Megalomaniac Politicians Engage in Grandiose Public Displays of Self-Importance
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AOC Is Grateful to Mexico for Sending Highly Experienced Firefighters to California
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Anne of Carversville expresses gratitude to Mexico for sending 70 highly-experienced firefighters and disaster relief workers to California. Watch this impressive video that reminds us of the ways great countries work together and help each other in so many ways. When it comes to Mexico and Canada, we are all stronger together — the three amigos.
Read MoreAOC Digs Deep into Jessica Chastain's Life Story in Photos by Zhong Lin for W Magazine China
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AOC Digs Deeply into Jessica Chastain's Life Story, Inspired by Zhong Lin's W China Images
W Magazine China’s [IG] end of year ‘The Great Performance Issue’ reports that American actor and producer Jessica Chastain is affectionately known as ‘Lady Model Worker’ by her Chinese audience. Widely-respected for her dedication to advancing projects with feminist themes, Chastain is surely touched by her Chinese moniker.
Chastain’s Oscar for ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’
W China honors Chastain’s 20 years in the spotlight and over 70 film, TV and stage credits. She took home a Best Actress 94th Oscar [2022] for ‘‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’. Listening to her acceptance speech takes us into the mind, heart and values of Jessica Chastain, who is very comfortable speaking to her own challenging roots in America, as well as the women in her family who have been her rock.
Read MoreTexas High Court Will Rehear Crystal Mason 2016 Voting Case
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The Crystal Mason case news out of Texas is good. To send anyone to jail for five years for a casting provisional ballot is unAmerican. The Texas high court will rehear the case.
1) The actual news about voting in 2016 was filled with many states [most or all former slave states] softening their policies about previously convicted people voting. I posted many of those articles. Mason's mom believed her daughter could vote, even though her 'parole' wasn't completed.
Read MoreAmerica’s Black Cowboys, As Tributed by Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton Fall-Winter 2024 Men’s Collection: Pt 1 of a French-American Cowboys Story
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America’s Black Cowboys, As Tributed by Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton Fall-Winter 2024 Men’s Collection: Pt 1 of an American-French Cowboys Story
Historians estimate that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one in four American cowboys was black. Anne of Carversville seriously doubts that this reality is taught in the history classes of American schools. Additionally, an estimated 12% of cowboys were Mexican.
Thanks to the January 18th Louis Vuitton Fall-Winter 2024 Men’s Collection show at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, this historical lens of exploration is opened wide. AOC is both incredulous and excited to tell this story. But first — a look at the highly-praised, Louis Vuitton Men Creative Director Pharrell Williams Fall-Winter 2024 show.
Black Cowboys and Slavery
The history of black cowboys in America is deeply intertwined with the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. Prior to Emancipation, many enslaved African Americans were forced into labor on plantations, including working with cattle. Other African Americans went west to California as slaves of gold miners and to Utah as slaves of Mormons.
Texas became the largest home to black cowboys.
Read MoreAngelina Jolie Pens Major Essay on Domestic Violence and Racial Inequity in Treatments
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4% of Women and 6% of Men in America Murdered by an Intimate Partner
In America, of the 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, law enforcement agencies reported that 34% were killed by an intimate partner. By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide. About 16% of female murder victims were killed by a nonintimate family member—parent, grandparent, sibling, in-law, and other family member—compared to 10% of male murder victims.
We are familiar with the absurd but widespread belief that women of color can handle greater pain. But this device deals with the very real problem of not even seeing or detecting bruising, when a doctor has the best of intentions to offer quality healthcare in communities of color.
Angelina received a demonstration of how a handheld device can highlight bruising on darker skin tones that had been previously invisible to the naked eye.
The simple, portable device directed “alternate light”—in this case violet light with a yellow lens—toward the skin. The technique is up to five times more effective at detecting bruising than white light, as much as four weeks after injury.
Read MoreMacKenzie Scott's HBCU Giving Contrasts Starkly With Historical White Funders
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MacKenzie Scott's HBCU Giving Contrasts Starkly With Historical White Funders AOC Living
Novelist and billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has so far given at least US$560 million to 23 historically Black colleges and universities. These donations are part of a bid she announced in 2019 to quickly dedicate most of her fortune to charity.
Scott’s gifts, including the $6 million she donated to Tougaloo College in Mississippi and the $45 million she gave North Carolina A&T University, vary in size but nearly all of the colleges and universities describe this funding as “historic.” For many, it was the largest single donation they had ever received from an individual donor.
Scott, previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is not making a splash just because of the size of her donations. She has an unusually unrestrictive get-out-of-the-way approach.
“I gave each a contribution and encouraged them to spend it on whatever they believe best serves their efforts,” Scott wrote in a July 2020 blog post.
She sees the standard requirements that universities and other organizations report to funders on their progress as burdensome distractions. Instead of negotiating detailed agreements before making a gift, she works with a team of advisers to stealthily vet a wide array of nonprofits, colleges and universities from afar before surprising them with her unprecedented multimillion-dollar gifts that come without any strings attached.
Scott is also supporting students of color through donations to the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which give HBCU students scholarships, and by supporting many other colleges and universities that enroll large numbers of minority students.
Her approach sharply contrasts with how many wealthy white donors have interacted with Black-serving nonprofits, including HBCUs, in the past. As a historian of philanthropy, I have studied the paternalism of white funders, including those who helped many of these schools open their doors.
HBCU Origins
The first HBCUs were founded in Northern states before the Civil War, including Cheyney and Lincoln universities in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University in Ohio. After the war, most HBCUs were established in Southern states. These institutions were lifelines for Black Americans seeking higher education during decades of Jim Crow segregation that locked them out of other colleges and universities. (Disclosure: I earned my bachelor’s degree at Lincoln University.)
Although many white philanthropists made large gifts to these schools, their support was fraught with prejudice. Initially, white funders pushed for HBCUs to emphasize vocational training, then called “industrial education,” such as blacksmithing, printing and shoemaking, over more intellectual pursuits.
White philanthropists including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had poured millions from their fortunes into the proliferation of Black industrial schools by the early 20th century. The HBCUs Hampton University in Virginia and Tuskegee University in Alabama, which received donations from Scott, were leading models of industrial education for decades.
Black students during a class on the assembly and repair of telephones at Hampton Institute (1899). US Library of Congress.
The vocational curriculum at these schools was promoted as preparing Black students to be skilled laborers and academic teachers. During this era, however, most graduates worked as unskilled laborers or vocational teachers.
White Southerners overwhelmingly approved of this arrangement, which left many HBCU grads on the bottom rung of society rather than making them educated citizens. Emphasizing industrial education at HBCUs preserved the superior economic status of white Americans and the racist system of segregation. But African Americans’ educational aspirations required much more.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black intellectual, was a leading critic of the funding HBCUs got from wealthy whites. He said: “Education is not and should not be a private philanthropy; it is a public service and whenever it merely becomes a gift of the rich it is in danger.”
Read on: MacKenzie Scott's HBCU Giving Contrasts Starkly With Historical White Funders AOC Blackness
