Tag: african

Everyday African American Vernacular English Is A Dialect Born From Conflict And Creativity
Journalism, VIDEO REELS

Everyday African American Vernacular English Is A Dialect Born From Conflict And Creativity

Dr. Walter Edwards is a professor of linguistics at Wayne State University, Michigan, where he teaches courses on African American Vernacular English, sociolinguistics and American dialects. Until Aug. 31, 2022, he was also the director of the Humanities Center at Wayne State. Below are highlights from interviews with The Conversation U.S. and another online interview. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. Exactly what is African American Vernacular English? A linguist explains. What brought you to your field of research? I grew up in the poorest section of the poorest section of Georgetown, Guyana, the nation’s capital. I grew up speaking what is called conservative Guyanese creole, a stigmatized language variety that was and is considered broken English by most Guyanese and...
Enhance Your Fashion Statement With African Women’s Formal Wear
FASHION

Enhance Your Fashion Statement With African Women’s Formal Wear

The African clothing for women is the perfect attire to transitioning your look and enhance your confidence this season. Our African Women's Formal Wear will stand out on any formal occasion, religious event, party, wedding, homecoming, African history month, or family reunion. These African clothing are meticulously handmade by the best designers from Africa and can be ordered to your tailored-fit. We handpicked print dresses from numerous artisans in many parts of African areas. Our accessories will suit perfectly for the occasion is good for the African look. We offer a high-quality collection of unique African print dresses we carry. Give the Gifts of Culture, Heritage, and originality to your loved one. In summer, everyone gets to dress up in light fabric and heat-resistant clothes....
An Intimate Glimpse Into Segregation-Era Life For African Americans – The Gordon Parks Exhibit
Journalism, SOCIAL JUSTICE

An Intimate Glimpse Into Segregation-Era Life For African Americans – The Gordon Parks Exhibit

In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle school classmates, who were dispersed among Fort Scott and other Midwestern cities and towns. The resulting images – while quite personal to Parks – offer a glimpse into a community and a set of experiences shared by many African Americans of his generation. Depicting the realities of discrimination without the veil of nostalgia, it’s a body of work that captures the resiliency of a community at a significant point in American history – just prior to the Civil Rights Movement. But for reasons unknown, Life never published the series. Now, the powerful exhibit of over 40 segregation-er...
Alice Walker Breaks Out As One Of The Leading Female Voices In African American Literature
IN OTHER NEWS

Alice Walker Breaks Out As One Of The Leading Female Voices In African American Literature

An African American writer and activist Alice Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960's. Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropper parents,  she knew racism and poverty only too well and with works expressing the need for the tackling of such issues she has become one of the best-known and most highly respected writers from the U.S. along with such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor , commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women's literature. Her activism started after being educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, where Walker, in a commencement speech spoke out against the silence of that institution's curriculum to African-American culture and history. Active...
African Americans Have Long Celebrated Black Culture In Public Spaces Defying White Supremacy
IN OTHER NEWS

African Americans Have Long Celebrated Black Culture In Public Spaces Defying White Supremacy

From Richmond to New York City to Seattle, anti-racist activists are getting results as Confederate monuments are coming down by the dozens. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters have changed the story of Lee Circle, home to a 130-year-old monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It’s now a new community space where graffiti, music and projected images turn the statue of Lee from a monument to white supremacy into a backdrop proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m a historian of celebrations and protests after the Civil War. And in my research, I have found that long before Confederate monuments occupied city squares, African Americans used those same public spaces to celebrate their history. But those African American memorial cultures have often been o...
Colin Powell – As A Patriot And Black Man, He Embodied The ‘Two-Ness’ Of The African American Experience
Journalism

Colin Powell – As A Patriot And Black Man, He Embodied The ‘Two-Ness’ Of The African American Experience

Chad Williams, Brandeis University Colin Powell knew where he fit in American history. The former secretary of state – who died on Oct. 18, 2021, at 84 as a result of COVID-19 complications – was a pioneer: the first Black national security advisor in U.S. history, the first Black chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and also the first Black man to become secretary of state. But his “American journey” – as he described it in the title of a 2003 autobiography – is more than the story of one man. His death is a moment to think about the history of Black American men and women in the military and the place of African Americans in government. But more profoundly, it also speaks to what it means to be an American, and the tensions that Colin Powell – as a patriot and a Black man – faced th...
Can Churches Help African Americans In A Mental Health Crisis?
Journalism

Can Churches Help African Americans In A Mental Health Crisis?

Brad R. Fulton, Indiana University Centuries of systemic racism and everyday discrimination in the U.S. have left a major mental health burden on African American communities, and the past few years have dealt especially heavy blows. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that Black Americans are twice as likely to die of COVID-19, compared with white Americans. Their communities have also been hit disproportionately by job losses, food insecurity and homelessness as a result of the pandemic. Meanwhile, racial injustice and high-profile police killings of Black men have amplified stress. During the summer of 2020, amid both the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, a CDC survey found that 15% of Black respondents had “seriously considered suicide in the pa...
African Americans And People With Vascular Dementia Are At Greater Risk For COVID-19
HEALTH & WELLNESS, VIDEO REELS

African Americans And People With Vascular Dementia Are At Greater Risk For COVID-19

New research is shedding light on how dementia can increase people’s risk for developing COVID-19, particularly among two groups: African Americans and people with vascular dementia. The headline findings of a recent study revealed that dementia patients overall face twice the risk for developing COVID-19 as adults without dementia. But two other results from that study deserve more attention than they have received so far. One is that African Americans with dementia had three times the risk of developing COVID-19, and when they did, it was more likely to be life-threatening. African Americans with both dementia and COVID-19 had a higher hospitalization rate than white patients with dementia – 73% compared with 54% – and a higher death rate – 23% compared with 19% for whites. In view of ...
The Legend Of The Flying African Caused By A Mass Suicide Of Slaves
Journalism, VIDEO REELS

The Legend Of The Flying African Caused By A Mass Suicide Of Slaves

In May 1803 a group of enslaved Africans from present-day Nigeria, of Ebo or Igbo descent, leaped from a single-masted ship into Dunbar Creek off St. Simons Island in Georgia. A slave agent concluded that the Africans drowned and died in an apparent mass suicide. But oral traditions would go on to claim that the Eboes either flew or walked over water back to Africa. For generations, island residents, known as the Gullah-Geechee people, passed down the tale. When folklorists arrived in the 1930s, Igbo Landing and the story of the flying African assumed a mythological place in African American culture. Though the site carries no bronze plaque and remains unmarked on tourist maps, it has become a symbol of the traumatizing legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery. Poets, artists, filmmakers, jazz m...