Category: race
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The State of Our Society
Obari Cartman’s work begins with stories. “I start with an individual and I say, ‘Tell me how you got here,’” said Dr. Cartman, a trauma-focused clinician and restorative justice coach who primarily works with young Black men in Chicago. “A lot of my work straddles that fence between individual therapy, and community advocacy and organizing.” When…
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The Culinary Legacy of Brooklyn’s First Free Black Community
SOMETIMES, WE CAN ONLY UNDERSTAND history from above. That, anyway, seemed to be the outlook of historian James Hurley and pilot Joseph Hays when, in 1968, they flew a plane over Brooklyn. They were looking for the remnants of a village founded 130 years earlier, the free Black community of Weeksville. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Featured…
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The Japanese Ghost Town Buried Deep in a Canadian Forest
AT FIRST, IT DIDN’T LOOK like much: a clearing about an hour’s walk into the dense forest of British Columbia’s Seymour Valley, with some rusted cans scattered among the dank leaves and moldy tree trunks. It was 2004, and Bob Muckle, an archaeologist and anthropology instructor at Capilano University, was looking for a site to teach…
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American School Lunch Is Becoming More Diverse, Like It Was in the 1910s
ALANA DAO COULDN’T FIGURE OUT which was worse: going to school with a lunch box full of hummus, or pulling out Chinese pork floss buns in front of her classmates. In the 1990s, Sugar Land, Texas, was a steak and potatoes kind of place. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Jacob Riis, Library of Congress/Public Domain.
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Why Are We Still Debating Whether Trump is Racist?
Defining things as racist is like that exercise swim instructors do, where they tell kids to swim to them but keep walking backwards so the goal is never actually reached. Except in this exercise, the American public is trying to agree on whether something is racist or not, and the swim instructor is the ever-receding standard for…
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Who Gets to be Naked at Harvard University?
Every semester at Harvard University, students take their clothes off. The event is called Primal Scream, and it happens on midnight before the first day of final exams. As the hour approaches, there is a palpable buzz in the central quad, the Harvard Yard. Students gather in various states of undress: towels and trenchcoats, gym shorts…
Reina Gattuso 