Here is your week in review, in haiku
1.
A person named Bryce
Harper signed a contract, and
people have feelings.
2.
Sometimes you have to
walk away from the one you
love. “Right?” sighed Cohen.
3.
A pilot shot down,
an angry mob, then some tea.
Kashmir near the edge.
4.
We look at clouds from
both sides now, from near and far…
5.
“Stevie Nicks keeps her
shawls in a cold vault,” she said,
re-thinking her life
Have a peaceful and fashionable weekend.
On Point
| Why are ad agencies so white? |
| The most recent installment of Adweek’s terrific podcast “Yeah, That’s Probably an Ad,” is an unflinching look at the persistent whiteness of the agency world. Real Talk About Race and Advertising keeps its promise. “This glorious pipeline that you hear so much about…but that you never see,” says Kai Lawson, producer and co-host of the podcast Mixed Company. “I don’t think they care about diversity and inclusion,” she says of most agency C-Suiters. “I think they care about being included in the conversation.” “The pipeline is there, I’m personally a product of it, says copywriter Bennett D. Bennett. “But it’s almost like a relay race. You hand off that baton. You train all these dope young professionals and give the agencies a whole list of them… and then once the agencies get that baton, they don’t know what the hell to do with it.” |
| Ad Week |
| Ava DuVernay shares the trailer for her upcoming Netflix film |
| “Not thugs. Not wilding. Not criminals. Not even the Central Park Five,” DuVernay tweeted. “They are Korey, Antron, Raymond, Yusef, Kevin.” The film is the story of the five black boys who were falsely accused of raping a white, female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989, and is no longer called The Central Park Five. The new title, When They See Us comes from DuVernay’s decision to “embrac[e] the humanity of the men and not their politicized moniker.” She co-wrote the four-part film, which begins in 1989 and ends in 2014. It’s set to be released on May 31. |
| Vulture |
| The new president of one of the most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. is a black man intent on shutting it down |
| The National Socialist Movement, one of the most prominent neo-Nazi extremist groups, has a new leader: James Hart Stern, a black activist who plans to dismantle the organization. How Stern became NSM’s new president is still unknown. The group had been fighting about its future direction, which forced the resignation of its most recent president, Matt Schoep. Schoep had been trying to make the organization more attractive to next-gen haters by abandoning the use of Nazi symbols, or some such. Now with Stern at the helm, the group has much bigger problems. The NSM is being sued for its role in the 2017 Charlottesville rally; Stern has filed a document asking a federal court in Virginia to issue a judgment against the group before one of the lawsuits goes to trial. Evidently, Stern has been working to disrupt the group for two years? I’ve read this story three times and I’m still the blinking white guy GIF. |
| NBC News |
On Background
| Happy Women’s History month, part one |
| It’s worth noting how entwined the early women’s suffrage movement was with white supremacy, in part because it’s an under-acknowledged part of our history, but also because it makes the work that so many white women are doing to address this legacy so valuable. This piece from New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples says the upcoming 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment is the perfect time to correct the record. “While middle-class white women celebrated with ticker tape parades, black women in the former Confederacy were being defrauded by voting registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence,” he writes. When black suffragists asked their white sisters for help, they were told it was a race issue, not a gender one. |
| New York Times |
| Happy Women’s History month, part two |
| Author and historian Sally Roesch Wagner was one of the first Americans to get a doctorate in women’s studies and she is de-bunking myths about women’s history right and left in this must-read-and-share piece. Her first bombshell is a doozy: American women’s rights did not begin with getting the vote in 1920. Actually, Native American women have had political power for 1,000 years, as part of sophisticated governance systems that still exist. Wait until you read the part about how birth control products were declared “obscene” in 1873! I get you can't guess whose idea that was. |
| New York Times |
| Happy Women’s History month, part three |
| Bloomberg’s editorial board has published a full-throated call for Congress to do more to protect Indigenous women. They begin with the horrifying facts. A National Institute of Justice study has documented the dire situation facing Native American women -more than half have been sexually assaulted, more than a third have been raped, and countless more have gone missing. The board recommends on more funding for the woefully understaffed law enforcement agencies and a clarification of the jurisdictional morass that often means that no one knows which agency - tribal officers, local police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs or state police – is responsible for an investigation. I appreciate a mainstream media publication taking this stand; please reward them with web traffic, if you feel so moved. (Maybe skip the comments, though.) |
| Bloomberg |
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