Dearest friends of Diversity is beautiful, it is time again to wish you all the best for the coming year... have a wonderful, interesting (but perhaps a bit less interesting than the past two years), sparkling, sunny, bright, friendly, pandemic-free, joyful, fabulous, fun, warm, relaxing, adventerous, and marvellous year. Buon anno!
photograph via
photograph (by Jane Bown, 1993) of the wonderful Desmond Tutu who shall always be missed via
::: Tongue Forest ft. Lamont Humphrey on YouTube: LISTEN/WATCH
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photograph by John Vachon (1938) via
"Well, I think this shows how ageism in Hollywood is. I was in my forties when I got that role, and Linda was in her thirties. John was 62. Do you think any of the press ever mentioned that he was 62? It was always "the older women, Linda and Joan, you know, in their thirties and their fourties". Never mentioned it. And I would bring this up in interviews because I don't like ageist people. And Mr Forsythe didn't like it. And he would say, "Why do you have to mention my age?" I say, "because our is mentioned, Linda's and ours is mentioned all the time and we want equality, you know. They are mentioning ours and we are mentioning yours." Joan Collins
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Every year, the Afrozensus is carried out, a survey among people of African origin living in Germany. The findings show that they have very diverse backgrounds since they come from 144 countries. At the same time, they do share some experiences, such as other people touching their hair without consent, an experience 90% of black people living in Germany make or have made. 80% get sexualised comments regarding their look or skin colour on dating apps, More than 56% have been asked whether they sell drugs and more than 56% say they have been stopped by the police without any obvious reason. Exotisised, sexualised, criminalised... but also homogenised and deindividualised.
More than 90% say that people do not believe them when they talk about their encounters with racism. And when they express criticism they are accused of being angry (86%). Most of the people taking part in the survey (74.9%) call themselves "black" (via)
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photograph by Neil Libbert
via
In 1977, Chris Steele-Perkins photographed the "Battle of Lewisham", i.e. members of the far right National Front planning to march to London's city centre, the 4.000 counter-protestors and many police officers.
Steele-Perkins kept photographing the far right supporters in the following decades... shaved heads, White Power t-shirts and Nazi salutes. However, they only tell part of the story, as he points out:
"The far right is depicted in photographs as the burly boys because it's easy to do it that way. Skinheads shouting perhaps looks more intimindating than people with long hair shouting."
photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins via
photograph by David Godlis via
YouTube Selection
::: Hollow Ponds:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: Polaris:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: Out of Time: LISTEN/WATCH
::: The Universal (Matera, 2019): LISTEN/WATCH
::: Everyday Robots:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: Royal Morning Blue:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: On Melancholy Hill:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: Lonely Press Play:
LISTEN/WATCH
::: Hostiles:
LISTEN/WATCH
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A grandmother is seen as a one-dimensional being since becoming one "subsumes everything else in your life under a fog of irrelevance". When Hillary Clinton, for instance, became a grandmother she was asked when she would "please go quietly into the night" (via). This attitude is there despite the fact that grandparents represent a bigger chunk of the population than ever before and despite many of them being in the labour force. Let's face it: "The idea of Grandma baking the occasional batch of cookies doesn't match today's realities." (via).
There's nothing new about grandmother stereotypes. Remember Little Red Riding Hood? A wolf swallows up sickly granny in her cap and nightgown and climbs into her bed to wait for the dutiful child to appear so he can gobble her up too, along with her basket of goodies. In the more benign resolutions of the tale, a friendly woodcutter cuts open the wolf, and grandmother and child emerge unscathed. Presumably granny then retires to her rocking chair and is transformed into another common stereotype – the plump, kindly old woman in her dotage, sitting with her knitting in an isolated corner of the room. Sandra Martin
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photograph by David Godlis
via
photograph by Leonard Freed (The March on Washington, 1963) via
Photographer Giovanni Corabi and creative director Roberto Ortu spent two weeks in Sardinia capturing "the rebellious youth" living on an island where the "traditions are strong and can sometimes feel heavy" making many people decide to leave and for those who stay hard to find their own voice. Corabi and Ortu celebrate "the rebellious youth that lives on the island but is an active part of where the culture is headed, somewhere between tradition and modernity" including migration (via).
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“Everyday ageism is part of American culture and one of the most common and socially condoned forms of prejudice and discrimination. There is no doubt that it harms the health and wellbeing of older adults (...). In addition to addressing everyday ageism in general, we as a society should be especially careful about how ageist prejudices and stereotypes affect our response to the massive public health challenges of the ongoing pandemic.”The new poll asked older adults about nine forms of everyday ageism, and analyzed the results based on respondents’ age, income, media consumption habits, residence, work status, and self-reported health and appearance.In all, 65% said they’re commonly exposed to ageist messages in materials they watch or read, and 45% said they sometimes or often experience ageism in interactions with other people. More than one-third of older adults have internalized stereotypes to the extent that they agreed or strongly agreed that feeling lonely or depressed were inherent parts of growing older.Older and lower income older adults were more likely to report that they commonly experienced three or more forms of everyday ageism. Women, those who had retired and those who lived in rural areas were also more likely than men to experience it, as well as those still working and those living in suburban or urban areas.
Romania is an anti-Semitic country, as Saul finds out when he moves to the capital with his family. His scholastic career in the Liceu Matei Basarab in Bucharest would be made difficult by this climate. After enrolling in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, in 1933 he decides to study architecture but is not admitted: there is a limit to the number of Jewish students. Years later he would write: "My childhood, my adoslescence in Romania were a bit like being a Negro in the State of Mississippi" (Reflections and shadows, 2001). (literally from the exhibition at the Triennale Milano currently showing Saul Steinberg's works)
Saul Steinberg was born on 15th June 1914 in Ramnicu Sarat, a small town north of Bucharest, in Romania. His parents, Moritz Steinberg and Rosa Iacobson, belonged to the Jewish middle class. In 1915 the family moved to Bucharest and Moritz set up a bookbinding shop and then began to produce decorative boxes. Some of the family had already emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century. In 1925, Saul enrolled in the Liceu Matei Basarab and three years later graduated to its upper school. Having gained his diploma in 1932, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Bucharest. He received good grades but the university's anti-Semitic atmosphere kept him from regularly attending courses. (text from exhibition, Triennale Milano)
In 1933, he applied for admission to the Faculty of Architecture but was denied entrance because a quota system limited the number of Jewish students who could be accepted. Instead, he went to Milan and enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Regio Politecnico, arriving in the city in November. (...) But in 1938 the Fascist regime promulgated racial laws and Steinberg risked expulsion from Italy. He was able, however, to complete his studies in 1940, but his efforts to leave Italy for the US failed. After various ups and downs, including being arrested and confined in an internment camp, he managed to leave for Santo Domingo, where he spent a year waiting for a US visa. He finally arrived in New Yorsk in July 1942. (...) (text from exhibition, Triennale Milano)
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... also widespread and accepted. Ageism is there, everywhere. Age determines who receives medical procedures, treatments, lifesaving therapies, who is disadvantaged in the workplace, who has access to specialised training and education. Ageism leads to poorer health and earlier deaths, it causes social isolation, reduces quality of life and costs economies billions. Nevertheless, every second person in the world holds ageist attitudes (United Nations, 2021).
Ageism is also costly:
Ageism costs our societies billions of dollars. In the United States of America (USA), a 2020 study showed ageism in the form of negative age stereotypes and self-perceptions led to excess annual costs of US$63 billion for the eight most expensive health conditions. This amounts to US$1 in every US$7 spent on these conditions for all Americans over the age of 60 for one year (see note to editors).
Estimates in Australia suggest that if 5 per cent more people aged 55 or older were employed, there would be a positive impact of AUD$48 billion on the national economy annually. There are currently limited data and information on the economic costs of ageism and more research is needed to better understand its economic impact, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. (United Nations, 2021)
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photograph by Diane Arbus
via
Subjects rated the likelihood that the alleged offender was guilty of the assault. Guilt ratings of the white target did not differ significantly between the stereotypical and the neutral comedy skit conditions. In contrast, guilt ratings of the African-American target were higher in the stereotypical comedy skit condition than in the neutral comedy skit condition. (Ford, 1997)
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- Ford, T. E. (1997). Effects of Stereotypical Television Portrayals of
African-Americans on Person Perception. Social Psychology Quarterly, 60(3),
266-275.
- photograph by Pierre Verger via
Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger (1902-1996) was a French photographer and researcher born in Paris into a bourgeois family. In 1932, he discovered photography and travelling, a combination that changed his life. Verger travelled around the world and, after disembarking in Brazil, decided to stay there (via)
Verger traveled extensively during his long career, but his central focus was the exploration and visual depiction of the enduring continuities linking peoples and cultures of West Africa and the African Diaspora. Over the course of five decades, he took an estimated 65,000 black-and-white photographs with his Rolleiflex camera, depicting individuals and groups in humanistic, light-drenched portraits. In his approach to photography, he placed great emphasis on documenting the beauty of the human form as encountered in scenes of everyday life. In large part, his intention was to counter racism and all-too-prevalent derogatory representations of Africans and peoples of African-descent in the Americas. (via)
Verger turned toward his subjects, his photographs differed from etchnographical approaches "based on measured gestures and the obscene gaze directed at the object being photographed". In fact, he had an aversion to voyeurism and made sure that even when photographing the poorest of the poor, they maintained their personality and dignity. He captured them from an ascending camera angle which reflected his own gaze, i.e. gazing up at them and giving them a heroic aura (via).
Unlike the friends also ethnologists from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Roger Bastide and Alfred Métraux, who often gave him their texts to correct, Verger’s approach was deliberately undetached. He was the opposite of an aloof observer; he never used the lens of his camera as a partition between the observed object and the subject being interpreted. Moreover, his almost obsessive attempts to escape the middle-class milieu, and to subject himself to extreme situations, prompted him to always see himself as a part of his own experimental arrangement. There was method in his empathy. He never saw sympathy and shock as obstacles; they were the motivating forces of his understanding that enabled him to place himself in the position of the other; to overcome ethnic, social and epistemological barriers, and to experience in this way – recalling Rimbaud – oneself as the other: “To be honest, I’m only marginally interested in ethnography. I don’t want to study people as if they were just beetles or exotic plants. On my journeys, what I like is living with people and learning their different lifestyles. That’s because I’ve always been interested in what I never was, or in what I could be with others.” (via)
photograph (Vogue) via
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photographs by Francesco Pizzo via
JJJJJerome Ellis is a black stutterer and artist based in New York. He is interested in how ableism disadvantages people with a stutter since they do not adhere to the flows of time. This disfluency, to him, becomes "a means to exist outside of ordinary time, as defined by a white-dominated world." His work is an approach to experimenting with freedom and to depathologising disfluency (via)
I was interested in the role that clocks and watches played o-o-on plantations in the antebellum south. How slave masters deliberately did not let enslaved people own [them], as a way o-o-of domination and control.
"On the album, I feel safe stuttering because it's just me. I have the opportunity to score my own stutter. That felt very liberating." JJJJJerome Ellis
This article argues that dysfluency, music and Blackness, because of their distinct relationships to time, have the power to forge alternative temporalities and help us heal from ‘temporal subjection’. As a Black composer who stutters, I write from first-hand experience. With reference to my own recordings and scores, I examine the ways I use musical techniques like loops and rubato to create these alternative temporalities. Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music ‐ work that I continue today."Sometimes people just walk away. Perhaps because I didn’t adhere to t-t-the choreography t-t-that we are often used to. So much of the pain comes from not feeling fully human. Not feeling intelligent. People thinking that I might be evading a question. I don’t want my Blackness to come off as a threat and I don’t want my stuttering to come off as evidence of lying.”
Respect and kindness are core principles of nursing practice, yet little is known about how they are experienced by nursing home (NH) residents at the end of life. The aim of this study was to examine the factors associated with being treated with respect and kindness in the last month of life as an NH resident. A retrospective survey of 208 bereaved family members was conducted in 21 NHs located in a city in central Canada. The majority of participants indicated that the resident had always been treated with respect or kindness. However, significant differences emerged, with not all family members believing that their loved one had always been treated with respect or kindness. The apparent lapses in care practices are troubling and indicate that steps must be taken to address them. (Thompson et al., 2011)
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- Hinton, D. E, Ojserkis, R. A., Jalal, B., Peou, S. & Hofmann, S. G.
(2013). Loving-kindness in the treatment of traumatized refugees and
minority groups: a typology of mindfulness and the nodal network model of
affect and affect regulation. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(8),
817-828.
- Thompson, G. N., McClement, S. E. & Chochinov, H. M. (2011). How
respect and kindness are experienced at the end of life by nursing home
residents. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 43(3), 96-118.
- photograph (Steve McQueen with his son Chad on the set of Le Mans,
1971) via
“There has been a confrontation between police and a large number of people in the city of Newark…Police have declared a curfew…Police are out in force.”
Fifty years later, I ask myself why I was in such a hurry to get back to Newark. At the time, I was a 22-year-old student at Yale Law School, spending my third summer as a community organizer and law-student advocate in Newark. I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, but Newark felt like my new home. Now my home was about to fulfill a prophecy.
For weeks, black people had been saying the community was ready to explode. I heard it in bars and at neighborhood meetings. I heard it from speakers protesting the two hot issues of the day: Mayor Hugh Addonizio’s plan to build a medical and dental school on 150 acres in the Central Ward that would displace 20,000 mostly black and Puerto Rican residents; and the mayor’s decision to place James Callaghan, a white man with a high school diploma, in the position of board secretary (business administrator) for the Newark public schools, instead of Wilbur Parker, the first black CPA in New Jersey. “Keep this shit up and there’s gonna be a riot in Newark!” was the word on the street. (Applause meter off the charts; everybody agreed.)
So here I was, driving back into Newark late at night. I had no intention of burning or looting, or shooting police—not even the cops whose racism I had seen in action. I was totally committed to nonviolent resistance, by training if not by disposition. (...)
Most accounts of the Newark Rebellion—and I call it a rebellion—say the arrest and beating of John Smith, a black cab driver, triggered the outbreak of violence. Hundreds witnessed Smith being dragged into the 4th Precinct police station in front of the Hayes Homes, a high-rise housing project. Rumors spread that Smith had been killed while in custody. Local civil rights leaders tried to form a march downtown in protest. But as the crowd grew in front of the Hayes Homes, someone lit a bottle filled with gasoline and threw it at the police station. Cops poured out of the station in riot gear to drive off the protesters. As the crowd dispersed, looting broke out on nearby streets. The Rebellion was on.
Why do I call the events of July 12 to 17 a rebellion rather than a riot? Riots are mindless, aimless, spontaneous outbursts triggered by some immediate event. But rebellions, like those waged by Thomas Jefferson and Nat Turner, are the result of long-simmering hurts with no other ways to redress grievances. Looking at the evidence, this was a rebellion.
The situation in Newark at the time can be explained in two words: racial polarization. Whites held a virtual monopoly on power in Newark, despite token representation of blacks—what are sometimes called “house Negroes”—on the city and county levels. Racial polarization was entrenched. This in a city that, at the time, was 52 percent black and 10 percent Spanish speaking.
The increasingly angry black community raised a growing chorus of demands for better opportunities. Repressive measures by the police force (which was 90 percent white) and government agencies like the Board of Education and the Welfare Department increased the hunger for self-determination in the black community. Blacks were the victims of unscrupulous landlords and crooked retailers, and of misguided development programs that turned into land grabs, destroying communities in the name of urban renewal.
The white population had been flowing steadily out of Newark since the 1950s. Jobs were leaving, too. (...)
On the second night of the Rebellion, I was driving around with three guys in my car. (...)
I was climbing up the hill on Court Street, heading west toward the Scudder Homes, when I heard the siren. It was a hot night; the windows of my white Ford Fairlane 500 were down. We neared the corner of High Street—now Martin Luther King Boulevard—when I picked up the whirling lights of a Newark police car in my rearview mirror. The siren was getting closer. They were coming for us.
I pulled over to the grassy divider in the middle of Court Street. The squad car sped forward, angling in front of me, presumably to prevent our escape. Four cops jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered us out of the car with our hands up. One of them had a shotgun.
We stepped from the car as directed. One of the cops yelled, “Up against the car, motherfuckers.” The street was deserted. We knew we were in big trouble.
I had never before looked down the wrong end of a shotgun. It seemed like it was looking back at me. I turned and assumed the position, hands on the roof of my car, legs spread wide.
The pat-down produced no weapons. Still, these guys were scary. One cop ordered me to open my trunk, which I did without hesitation. I thought about my Virginia plates. It was popularly held in government and law-enforcement circles that, when unrest came to Newark, it would be fueled by “outside agitators,” who would supply guns and ammunition. (...)
It is hard to explain to anyone who was not there the climate of resistance in the streets during the 1960s. People organized to withhold rent from landlords who overcharged for slum properties; they demonstrated against welfare bureaucrats who punished their clients for violating the “man in the house” rule, which said families could not get public assistance if there was an able-bodied man in the household. People boycotted retail merchants who sold bad meat and schools that failed to properly educate children. People demonstrated against poorly managed, overcrowded public housing, and against rampant urban renewal that gobbled up residential neighborhoods without providing adequate replacement housing. And of course, they spoke out against police brutality.
The ordinary democratic processes didn’t work for black people. All that was left was the politics of confrontation. Up to 1967, those confrontations had been nonviolent. (...)
On another corner, across from the Morton Street School, Central Ward Democratic leader Eulis “Honey” Ward and I watched as local residents ran into the furniture stores on Springfield Avenue. Out they came with sofas, chairs, lamps—whatever they could carry. They hauled their goods up flights of stairs and came back down with worn-out, dilapidated furniture, leaving it on the sidewalks for the trash collector. What Ward and I couldn’t see was the deliberate removal of credit records from the filing cabinets in these stores. Without these records, the merchants wouldn’t be able to find people who had bought on credit.
Not all white merchants were targeted. Those with a reputation for fairness were spared—although this message was not always easy to communicate to passing looters. The few black merchants wrote “soul brother” on their windows or doors to avoid the riotous invasion or the torch. On South Orange Avenue, neighbors wrote those words outside a shop owned by a Chinese merchant they wanted to protect from looters. But they couldn’t protect him from the police. The next morning, the merchant discovered bullet holes in his shop. Law-enforcement officers were singling out stores that appeared to be black owned for their own brand of retaliation and lawlessness. (...) Junius Williams
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