Tayssir bond with the actresses who are, and are not, the sisters they’ve lost. Four Daughters blends truth and fiction with rare transparency, and does it for a purpose. You won’t see another film quite like it this year, or really any year. Bobi Wine: The People’s President Many Americans are understandably skeptical of celebrities who become politicians. This is the story of one who became quite beloved. Bobi Wine is a musician from Uganda who was known for using his music to talk about politics and the need for change. In 2017, he won an open parliamentary seat. He later ran against longtime president Yoweri Museveni, of whom he’d once been an admirer. Bobi, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out to be a charismatic and appealing figure who builds a large following among the people, and that following makes him a threat. His campaign becomes dangerous; his life becomes dangerous. Directors Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp follow Bobi and his family for a number of years as his prominence increases. This would be a captivating story if it were only about Bobi Wine, or if it were only about Uganda, or if it were only about his relationship with his extraordinary wife, Barbie Kyagulanyi. But there are a lot of conversations going on in other parts of the world about what it looks like to have a democracy on the surface but not in reality. Here, you see arrests of candidates and their supporters, laws that are toothless and unenforced, and voting that is obviously manipulated. Museveni can be voted out in theory. The film is in part about whether he can be voted out in practice. Bobi Wine is well worth a watch for anyone, but particularly for people who are thinking about what guardrails prevent their own governments from winding up in the same situation. The Eternal Memory There are no interviews in this story of the marriage of Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife, Paulina Urrutia. It’s just footage of the couple over the period after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Director Maite Alberdi follows Augusto and Pauli as she continues to care for him, engaging him in conversations that allow him to recover particular memories, or even to delight in hearing about events in his own life as if for the first time. Alberdi also documents his long history in journalism, including his participation in documenting the Pinochet government. If you have known and loved anyone who experienced any kind of dementia, you’ll likely find it both painful and moving to watch Pauli act on her determination to make his life as good as possible for as long as possible, and to watch him struggle with what he cannot do while also being still delighted by things he discovers he can do, can remember, can get pleasure and meaning from hearing about. This illness is grimly predictable, in that it moves in one direction only. So there is not the tension of hoping for a miracle that will restore Augusto’s memory or his function, as there is in some stories of life with an illness. But the love story of these two, and the way Pauli makes her way through extraordinarily difficult moments in which he is upset or frightened, feels surprising over and over. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonArt & Living / Culture / Reviews / TrendingTwo things can be true at the same time. We’re in a time of backlash to ideas that challenge white America’s perception of itself, and we’re also living through a great reevaluation of what American society can and should look like. It’s also true that some of the most important leaders on the frontlines of these battles are Black women, people like law professor Kimberle Crenshaw who helped develop the concept of intersectionality and the much debated and maligned and misunderstood critical race theory and a new wave of thinkers picking up that inheritance. Black feminists are also some of the most astute observers and theorists of American mass culture right now. Scholars and writers like Patricia Hill Collins, Joan Morgan, and the late bell hooks have long understood that oppression and injustice is perpetrated and enacted through customs and cultural practices as well as law. At it’s root, Black feminism is an ideology of liberation rooted in Black women’s experience, with the inclusive aim of disrupting oppressive social hierarchies for all people. Black feminist theory is arguably now a key part of how all of us make sense of the world. At the same time, the kind of cultural analysis that Black feminists promote continues to be controversial. Between the numerous attacks on library collections and school curricula — a 2021 NBC News analysis found at least 165 local and national groups are trying to disrupt or block lessons on race and gender — and the recent passing of the foundational cultural theorist bell hooks, questions of culture and identity bubbled up with renewed urgency. A silver lining in this time of contradictions, of creativity, and precarity, has been the bumper crop of new books at the intersection of Black feminist thought, culture, and politics. Even better, this great flowering is not isolated to the proverbial ivory tower. With Nichole Perkins’ popular memoir Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be and Zeba Blay’s essay collection Care-Free Black Girls, I was struck by how vibrant, wide ranging and central the conversation is right now around Black women, feminism and culture. Looking at these books it’s immediately clear how relevant they are to people’s lives. Choosing a short list from the recent bounty is a daunting task, but these five books stand out in conversation and contrast with each other. Though they target different audiences and sit within different genres of nonfiction – from memoir to cultural analysis to theory – they share certain hallmarks: a celebration of marginalized, unruly Black women and concurrent rejection of the politics of respectability; the not so secret realization that as dissatisfied as we are with our exclusion and distorted depictions, popular culture plays a big role in all our lives; and a keen awareness of the complex connections between representation and reality. Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins No one writes better about the personal relationship between culture and girlhood than Nichole Perkins, a popular cultural commentator and writer. Her first book is a page turner, a singular and seamless blend of memoir and cultural analysis. I found her words heart-wrenching. As a former host of “The Thirst-Aid Kit,” a podcast aimed at analyzing the intersection of sexual desire and popular culture, the way Perkins writes about her burgeoning sexuality and the awareness of how that’s different when you’re Black is particularly effective. She exposes the pervasive shaming around sex, and how it’s not equally distributed. Societal rules differ by race (for Black girls versus white girls) and gender (for Black boys and Black girls). Too often, Black girls have been relentlessly shamed, and that formative personal experience has been reinforced by the culture. That experience can be crushing. So, unlike the dearth of love stories for Black girls in film and television when Nichole was growing up: “There were plenty of sassy Black teenagers on television, in characters like Dee Thomas on What’s Happening!! or Tootie on The Facts of Life. These girls always had a smart remark ready on their lips and got plenty of laughs, but just like in real life around my way, every crush they had led to lectures or scolds… Images of white girls in love came easily, but everywhere I turned black girls were warned.” That passage is just one example of how Perkins’ work blends passion and analysis. My list of highlights is endless. Like in a confessional conversation, albeit one that is as incisive as it is emotional, Perkins is adept at connecting personal experience to cultural and social practices. Not everything hits perfectly, but there is no doubt that this memoir is very real and candid. The passages where Perkins writes about her family are also especially powerful. One part that just about broke me was Perkins’ discussion with her aunt of Tenessee Williams’ American classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Her insights resonated far and wide on her podcast, and readers will nod along to these words as well. Carefree Black Girls by Zeba Blay Though the concept spread like wildfire in 2013, the idea of the “carefree Black girl” was always more of an aspiration than reality. It spoke to a hunger and lack in the images and discourse around Black women. As author Zeba Blay notes in her book: “Social media has always been a great place for pretending, for playing, for projecting some idealized version of self. A way to hide in plain sight. I posted the selfie and the hashtag. An attempt to be carefree.” Expanding on the concept and archetype Blay originated, Blay’s first book is similarly aspirational, but also deeper and more confessional. Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture is “a meditation on a single idea: what it means to be a Black woman and truly be ‘carefree.'” With a clarity of mission that Blay executes masterfully, the book hangs together with admirable cohesion. One of the more personal subjects Blay explores is her struggle with depression, and the role that art and culture plays in her recovery: “Turning to art and turning to Black women has always been the road by which I come back to myself.” As personal as those revelations are, like the other authors on this list, Blay is also clear on the connections she makes to larger cultural trends and phenomena outside of herself. The stories she relates are specific, but not isolated. Staking a claim and underscoring her point in the most direct way possible, she writes, “Our stories are culturally and historically relevant.” There’s beauty in Zeba Blay’s style and substance in her ideas. I was struck by the poignance of her plea and how familiar it sounded: “Hopefully, whoever you are, reading this, you find inspiration in that beauty. And hopefully you are reminded that Black women are essential.” That this message pops up so consistently across these books, and that so many of these authors feel it needs to be repeated, speaks volumes. Bad Fat Black Girl by Sesali Bowen Both manifesto and memoir, Sesali Bowen’s Bad Fat Black Girl is another standout. It’s written from the perspective of someone who’s both a media scholar and activist, and it shows. Like the other authors, Bowen weaves together observations about cultural expression with broader social attitudes and ideas. But there’s more of an urgency and grit and an irrepressible, profane irreverence to a book titled “Bad Fat Black Girl.” Bowen also brings more of an outsider perspective. She grew up working class and she’s not trying to aspire or fit into white dominated “mainstream” culture. Influenced by Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (about reconciling feminism and hip-hop) and trap music, Sesali Bowen weaves together feminist theory and hip-hop analysis from the perspective of someone who loves and lives for it. Citing trap artists like Yo Gotti, Gucci Mane and Travis Porter alongside Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, Bowen articulates a vision of what she calls “trap feminism,” a music and street-inflected ethos of empowerment. Despite trap being known as reductive, Bowen refused to “accept the idea that no good could come out of trap music. I wanted to reconcile the fact that some of my favorite trap songs made me, a queer Black woman, feel good, proud, and even inspired.” Bowen also effectively argues that a lot of what is dismissed as “ratchet” or uncouth is really a conscious aesthetic of rebellion, a way of eschewing still white-centered patriarchal conventions that fail girls like herself. With behavior and style choices that make sense for their environment and circumstances, “ghetto girls,” she says, perform gender in rebellious ways that are often disrespected and yet envied and eventually emulated. Bowen is a versatile and agile commentator, equally convincing and expert in her explication of the idea of the “bad bitch” as an expression of power in hip-hop and citing bell hooks on why beauty is a “politicized concept” that maintains what hooks called “imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy.” The latter may seem like a long list of “isms” and labels, but Bowen shows that these dimensions of social hierarchy and control have real-world implications. She names and shames a system of cultural gatekeeping in which hip-hop and even Bowen’s beloved trap culture is complicit, assigning value and affording respect and opportunity to a select group. And, in keeping with that, as Bowen shows, even when Black girls are celebrated, it’s within a narrow range of acceptable images of Black femininity. Existing outside those “aesthetic rules” (as Bowen herself does) has consequences: “It means that you’ve committed an egregious act against the social order. Women who find themselves too far away from the center of beauty norms are often treated as if they’ve committed treason, our aesthetic a public-facing betrayal of our refusal to conform…” Complicating that analysis, Bowen also calls out the classism and cultural biases even within Black media circles where so many of her colleagues come from privilege and “have had to untangle their Blackness from the web of whiteness they were socialized in.” This is one reason Bowen is powerful; she takes no prisoners. Going against every tide, Bowen’s trap feminism enthusiastically celebrates “ghetto girl culture.” More than reconciling feminism with hip-hop, she marshalls its power. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance by Moya Bailey Known for coining the term misogynoir, a portmanteau of the words “misogyny,” meaning the hatred of women, and noir, the French word for Black, Northwestern professor Moya Bailey has already made a mark on the landscape of American culture that extends beyond academia. The term and its implications have penetrated popular consciousness. With her first solo-authored book, Bailey expands this impact. As seen in the books on this list, the work of Patricia Hill Collins has influenced many writers in the Black feminist tradition, but with Bailey, that legacy is more direct. Building on works like Collins’ Black Feminist Thought and bell hooks’ Black Looks, Bailey expands our understanding of the link between media portrayals of Black women, which people like to think of as merely symbolic or superficial, and real world, material consequences: “…the media that circulate misogynoir help maintain white supremacy by offering tacit approval of the disparate treatment that Black women negotiate in society. Whether the Jezebel, mammy, Sapphire, and later the ‘welfare queen’ or even the ‘strong Black woman’ archetype, misogynoiristic portrayals of Black women shape their livelihoods and health.” In other words, contrary to those who would dismiss the weight of culture, Black feminist theory “articulates the power of the image.” By shaping the way that society views marginalized groups and how we view ourselves, cultural images help shape our social relations. By design and necessity, this project is inherently political. Like Collins before her, Bailey’s work is significant on its own. But such work also adds essential perspective and depth to the efforts of political scientists like Angie Hancock, author of “The Politics of Disgust” whose research established in quantifiable terms the impact of the welfare queen image on public policy debates around the social safety net. Today, it’s hard to understand American politics without coming to grips with the concepts Bailey’s grappling with. Bailey’s aims are ambitious. She’s not interested in just shining a light on misogynoir; she’s interested in its destruction. In a voice that is scholarly yet accessible, she tackles media culture from television and film to Tumblr to YouTube web series, to hashtags, revealing how different media contribute to, transform and/or challenge the pervasive circulation of misogynoir and, importantly, how Black people deploy digital activism to resist. Though expansive, Bailey’s scope is also strategic; she privileges those too often marginalized in feminist conversations: “Black women as well as Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks’ work and voices.” The penultimate chapter, “Alchemists in Action against Misogynoir, ” which is Bailey’s most personal, focuses on Tumblr. It’s a particular treat. Digital Black Feminism by Catherine Knight Steele In Digital Black Feminism, Catherine Knight Steele centers Black women unapologetically within the study of digital culture. “Digital Black feminism is a mechanism to understand how Black feminist thought is altered by and alters technology,” she writes. This work has multiple dimensions. First and fundamentally, Steele exposes the frequent oversight of Black women’s contributions as a distortion that limits deeper understanding of the dynamics of the digital world. As Steele establishes, Black women’s involvement in digital spaces has been broad-based, influential and persistent. Understanding that digital culture requires getting this part of it right. So one contribution of Steele’s work is as a course correction to the work that’s been done before. At the same time, this book also recognizes and builds on the significant inroads made by scholars studying race and technology including Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression,) Sarah Florini, and Andre Brock. Steele has two core aims. First, she positions Black women online as central to the future of communication technology just as they’ve been central to its past. Second, per its title, Digital Black Feminism traces and critically examines a evolutionary shift in Black feminism thought, one driven and enabled by new technology. As both a researcher and a member of these spaces, she’s well-equipped for these tasks. Diving into a wide-ranging digital archive six years in the making, she demonstrates how online spaces expand and shape the work of Black feminist liberation while making insightful connections to the Black thinkers and writers that came before. In one chapter, Steele explores the parallels between hip-hop’s formative influence on an earlier generation of feminists and the role of digital technology in Black feminism today, noting how money changed both of those relationships. For a book with heft, it strikes an impressive balance of accessibility and intellectual innovation. A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonArt & Living / Culture / TrendingAfter we wrapped the shoot on this episode of Amplify, I called an Uber to take me from the Stony Island Arts Bank on Chicago’s South Side back to my downtown hotel. The 30-minute ride along Lakeshore Drive was beautiful, with Lake Michigan shining a bright and hopeful blue. I started chatting with my driver, and it was one of those conversations between strangers that quickly goes deep. We talked about life in her city and in mine, how people are getting along, or not, and how these are far from the best of times for many Americans. This led to a reflection about inherited trauma, the passing down of troubles from one generation to the next, and how, within the Black community especially, so much damage is caused by a legacy of buried truths and untold stories, the wounds we bear from not knowing the fullness of our history. And so I told her about the Arts Bank. This 100-year-old building, once slated for demolition and now restored thanks to the imagination, vision and tireless efforts of Theaster Gates and his Rebuild Foundation, is a shelter for our history. Gates has housed an immense archive – thousands of books, periodicals, images and objects that provide a multi-faceted documentation of Black life spanning centuries. It’s a place to find our stories, to understand our past and then to dream our future. Singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae is one of many artists and scholars who have found revelation and inspiration in this space. An entire album has come from her experience at the Arts Bank – an initial visit in 2017 that she calls life-changing, and then her engagement as an inaugural Mellon Archives Innovation Fellow. The narratives and images she explored in the archives informed the songs on her bold and emotionally charged new release, Black Rainbows. This conversation with Corinne and Theaster centers on the necessity of knowing the stories of our people so we can celebrate their triumphs and mourn their tragedies, so we can heal the scars we’ve inherited, make ourselves strong and healthy, and feel the freedom to write our own stories, in the fullness of our own truth. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit Classical California. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonEntertainment / Music / The Guide / Trending / VideosThis year’s Black History Month celebration at the Tiny Desk features a carefully crafted lineup spanning many genres, generations and walks of life. Each artist represents the best in their class and will be performing at the Tiny Desk for the first time. Hip-hop artists arguably make the most significant adjustments to play behind the Tiny Desk. The essence is two turntables and a microphone which, in time, evolved into bands for some. Ab-Soul, rarely seen with a live band, hand-picked a group of musicians he deemed the “Soulersystem” for his turn at the Desk. This display of raw honesty and next-level lyricism comes from his latest album, HERBERT. Before launching into some brand-new bars, he reminded us we’d approached a landmark in hip-hop culture this year: “We just here to restore the feeling. What you say? Fifty years of hip-hop?” Herbert Stevens IV is a prime example of how rap music has grown. There’s always a song to feel good and party to. Soul can do that, but he’s best known for his music’s depth, vulnerability and wordplay. The Carson, Calif., native has spared few details about what he’s endured and how much he’s lost. The opening frame of his performance shows the back of his customized jacket, featuring an image of one of his best friends, DoeBurger, who passed in 2021. The framed pictures surrounding the desk are from his childhood, some graphically detailing his bout with Stevens-Johnson syndrome. This rare disorder ravaged his skin and eventually left him legally blind. Between the HERBERT songs, Soul delivers more never-heard-before rhymes over instrumentals from 2012’s Control System. He perfectly conveys the emotional shift between the two “BE LIKE THAT” verses, and throughout the entire set, the band adds even more subtle nuances. He closes with “GOTTA RAP,” but not before another exclusive verse that will surely get people talking. Ab-Soul wanted to release his Tiny Desk on his birthday, which feels suitable as he considers this his “second second chance.” SET LIST “MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE” “Bohemian Grove” “IT BE LIKE THAT” “FOMF” “Terrorist Threats” “FALLACY” “DO BETTER” “The Book of Soul” “GOTTA RAP” MUSICIANS Ab-Soul: vocals Amaire Johnson: keys, music director Josh Rose: bass Taylor Hecocks: guitar Timothy McLaurin: drums David Young: trumpet Kevin Woods: trumpet Gabrielle Garo: saxophone, flute Noleac Yahsin: vocals Lance Skiiiwalker: vocals, effects Zacari: vocals TINY DESK TEAM Producer: Bobby Carter Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Creative Director: Bob Boilen Director/Editor: Joshua Bryant Videographers: Joshua Bryant, Catie Dull, Sofia Seidel, Maia Stern Audio Assistant: Alex Drewenskus Production Assistants: Ashley Pointer, Jill Britton Tiny Desk Team: Suraya Mohamed, Marissa Lorusso, Hazel Cills, Kara Frame VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonConcert / Entertainment / Music / The Guide / Trending“I wanna introduce you guys to the baddest bitch,” Trina told the audience of her Tiny Desk. “The original baddest bitch.” It’s a title no one but the hip-hop icon herself could been able to claim at the Tiny Desk — and for good reason. As a rapper, Trina has been pushing P since before her successors were even sitting up in Pampers and her wild ride of a Tiny Desk concert, 25 years after making her rap debut, only further proves why she is the blueprint. Decked out in leather, diamonds and a wavy jet-black bussdown, the vet got comfortable behind the Desk quickly, ready to give fans the best of her sprawling discography. Trina temporarily fought back tears as she recited “Mama,” a dedication to her late mother who died of cancer in 2019. The crew made the breakup anthem “Here We Go” feel even more aching. The energy in the space made a seismic shift when the band took on the bass-bumpin’ classic “Da Baddest Bitch,” infusing the live arrangement with nimble guitar, charismatic drums and background vocalists so entertaining, their delivery felt like epic narration from the chorus of an ancient Greek play or, just as epically, a group homegirls hyping up their friend at the function. In the middle of it all was the 305 Queen herself, killing her verses with breath control, authority and bougie hair flips. “I believe in who I am. The game didn’t make me; I made the game. I made it,” the Diamond Princess declared in her Louder Than A Riot interview before recording this Tiny Desk concert. “I already came in with a motive and an initiative to know who I am from. That’s why I breed a whole universe of bad bitches.” To hear Trina’s full interview, subscribe to NPR Music’s Louder Than A Riot podcast. SET LIST “Mama” “Da Baddest Bitch” “Single Again” “Here We Go” “Nann N****” MUSICIANS Trina: vocals Bigg D: guitar Alton Coley: bass Jon Anderson: drums Cory Irvin: keys Asher Makeba Williams: vocals Nia McClain: vocals Shannon McClain: vocals Corey “C.O.” Evans: vocals TINY DESK TEAM Producers: Sidney Madden, Bobby Carter Director: Maia Stern Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Editor: Joshua Bryant Creative Director: Bob Boilen Videographers: Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Kara Frame, Sofia Seidel Audio Assistant: Neil Tevault Production Assistants: Jill Britton, Alanté Serene Tiny Desk Team: Suraya Mohamed, Maia Stern, Marissa Lorusso, Hazel Cills, Ashley Pointer, Pilar Galván VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonEntertainment / Music / The Guide / TrendingFresh Air continues our celebration of the 50th Anniversary of hip-hop by dipping into the archives. Questlove reflects on the Roots and his lifetime in music: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson — drummer and co-founder of The Roots — spoke to Terry Gross in 2013 and again in 2021. Born in 1971, Questlove says he and hip-hop grew up together. Public Enemy’s Chuck D discusses politically conscious rap: Public Enemy‘s music offered an unvarnished look at the harsh realities many young urban Black men faced in the 1980s. In 1997, Chuck D talked about the group’s anthem, “Fight the Power,” which was featured Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing. Hip-hop mogul Diddy says he’s always been motivated to be ‘the best’: Sean “Diddy” Combs, aka Puff Daddy, made his name — or names — in the hip-hop world as a record producer and rapper. The Bad Boy Records founder spoke to Fresh Air in 2008 about his losing his father in a shooting when Combs was 3 years old, and about the influence his mother and grandmother have had on his life and career. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine . To see more, visit Fresh Air. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonArt & Living / Culture / TrendingThe PBS program Antiques Roadshow sparked something in Dr. Lonnie Bunch III. The reality television show depicts dealers touring the country to give free appraisals of the objects people bring to them. They could be family heirlooms or thrift store finds, and the appraisers often give historical context to the items. Well, in 2005, Bunch, who is now the secretary of the Smithsonian, had been tasked with leading the latest addition to its family – the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. He decided to emulate the PBS television show to help add acquisitions to the museum. “You know, it’s almost as if someone said, ‘The time is now,’ and what I found fascinating is that, as we went around the country and collected artifacts – which is one of the revolutionary things we did – people were almost waiting for this,” Bunch said. “Suddenly, they opened up their trunks and their drawers and their attics, and they told their stories, and so I knew there would be great interest.” The museum on Saturday celebrated the 20th anniversary of the signing of legislation that created the NMAAHC. It is being commemorated with an interactive, online history that will run through Christmas, and the display of “Bruise Painting ‘Message to Our Folks,'” a painting by Rashid Johnson, in the museum. Long before the NMAAHC had its 10 millionth visitor in September, or Bunch and his staff set out on the road, the journey to the museum had been a lengthy one. A dream deferred The legislation that approved the NMAAHC, the 19th Smithsonian museum, was signed on Dec. 16, 2003. The building opened on Sept. 24, 2016. But the idea for the museum went back more than 100 years. In 1915, Black veterans who fought for the Union Army in the Civil War met in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war’s end. During that meeting, they assembled a committee that would lead the efforts in building a memorial to honor Black people’s service to the U.S., as they had often faced racism within the military and from civilians. Their work hit a major milestone – Congress signed a bill in 1929 authorizing the memorial, although it came with a caveat: it had to be privately funded. But 1929 was also the year of the Wall Street Crash that contributed to the Great Depression, so the memorial project fell through due to a lack of funding. There was more talk of the museum in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly by Rep. Mickey Leland, a Democrat from Texas. Then, in came the storied activist and congressman John Lewis. “When I think about this anniversary, I have to think about John Lewis, that on the one hand, we all know this is an amazing, courageous civil rights leader — almost lost his life to help transform the nation,” Bunch said. “But the other side of John Lewis is a kind of resiliency and political savviness.” The creation of a national African American museum was a mission Lewis took on shortly after being sworn into Congress in 1987. He introduced legislation to build the museum the next year, but the bill was blocked. Lewis introduced legislation for the museum during every congressional session for 15 years, and was blocked all but once. He faced opposition about the funding and location of the building, and criticism that it was unnecessary. One former Smithsonian secretary suggested putting it in a wing of an existing museum, while another questioned the validity of an “ethnic” museum. Some on the Smithsonian Board of Regents doubted there would be enough artifacts to fill a museum. In 1994, Sen. Jesse Helms refused to let the bill onto the Senate floor, despite bipartisan support. The Smithsonian eventually warmed up to the idea. Under new leadership, a commission hired by the Smithsonian and approved by former President George W. Bush in April 2003, said a standalone museum was necessary. They recommended 350,000 square feet of space (it has about 400,000 now) and estimated it would cost $360 million, of which half would be from the federal government and half would be from private funds. (It actually costed $540 million.) Based on the report, Sen. Sam Brownback introduced new legislation to the Senate, while Lewis again introduced legislation to the House. Bush signed off on the bill in December 2003. “This museum is a testament to the dignity of the dispossessed in every corner of the globe who yearn for freedom,” Lewis said at the museum’s opening ceremony in 2016. “It is a song to the scholars and scribes, scientists and teachers, to the revolutionaries and voices of protest, to the ministers and the authors of peace. It is the story of life, the story of our lives, wrapped up in a beautiful golden crown of grace.” Getting it off the ground Bunch worked at Smithsonian in the 1990s, left to serve as president of the Chicago Historical Society and was called back to lead the NMAAHC in 2005. “I knew what a big challenge this was,” Bunch said. “I told everybody we’d pull it off, but I also knew how hard it was. But I also knew that even if we fail – although I’d never put that in my mind – I thought the process would change the way the Smithsonian did work, it would change the way people thought about African American history.” As the story is told, it was just Bunch and one staff member, Tasha Coleman. But that isn’t entirely true, said Kinshasha Conwill, the longtime former deputy director of the museum. Conwill advised Bunch to use the one-employee line to tug at the heartstrings of potential donors. “I said, ‘When we’re going to Congress, and we’re going to these donors, tell them, ‘When I started, I only had one staff person, and I didn’t have a collection, and I didn’t have a building,'” Conwill said. “And that kind of came back to haunt me because people often thought that was me.” Conwill wore many hats: attending town hall meetings to find a site, making sure the museum met Smithsonian requirements, accompanying Bunch to meet with congressional members, moderating discussions at college campuses, hiring staff and collaborating with divisions, such as facilities, legal and public affairs, among other things. “I was the chief cook and bottle washer for Lonnie, making sure that all those meetings took place, that all the I’s got dotted, the T’s got crossed, helping to put out fires here and there…I felt sometimes I was everywhere,” Conwill said. In many of the rooms Conwill was in, she was one of few Black women in executive positions. But Bunch had made it a point to hire women in leadership roles, a reputation that made it easy for others to identify Conwill as being an employee of the NMAAHC. In addition to Conwill being the deputy director, Adrienne Brooks was the director of advancement, Jacquelyn Serwer was the chief curator, Esther Washington was the director of education and Elaine Nichols was the senior curator for culture. Conwill said when talking to young women, she thought, “When I was their age, there would not have been a Black woman, and there probably would not have been a woman in a senior position at a very, very large national museum. It just didn’t happen. So this was an intentional act on Lonnie’s part and I think it was very meaningful.” Bunch also had to garner support for the museum through three presidents: Bush, Obama and Trump. During Bush’s tenure, there was a shortlist of four locations for the museum: the National Mall (where it is today), Banneker Overlook, the Liberty Loan Building and the Arts and Industries Building. Bush strongly expressed his desire for the museum to be on the Mall. “George Bush made it really clear this was important to him and that helped me because it helped me gather Republican support,” Bunch said. “And whenever I see him, he talks about this is one of the proudest things he’s supported.” Obama was more quiet with his support, as he didn’t “want to simply be seen as the Black president…then as we moved into the second term, he became extremely supportive,” Bunch said. Trump was fairly ambivalent. “President Trump was an opportunity for me to engage someone who didn’t really understand the importance of this history,” Bunch said. “In some ways, his administration didn’t stand in the way of the museum. But nor were they the biggest supporters I’ve ever had.” The museum’s opening in 2016 was a three-day event that included spoken word, dance and musical performances. Free passes were all booked up on opening weekend, and for months after. Obama later spoke at the opening ceremony for the museum, saying it helps us to understand “the keeper of the status quo but also the activist seeking to overthrow that status quo.” While the museum tells the story of African American history, it was always Bunch’s goal for the museum to be a place for all. “I thought that it had to be a two-sided coin, that one side was this opportunity to sort of help America – to force America – to confront its tortured racial past,” he said. “Where I think I added real value was the recognition that if this was a museum for black people, then it failed. And that in essence, the story of Black America was too big to be just in the hands of Black America.” Living in the present and looking to the future The museum’s current director, Kevin Young, began his term in January 2021, while the museum was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NMAAHC typically boasts millions of visitors a year, but in 2020 and 2021, the number of visits dropped to the 300,000 range. The museum closed in early 2020, temporarily reopened, then closed again until May 2021. During that time, Young spearheaded the Searchable Museum, a platform that allows users to explore exhibits online with added elements, such as videos, podcasts and “constellations” — interactive diagrams that link historical events, figures and objects. Young was there to welcome the people lined up to enter when the museum opened its doors again. One family had with them an artifact of the first woman killed in combat in the U.S. “I was thinking so much about that day,” Young said. “It was all those family members, seeing them, and they had waited, and they had saved up and they had come to the museum, come together, and it was a site of pilgrimage, and I’m always struck by that.” The pandemic emphasized the need to capture major events as they continue to happen, Young said. “I think living history is all the more important to help people understand that we’re living through history, but they can also — especially with our young people — make history, and that history is all around us. And it’s alive,” he said. For Conwill, her goal in beginning work on the museum was rooted in her desire for young people to feel seen. “I want it to be a place that helps my nieces and nephews walk tall on this earth,” she said. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonCover / Culture / Featured / Politics / TrendingTo move forward, the United States must confront its history of racial inequality. This hour, three perspectives on looking to the past to build a better future for Black Americans. Guests include author Joseph McGill Jr., Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker and opinion columnist Charles Blow. This episode of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Harsha Nahata, Katie Monteleone and Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier and Fiona Geiran. Our audio engineers were Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez and Ted Mebane. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonHealth Life / TrendingLincoln Mondy grew up in a mixed race family in Texas, where his white mother’s family used regular tobacco, unlike his Black father. “My dad exclusively smokes menthol cigarettes,” he says. “Menthol was such a part of Black culture. And I knew that Black people smoked menthol and that was just a fact.” The 29-year-old filmmaker turned his curiosity about race and menthol tobacco into a documentary on the topic he produced for the Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking advocacy group. He then realized how menthol’s popularity with the Black community came from decades of racially targeted marketing, including ads (such as the Kent Menthol ad shown above) depicting Black models in Black magazines like Ebony, and cultural events in Black neighborhoods — like the KOOL Jazz festival, sponsored by the menthol brand. “They really created menthol as a Black product,” Mondy says. Now, as a proposed ban on menthol remains in limbo since the Biden administration put it on hold in December, lobbying and debate continues about how the ban would impact Black smokers. Not only is the minty, cooling flavored tobacco most heavily marketed and consumed in Black communities, where over 80% of smokers use menthol, it is a big reason Black men face the highest rate of lung cancer, says Phillip Gardiner, a public health activist and co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. Latino and LGBTQ communities as well as women were also targeted, he says. The minty, cooling flavor of menthol masks the smoke and soothes the throat, making it easier to inhale deeply. “The more deeply you inhale, the more nicotine and toxins you take and the more addicted you become,” and the more lethal the product, Gardiner says. That history is why efforts to ban menthol cigarettes and cigars have always been entwined with race. Menthol has become a flashpoint of controversy, dividing Black leaders and their communities. The Food and Drug Administration was set to enact a long-awaited ban on menthol cigarettes and cigars last August. The rule detailing the ban has already been written but needed to be approved by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget before it could be finalized. The White House since delayed it until March, and agreed to hold meetings with groups opposed to the rule. This angered activists like Gardiner. “It’s ridiculous; thousands of lives are being lost because of the inactivity of the FDA and now the White House,” he says. Gardiner says the delays are the result of the industry wielding its financial influence within the Black community. Late last year, tobacco giant Altria recently sponsored a poll finding a menthol ban would sway more Black voters against President Biden. Details of that poll have not been released, and NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson refutes its findings, saying in a video statement, “we’re the largest civil rights organization in the Black community in 47 states across the country; no one has raised this as a political issue.” One of the most vocal and influential voices against menthol bans is Reverend Al Sharpton. Sharpton and his group, National Action Network, didn’t respond to requests for comment, but in the past, they’ve acknowledged working with and receiving funding from tobacco companies— including in fighting in New York state, which has considered a menthol ban. “Smoking is bad for you, no question about it, but if it’s a health health issue, why aren’t you banning all cigarettes,” Sharpton says to a cheering crowd, in a video from a speech at a 2019 National Action Network event. Implied in a menthol ban, he says is the notion that “whites know how much to smoke and we don’t know how much to smoke.” More recently, in lobbying against a federal ban, Sharpton has also repeated his argument, including in a letter to White House’s domestic policy advisor Susan Rice that it would lead to more over-policing of Black people. He cites the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police during an arrest on suspicion of selling loose untaxed cigarettes. In fact, a federal menthol ban would not outlaw individuals from possessing or using those cigarettes, but bar the manufacture and sale of them. But Lincoln Mondy, the filmmaker, says coming from respected leaders like Sharpton, messages that tap into existing fears about aggressive policing can be deeply confusing and divisive for the Black community. “My granny has pictures of Al Sharpton on her mantle, along with Jesus,” he says. “Especially for our elders, you have Black leaders who are selling this tobacco PR line around policing and : ‘They’re just trying to take things away from Black people.'” He and others say the delays in the federal menthol ban have already handed the industry a win. In places like California and Massachusetts that already banned menthol, the tobacco industry is now selling menthol-like flavors that aren’t technically menthol, and therefore not subject to those new laws. A similar end run, he says, would be likely if any national ban were to take effect. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...
Smack HoustonGod Money & Power / Politics / TrendingRep. Jim Clyburn has been a commanding voice in Congress for more than 30 years. But after a little more than a year serving as assistant Democratic leader, he’s chosen to step down from his role in the House Democratic leadership. He leaves the role of the assistant Democratic leader vacant and is already proposing a successor, though he will continue to run for reelection in his 6th district of Charleston. In stepping down from his House Democratic leadership role, Rep. Clyburn wishes to make way for a younger generation and to shift his focus on other efforts. Rep. Clyburn has been credited with playing a critical role in helping former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden get to the White House. In 2020, his endorsement boosted President Biden to win the Black vote in South Carolina, and his renewed endorsement of the current president could be significant once more. He shared with Morning Edition’s Michel Martin why he stepped down and his assessment of the state of the Presidential race so far: The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. You were the first African American to serve multiple terms as majority whip, which is a key leadership role. Now you’re assistant leader of the Democratic caucus. Why have you decided to step down as assistant leader now?   Well, twofold. I think that high time for a transition to younger leadership is here. And I want to be a part of helping that get done in a way that would ensure continuity and effectiveness. And secondly, I want to spend my time on the campaign for Joe Biden’s reelection. So when you talk about the timing being right, is it just having been in leadership for a long time or is it age itself? I mean, you yourself are 83. Was that the issue? Energy level, etc.? Or is it more just you feel like it’s time to turn over the reins? Well, being 83 puts me about 13 years beyond the promise, but my energy level is still high. I have not noticed any real problems. I have three daughters. We have annual family meetings and they have informed me that they have not detected anything, except that I sometimes look for my eyeglasses when I’ve got them on. But they tell me they do the same thing. And so, we have come to the conclusion that they have that role to play. Now, if I felt differently before I really from them, I would quit myself. But I have not felt any real problems. Age is, as you know, a theme in this election. President Biden is the oldest president in history. The former president, Donald Trump, is just four years younger. And former President Trump’s only rival at this point, which is your former governor, Nikki Haley — she’s been hammering away at the argument that they’re both just too old. How do you respond to that? Age, to me, brings on a lot of things. Among those things are wisdom relationships, both domestically and internationally. And no one can stop the aging process. I grew up in a parsonage, and it is scripture to me that the young are called because of their strength, the older, because they know the way — the experience. So there must be some balance here, and I see that balance in Joe Biden. If I did not, I would say it to him and I would say it publicly as well. So going forward here, the former President Trump won South Carolina, the primary there, the Republican primary in 2020 and 2016. He is expected to win this week — the Republican primary is this Saturday. What do you think accounts for his continued strength? Look, this is still a pursuit of a more perfect union. You’ve got his big rival at the beginning of this campaign… was a man who vowed to ban books by office. The man who vowed to take Black history out of schools, not let students get advance credit for Black history courses. Now, if that didn’t tell you what you need to know about what’s going on here… you’re talking about a man who took out a full page ad in The New York Times calling for the death penalty of five young Black people who were determined to be innocent. He never apologized for . You’re talking about former President Trump and the so-called Central Park Five. Yes. You asked me why he’s running better than Nikki Haley? I’m telling you why. I don’t know if you’re ready to talk legacy, but what would you say is your proudest achievement as a member of the Democratic leadership? I’ve said to those same three daughters that when I take my place alongside my late wife, their mother, I want them to put on my tombstone that he did his damnedest to make America’s greatness accessible and affordable for all. If you look at everything that I’ve done, it has been looking for ways to make this government respond to the dreams and aspirations of everybody, irrespective of what zip code they may have been born in or currently live in. Copyright 2024 Smack Urban Magazine. To see more, visit NPR. [...] Read more...

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