A better future requires honest, open teaching of African American history

A better future requires honest, open teaching of African American history – African American News Today – EIN Presswire

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Honoring Black History Month with the Hearne Fine Art Gallery

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – In honor of Black History Month, a fine art gallery founded in 1988 in the capital city is promoting the power of African-American art.

Hearne Fine Art Gallery owner Garbo Hearne said the gallery gives people a voice and offers a platform for creatives to showcase their unique gifts and talents.

The gallery features African-American art and artists from around the world, while paying special attention to those local to Arkansas. It consists of a gallery, bookstore, framing studio, and gift shop.

The gallery is located at 1001 Wright Ave. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information about the gallery visit HearneFineArt.com.

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Shades of Expression: Celebrating the Works of Black Artists

MUSIC

Rising by Lawrence Brownlee

Rising by Lawrence Brownlee

Lawrence Brownlee is a Black opera singer of international acclaim, whose brilliant tenor voice can be heard singing leading bel canto roles in the most prestigious opera houses. In addition to his numerous appearances on operatic recordings, Mr. Brownlee has many solo projects to his credit. His most recent solo album, Rising, features six Black composers (Damien Sneed, Brandon Spencer, Jasmine Barnes, Joel Thompson, and Shawn E. Okpebholo) who all set poetry from the Harlem Renaissance, including works by Claude McKay, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. The poems highlight “joy, empowerment, faith, love and strength in the face of challenge.” Mr. Brownlee initiated this project to “create something that speaks not just to our struggles, but to our triumphs.” Rising received a 2024 Grammy nomination for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.

– Brandon Williams, associate professor of music and interim director of choral activities, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers-New Brunswick

Glory Hour by Victory Boyd

Victory Boyd, a professional singer-songwriter, began singing at a young age and played in a group with her siblings. Her distinct sound draws on soul, folk, jazz and gospel music, which she learned growing up in a musical family. She is an inspiration to the next generation of musicians on many levels and I highly appreciate her drive and tenacity. I love that she describes her gift as not only a sound but also a responsibility of what she carries as an artist, entrepreneur and advocate. Her journey has never been about becoming famous, but more of a strategy of being excellent at what you do. I love her distinct, rich, smooth rasp that can take you on a rollercoaster ride. It is noted that her sound has earned her comparisons to the amazing Nina Simone for both her unusual voice and her jazzy inclination. The birth of Glory Hour began in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic when she saw how much she needed the comfort of a savior and knew that she had to keep writing the message of the gospel in song  for herself first and then for the world. I appreciate the deep richness in her tone and look forward to hearing more from her in the years to come!

– April Parker, staff assistant, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers Health

Victory Lap by Nipsey Hussle

Victory Lap album cover

Nipsey Hussle’s last album, Victory Lap, is what you listen to when you need that extra motivation at the gym. It’s what you turn on when you’re riding into work and when you’re leaving. It’s the soundtrack to your personal success story. Victory Lap is a mindset, a lesson for the young, and a motivator for everyone on their grind. It’s a reminder for Black folks that we are “prolific and so gifted.” It’s a testimony and result of what “hard work plus patience” can give. It’s a reflection on community, life, education, code, business, money, and power. I recommend this album for anyone searching for purpose or living in it. Long live Nipsey Hussle.

– Joshanna Holyfield, senior program coordinator, Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Rutgers-New Brunswick

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Why I Stopped Being A “Good” Cancer Patient

“You are allergic to your oral chemotherapy,” explains my oncology team at a recent appointment. “We are going to try a newer drug,” I am on my fourth attempt to find an oral treatment suitable for both my body and my cancer, so that I can maintain a remission that took three years and a stem cell transplant to achieve. “We want to get ahead of it before it gets ahead of us.” In my headphones, Weezer achingly croons, “Say it ain’t so, your drug is a heartbreaker.”

Since being diagnosed with phase three chronic myeloid leukemia in 2017, finding oral chemotherapy that my body agrees with has been a turbulent experience. While these targeted therapies are often considered a more humane method of leukemia treatment, they have almost always brutally interrupted my life. From bouts of nerve pain lacerating through my limbs, leaving me agonized and frozen in place for days on end, to medically induced pulmonary hypertension, to muscle spasms knocking heavily against old bone marrow biopsy sites making daily tasks feel near impossible, every new prescription almost always felt like my cancer and my body were teaming up to say, “Nice try, but absolutely not.”

In 2020, thinking I had discovered an “out,” I believed a stem cell transplant could cast out my cancer permanently. To be worthy of such a “blessing,” I fashioned myself into the perfect patient: tracking symptoms, pouring hours into meticulous research, maintaining “positivity” through chemotherapy and radiation, performing physical therapy, becoming a solitary island to avoid COVID-19, and jumping through exhaustive hoops to “move on” from the terrible thing inside me.

Three years after a transplant, I am still here, four failed oral chemotherapies later, standing before the gaping mouth of a familiar hell, being handed yet another drug, so “all the good work” of the last six years will not go undone. No one treating me considers what it means to actually live through all this. It is easy to prescribe a drug because the enemy is always cancer. In their eyes, if I say “no” to treatment, I am saying “yes” to dying; I am saying “yes” to the enemy in my blood.

In her seminal bookIllness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag notes that we have historically witnessed the polemical function of cancer to describe what is diabolical. From the “war on cancer,” equating cancer treatment to a “battle” intended to pulverize “invasive” cells, to Trotsky calling Stalinism “the cancer of Marxism,” to John Dean explaining Watergate to Nixon as a “cancer within close range” when discussing the presidency, the disease has been a means of invoking anger, disgust, and paranoia. It has been a means to contextualize what is evil and in need of extermination.

When musicians such as Hozier sing, “When that part of you was ripped away, a grip taking hold, like a cancer that grows… I know my heart would break,” cancer is the agent of despair. When bands like Rage Against the Machine belt, “The rungs torn from the ladder, can’t reach the tumor, one god, one market, one truth, one consumer,” cancer is the barometer of capitalism Cancer remains a vacuous abyss. Yet this mystification continues to obscure the realities felt most by patients—that its metaphors inform our experiences and there is little thought of how we, as patients, wish to live with dignity and illness.

Because of the societal implications that accompany cancer, I subconsciously regarded myself as a bad person. I viewed my diagnosis at 23 years old as a rightful karmic debt, or a curse from a God who was choosing to forsake me. On Instagram, a stranger sent me a message implying I had to be “so hateful” to have such a lethal illness residing in my bones. Leukemia ushered in a host of thoughtless comments where family and strangers alike mourned my existence even though I was—and am—very much alive. Over a phone call, my estranged grandmother laments, “We had such high hopes for you. Now look at you,” implying my cancer had made me a lost cause. It became clear to me that if I wanted to be treated with a shred of empathy by anyone around me, I would have to completelyembody the antithesis of every negative stereotype people maintained about cancer. In their eyes, if I performed goodness almost to the point of being a caricature, my virtuousness meant I deserved to live.

As a fat, Black, queer, non-binary person, I have never been afforded romanticism. But cancer quickly made me into a one-person circus, foregoing my own identity, emotions, and fears to embody the complete opposite of whatever negative implications illness carves into everyone’s psyche. Cancer patients, especially Black patients, have to navigate a healthcare system where we are demanded to perform being a “good patient” in order to receive proper treatment. I have been forced to code-switch to sound white, or fragile, or non-threatening. On days my fatigue and chronic pain have felt unbearable and surreal, I have had to cast myself as kind because my symptoms alone did not make me human enough. I have overcompensated by appealing to the moral sensibility of medical professionals in order to be taken seriously; for my loved ones not to be disgusted by my illness and by association, me. To echo Sontag, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning, that meaning invariably being a moralistic one.” Cancer has become such a universal touchstone, that nearly everyone has been impacted by it, but almost no one knows how to confront it wholly and humanely. 

Particularly in the U.S., we live in a society that benefits from reducing the complexity of illness to the false notion that health is a personal responsibility. It casts a shadow, deflecting us from confronting the sociopolitical realities that genuinely contribute to the health, livelihood, and treatment of not only cancer patients, but sick and disabled people as a whole. And to confront this reality head on, it is important to consider how the medical industrial complex, which every cancer patient navigates, has swelled in size because its foundation is built upon centuries worth of experimentation, murder, and exploitation of Black people.

Read More: U.S. Medical Schools Are Struggling to Overcome Centuries of Racism in Health Care

Medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, illuminates health as a function of oppression. There is a historical precedence for this: In the 19th century, doctors like Samuel Cartwright pathologized enslaved Africans’ rightful desire to escape bondage into psychological disorders like “drapetomania” to justify slavery as a corrective necessity, enacted by plantation owners for Black people’s well-being. Since then, health has remained at the helm of a political strategy to oppress marginalized communities through the continual, intentional falsification of data. Consider the Tuskegee Study, the U.S. Public Health Service’s attempt to “prove” Black people were a “syphilis-soaked race” by withholding treatment. Consider, too, that “…between 1992 and 1997, New York City’s New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and Columbia University’s Lowenstein Center for the Study and Prevention of Childhood Disruptive Behavior Disorders conducted research studies that sought to establish a link between genetics and violence.” These predatory studies were conducted in an ultimately fruitless effort to correlate young Black and Brown boys with extraordinary violence–coincidentally at the same time as Joe Biden’s introduction of the Crime Bill in 1994.

This intentionally subversive propaganda has always pitted Black people at odds with a mythological notion of “health,” further fueling racist malpractice, negligence, and violence by the medical industry. The tangible outcomes are evidenced in statistics like the maternal mortality rates of Black women being “2.6 times higher than those of white women,” according to a CDC study in 2021, or COVID-19 infection rates, estimating that “…in the U.S., Black people were 3.57 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people.” The outcomes of this egregious disregard have also manifested in my life: In 2017, I stumbled into a Los Angeles emergency department, unable to walk without assistance, with symptoms like vertigo, bruising, a distended spleen, and compromised vision, and I was nearly denied care because I “looked like a drug addict.” In actuality, my veins were inflating with 666,000 cancerous white blood cells.

I admit surviving cancer has not been a dignified process. Frantically attempting to live in “goodness,” I felt as though I was Icarus falling to the bottom of an ocean. I believed that if I, alone, did everything “right”—managing my medications and treatment plan without assistance, assigning a “greater purpose” to my diagnosis, turning the meaning of life into a frenetic ode to productivity and workaholism, and ignoring serious warning signs of physical, mental, and emotional burnout—then I would achieve health as a reward: a “well-earned” invincibility. Now, I have a grounded clarity that I, and other cancer patients, have consistently been failed by negligent,willfully violent systems that demand a culture of silence and spectacle-making of survivorship.

I am no longer interested in self-blame as self-empowerment. I am interested in naming what the powers that be refuse to address that, as disability activist Patty Berne wrote in her working draft manifesto Disability Justice, “we are in a global system that is incompatible with life.” Illness does not render me invalid or worthless, nor should I be denied understanding and self-determination. I refuse to live up to standards where I must barter all my self-regard for the bare minimum. I can no longer force myself to overlook larger systems playing critical roles in intentionally failing, neglecting, and impacting our health and our communities.

At the follow-up to my recent appointment, I relay to my oncology team that, at this moment, I have no interest in treatment. At this moment, it is a measured risk I am willing to take in order to buy some moments of repose. Call me hysterical, but I am incredibly lucid as I enter an autonomous wilderness of finding adequate support in all parts of my life and embracing interdependence. Call me the bad patient who listens to my body, who knows on a cellular level, I require a sabbatical from an industry mainly invested in profit over livelihood. I do not have a death wish; I want to live—just not like this. Embracing life with cancer and other disabilities does not mean I must forgo myself. If that means my leftover cancer cells become more resilient, if that means undoing all that “good work,” well, it was “good work” that was done unsustainably.

I am a cautionary tale, if you will, but being a cautionary tale does not make me a lost cause. I did not just believe myself to be a star, like Icarus; I am one, and fatigued, asking neighboring constellations for a burst of light. If I do fail, then I fail, but know that none of it is failure to me. It is not a war waged against me; I did not beckon some wake of vultures: cancer is an illness, and my body is just a body. There is no meaning. There is no metaphor.

Danville honors local African American figures for Black History Month

DANVILLE, VA – Danville is honoring local African American figures who have left their mark on the city, with a bus wrap commemorating black history month.

Unlike the transit system’s previous black history bus wraps, which honored state and national figures as well, this wrap only features local figures.

There are 13 notable people on it, who live in Danville or have lived there.

The city says the individuals they picked have shaped the community and inspired generations with their leadership.

“Their unwavering commitment to progress. Each figure encapsulates the spirit of excellence and determination that best defines our city,” Mayor Alonzo Jones said.

The full list of people featured on the bus can be found here.

Black History Month, Part 1: A quick word with Tiffany Mayo, M.D.

Black History MonthEach year, Black History Month is celebrated in February and focuses on a particular theme or premise. This year, the topic centers around “African Americans and the Arts.”

The Heersink School of Medicine Office for Diversity and Inclusion sat down with a faculty member, a few staff, and a student who are making a difference around UAB. This series aims to capture their memories, sentiments, and favorite Black/African American art during the month of February.

For Part 1, we talked with Tiffany Mayo, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Dermatology, to understand the diversity, equity, and inclusion work she is doing in Dermatology and to learn about her personal memories and arts recommendations.

Black History in Academic Medicine

In addition to her roles of associate professor and department director of Clinical Trials, Mayo is the vice chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Dermatology at UAB.

“Black History Month is a dedicated time for us to all reflect on the rich and unique contributions African Americans have made throughout history,” says Mayo.

“Importantly, as we continue to strive toward improving DEI, it is an opportunity to engage in much needed dialogue and to ensure we are being intentional in moving toward a more equitable future.”

“As a physician, Black History Month is a time to acknowledge how history has contributed to racial health disparities, and to work toward efforts to rebuild trust and health related outcomes in minority populations,” she explains.

A reminder to avoid complacency

“Personally, Black History Month is an important reminder to acknowledge the known and unknown African Americans whose courage led to progress despite unimaginable obstacles. It is motivation to avoid complacency.”

Mayo says her favorite memories are recalling participating in Black History Month celebrations in elementary school and church.

“The school halls were filled with photos of African American scientists, leaders, and other heroes. We performed plays and recited poems affirming individuals and the community. It was an important month and was highly celebrated.”

between the worldMayo’s recommended reading

We asked Mayo about her favorite books by Black/African American artists and book recommendations for those who wish to be a better supporter/ally. For both she answered: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.” The New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Winner, as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist, was published in 2015. It is a non-fiction letter from a father to his son on the reality of being Black in America.

Celebrate Black History Month

Looking for ways to celebrate Black History Month and engage in meaningful dialogue? Check out this list of university-wide events for Black History Month.

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment