After a year of verbal brutality, racially charged speeches, and regressive policy proposals, Trump attended a black church in an effort to convince African Americans he is not racist. His trip to Detroit with Ben Carson was the photo op that such an effort demands. Though he was shrewd enough not to say the words, the whole spectacle was designed to say, “some of my best friends are black.”
For Hillary Clinton, it was a classroom in Harvard with scared law school hopefuls trying to keep her from studying justice. For Malala Yousafzai it was a school bus loaded with an armed member of the Taliban, determined to keep her off her schoolyard soapbox. For me — clearly not saving the best for last here — it was a kitchen in the South with a confused freshman Baptist hell-bent on keeping me away from the pulpit.
Ultimately, as audience members, we have the power to control what we see. TV execs need our eyes watching the programming they select, and if we say we want diversity — if we purposefully watch more shows that are inclusive and that introduce us to narratives and cultures that are simultaneously new to us and reminiscent of our own lives — we can change the television landscape. We can change what we see and thus make sure that everyone is seen.
Just this summer, a federal court struck down the North Carolina law, ruling that certain provisions of it “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The court added, “With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans” and “retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.” Yet, importantly, restrictive voter ID laws in a number of other states remain on the books, and will be in place for Election Day.
"The Reformation gave at least a segment of Christians access to the Bible in a way that hadn’t happened before. Most of our history has been a rather Bible-less Christianity that was dictated or defined mostly by the hierarchical church, not by people who read the Bible. … We gained the freedom to approach it, and then in the current age, we have ceded that exploration to media, to entertainment forms, to prepackaged interpretations that are delivered in video, audio and pulpit forms so that there’s a substitute Bible that isn’t the Bible, per se, at the same time that people aren’t reading."
Rep. John Lewis — civil rights leader, gun legislation sit-in organizer, graphic novelist ... crowd surfer.
"Sometimes you have to find a way to get into trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble," Lewis said on a recent segment of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert shortly before diving off the stage, at Colbert's encouragement.
In a 399-0 vote, a bipartisan bill to ensure sexual assault survivors in federal criminal cases have rape kits administered in all cases passed on Tuesday. According to The Hill, the bill also protects survivors from having to pay for any evidence collection and survivors would be allowed to request preservation of any evidence for the maximum statute of limitations.
Singer and songwriter Sia recently released a stunning music video for her song “The Greatest,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, that appears to be a tribute to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. in June.
In the video, dancer Maddie Ziegler leads a group of 49 dancers in an energetic dance routine, 49 also being the number of people killed in the shooting at the gay nightclub.
"‘Ubuntu’ is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks to the very essence of being human … it also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. We say, ‘A person is a person through other people.’"
While America’s population is becoming less white and while gender diversity is transforming workplaces, white male leadership persists at most evangelical parachurch organizations — the thousands of nonprofit businesses that carry out various kinds of Christian ministry.
Only one of 33 major national organizations contacted for this article is led by a woman — Jane Overstreet at Development Associates International. And only three are led by nonwhite males.