Sunday, January 12

Journalism

Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves
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Journalism

Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves

Millions of people voted in an online poll in 2015 to have the face of Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill. But many might not have known the story of her life as chronicled in a recent film, “Harriet.” A portrait from 1868 of abolitionist Harriet Tubman. AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz Harriet Tubman worked as a slave, spy and eventually as an abolitionist. What I find most fascinating, as a historian of American slavery, is how belief in God helped Tubman remain fearless, even when she came face to face with many challenges. Tubman’s early life Tubman was born Araminta Ross in 1822 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When interviewed later in life, Tubman said she started working when she was five as a house maid. She recalled that she endured whippings, starvation and hard work even before she ...
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Mothers in prison aren’t likely to see their families this Thanksgiving – or any other day
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Journalism

Mothers in prison aren’t likely to see their families this Thanksgiving – or any other day

On a mid-October morning, I drove from Philadelphia to State Correctional Institution Muncy, Pennsylvania’s oldest and largest women’s prison. Nearly two-thirds of imprisoned mothers have never received a visit from their children. Shutterstock/Sakhorn The prison, located in the north central part of the state, is set at the base of a mountain and encircled by farmlands, feed mills and the upper branch of the Susquehanna River. The 170-mile drive took nearly four hours. I was visiting Cynthia Alvarado. In 2010, a Philadelphia jury found Alvarado guilty of driving the getaway car in a robbery homicide. The judge gave her the same sentence as the man who pulled the trigger: life without the possibility of parole. I was there to discuss her case as part of project on Pennsylvania’s accompli...
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Racism and the black hole of gun control in the US
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Journalism

Racism and the black hole of gun control in the US

Would tighter gun laws help protect African Americans or make them more vulnerable to racism and police brutality? I will never forget the day in eighth grade when my friend pointed a pistol at my face and pulled the trigger. I am old enough now that many of my childhood memories have faded into blurry black and white pictures, but 30 years later, that scene is a vivid colour film in my memory. I can see the smirk in his brown eyes as he points the pistol at my forehead, the slightly blue shimmer of the metal in the afternoon light, the way that the flat side of the barrel reached a nipple of an opening, suddenly curving inward, and the explosion of sound as he pulled the trigger. Time stretches in moments like these, and as time expanded before me, I thoug...
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Oprah Winfrey, others pay tribute to late author Toni Morrison
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Journalism

Oprah Winfrey, others pay tribute to late author Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning US writer known for her work on race, died in August, aged 88. In offering tribute to Toni Morrison, speakers from Oprah Winfrey to Fran Lebowitz have each shared a very different, but equally special portrait of the late Nobel laureate, who died in August at the age of 88. Angela Davis remembered a dear friend who as a Random House editor helped launch her writing career and would jot down notes for what became the classic Song of Solomon as she cooked eggs for her family. Lebowitz marvelled at Morrison's seemingly photographic memory of the bad reviews she had received. Poet Kevin Young once went to the cinema with her and otherwise proudly sat at her feet. Winfrey spoke of Morrison's majestic, sometimes intimidating pres...
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Journalism

How to Make Amends for a Life of Far-Right Radicalism

Shannon Martinez was a neo-Nazi angry at the world. After she left the movement, she started to atone by helping other far-right extremists follow her back to civil society. On a late summer morning in Athens, Georgia, Shannon Foley Martinez sits barefoot on her back patio, still in her pajamas, and clicks “follow” on the Twitter profile of a White nationalist named Adrian. He has almost no followers, so he notices her within minutes. “Hello,” he types via direct message. “Hello!!!!!” she responds as her 3-year-old son plays nearby. Martinez is a former neo-Nazi who now works to deradicalize people who are still in the movement. She was referred to Adrian by a friend of hers who researches right-wing extremism. When Adrian (not his real identity because of the sensitivity ...
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Journalism, VIDEO REELS

Colin Kaepernick refuses to attend NFL tryout session

The controversial quarterback says he is ready to play anywhere despite refusing to attend a tryout session organised by the NFL in Atlanta. Though it was billed as the first step in Colin Kaepernick's journey back to the National Football League (NFL), the 32-year-old unsigned player switched the venue to a nearby high school and held his own session. Kaepernick said it was to allow the media to be present. However, the NFL released a statement saying it was "disappointed that Colin didn't appear for his workout" and said his decision had no effect on his status in the league. Al Jazeera's Rahul Pathak reports.
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Journalism

Stop Calling Me an Activist

I’m only fighting for the right to live in this world free of constraints. Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals began as I stood outside the massive stone blocks that sustain one of the most powerful judicial bodies in the world. My emotions ran the gamut; this hearing would be a bookmark for what is yet to come: more anxiety, fear, and frustration surrounding my status as a DACA recipient. I had traveled from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I volunteer as a legal assistant, providing legal aid to immigrants both detained and non-detained, to become a witness to this newest chapter in a mighty social movement that had begun long before Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signed the DACA m...
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Journalism

Tony Porter Answers: Can We Build a Better Man?

What is men’s role in the #MeToo movement, and what does a new or nontoxic masculinity look like? Millions of pages have been devoted to demystifying the relationship between men and women, unpacking gendered power dynamics, and more recently, to interrogating toxic masculinity and finding ways to hold some men accountable for their bad behavior. What is now known as the #MeToo movement began more than a decade ago, when activist Tarana Burke launched a conversation around sexual harassment and assault often experienced by women and femmes with the powerful phrase “me too.” But what role do men have to play in ending this epidemic, and divorcing themselves from the toxic masculinity that underlies this behavior? We asked authors, organizers, journalists, and leaders to wei...
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Journalism

Tarana Burke Answers: Can We Build a Better Man?

What is men’s role in the #MeToo movement, and what does a new or nontoxic masculinity look like? Millions of pages have been devoted to demystifying the relationship between men and women, unpacking gendered power dynamics, and more recently, to interrogating toxic masculinity and finding ways to hold some men accountable for their bad behavior. What is now known as the #MeToo movement began more than a decade ago, when activist Tarana Burke launched a conversation around sexual harassment and assault often experienced by women and femmes with the powerful phrase “me too.” But what role do men have to play in ending this epidemic, and divorcing themselves from the toxic masculinity that underlies this behavior? We asked authors, organizers, journalists, and leaders to wei...
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How Reparations to Descendants of Slavery Can Heal a Nation
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Journalism

How Reparations to Descendants of Slavery Can Heal a Nation

To truly understand the debt this country owes to Black people is to be liberated from the bondage of miseducation that we’ve remained shackled to in the so-called land of the free. On a spring day, I stood at the corner of Madison and Pennsylvania avenues in the nation’s capital, transfixed on the building in front of me. Passersby zigzagged around me. In my trance, I imagined a “magnificent brownstone front, its towering height,” with “spacious windows.” A “splendid” sight indeed. Through those windows I imagined “its marble counters and black walnut finishings,” and “a row of its gentlemanly and elegantly dressed” Black men and women “clerks, with their pens behind their ears and buttonhole bouquets in their coat-fronts.” It was “beautiful,” just as Frederick Douglas...
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