Mental Health in the Indigenous Community

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 19 of this newsletter. This is our second consecutive week talking about Mental Health. Today we turn our attention to the Indigenous communities of the United States. The native community in America has endured the traumas of foreign disease, discrimination and genocide. Let’s discuss a brief history of their experiences and talk through some statistics. Let’s get into it!

Key Words

American Indian, Native, Native American, Indigenous American: All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus, however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms American Indian or indigenous American are preferred by many Native people.

Historical Trauma: This theory purports that some Native Americans are experiencing historical loss symptoms (e.g., depression, substance dependence, diabetes, dysfunctional parenting, unemployment) as a result of the cross-generational transmission of trauma from historical losses (e.g., loss of population, land, and culture). The current problems facing the Native American people may be the result of “a legacy of chronic trauma and unresolved grief across generations” enacted on them by the European dominant culture.

Let’s Get Into It

A Brief History

Boarding Schools for Native Children

• For the last 500 years, individuals from the dominant European cultures have engaged in behaviors that have resulted in the purposeful and systematic destruction of the Native American people (Plous, 2003). Native Americans have been subjected to traumas that have resulted in specific historical losses. These losses include loss of people, loss of land, and loss of family and culture.

• The population of Native Americans in North America decreased by 95% from the time Columbus came to America in 1492 and the establishment of the United States in 1776. (TPC)

• Mourning practices were disrupted when an 1883 federal law prohibited Native Americans from practicing traditional ceremonies (Brave Heart, Chase, Elkins, & Altschul, 2011). This law remained in effect until 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was enacted. This disenfranchised grief has resulted in the Native American people not being able to display traditional grief practices. As a result, subsequent generations have been left with feelings of shame, powerlessness and subordination (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998).

• President Andrew Jackson approved the Indian Removal Act of 1830, forcing the relocation of as many as 100,000 Native Americans.

• By 1876, the U.S. government had obtained the majority of Native American land and the Native American people were forced to either live on reservations or relocate to urban areas. Being relocated to urban areas removed Native American people from all the lives they were familiar with. Leaving their domestic lands led to a decline in socioeconomic status as they were not able to provide for their families, and the families became dependent on goods provided by the U.S. government. These relocations resulted in the death of thousands of Native Americans and the disruption of families. (TPC)

• The intent was to force the Native American people to fully assimilate to the dominant European-American culture and completely abandon their own culture. In 1871 the U.S. congress declared Native Americans wards of the U.S. government, and the U.S. government’s goal became to civilize Native Americans and assimilate them to the dominant White culture. (TPC)

• Government and church-run boarding schools would take Native American children from their families at the age of 4 or 5 and not allow any contact with their Native American relations for a minimum of 8 years. In the boarding schools, Native American children had their hair cut and were dressed like European American children. All sacred items were taken from them and they were forbidden to use their Native language or practice traditional rituals and religions. Many children were abused physically and sexually and developed a variety of problematic coping strategies (e.g., learned helplessness, manipulative tendencies, compulsive gambling, alcohol and drug use, suicide, denial, and scapegoating other Native American children). (TPC)

• The removal of children from their families is considered one of the most devastating traumas that occurred to the Native American people because it resulted in the disruption of the family structure, forced assimilation of children, and a disruption in the Native American community. (TPC)

• Given the substantial historical traumas Native Americans have experienced, experts believe they would be at greater risk of developing physical and emotional concerns related to re-experiencing these traumas. (TPC)

Lack of Culturally Appropriate Messaging

• The Western concept of mental health illnesses may not correspond with the beliefs and interpretations of Native cultures. The words “depressed” and “anxious” are absent from some native languages where alternative expressions such as “ghost sickness” or “heartbreak syndrome” are present. (ADAA)

• Many Indigenous tribes embrace a worldview that encompasses the notions of connectedness (with the past and with others), strong family bonds, adaptability, oneness with nature, wisdom of elders, meaningful traditions and strong spirit that may serve as protective factors when it comes to mental health. (ADAA)

• According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Native/Indigenous people may express emotional distress in ways that are not consistent with standard diagnostic categories.”

• Native people who meet the criteria for depression, anxiety, or substance abuse disorders are much more likely to seek help from a spiritual and/or traditional healer than from specialty or other medical sources. (ADAA) This reminded me of the connection between the church and the Black community as a solution to mental illness facilitated by the community.

• Lack of awareness about mental health issues and services that are available and a lack of programs and providers that are sensitive to native and indigenous culture can prevent Indigenous people from receiving treatment.

Facts & Figures

• Approximately 1.3% of the U.S. population, or roughly 4.2 million Americans, identify themselves as having Native American or Alaska Native heritage. (Mental Health America)

• Native/Indigenous people in America report experiencing serious psychological distress 2.5 times more than the general population over a month’s time. (Mental Health America)

• Suicide rates among Native Americans are 3.2 times higher than the national average. (TPC)

• Native/Indigenous people in America start to use and abuse alcohol and other drugs at younger ages, and at higher rates, than all other ethnic groups. (Mental Health America) Native American adults reported that in the last 30 days, 44% used alcohol, 31% engaged in binge drinking, and 11% used an illicit drug. abuse of alcohol by Native individuals may be related to loss of cultural identity, history of abuse and neglect, self-medication due to feelings of hopelessness, and loss of family and tribal connections. (TPC)

• Compared to non-Hispanic whites, nearly 3 times as many Native/Indigenous people had no health insurance – 5.9% compared to 14.9%. Approximately 43 percent of Native/Indigenous people in America rely on the Medicaid or public coverage. (Mental Health America)

• Domestic violence and physical and sexual assault are three-and-a-half times higher than the national average in Native American communities. (TPC)

• Fewer Native Americans have a high school education than the total U.S. population; an even smaller percentage has obtained a bachelor’s degree: 11% compared with 24% of the total population. (TPC)

• Almost 26% of Native Americans live in poverty compared to 12% for the entire U.S. population. (TPC)

Action Steps

Learn about the Indigenous community! If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that a lot was missing from our grade school textbooks, and the atrocities committed against the Native community has been, and continues to be, heinous. Learn about what has happened in the past and what continues to happen to these vulnerable communities today.

Next week, we close out of conversation on mental health by discussing the Latinx community. As a Puerto Rican and Dominican person—Black, Spanish and Indigenous Taino—I find myself at the intersection of all of these identities and am really glad we focused on each specific group in more detail. See you next time!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Mental Health in the Black Community

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 18 of this newsletter! I decided to turn this into a series on mental health in BIPOC communities. BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous or people of color. And while this term does have some controversy around inclusivity and specificity, I think it applies here. This week, we will focus on Mental Health in the Black Community. From generational trauma to coping mechanisms and stigmas, there is a lot to dive in to. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Generational Trauma: This is trauma that isn’t just experienced by one person but extends from one generation to the next. In 1966, Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff, MD, and her colleagues recorded high rates of psychological distress among children of Holocaust survivors, and the concept of generational trauma was first recognized. Trauma affects genetic processes, leading to traumatic reactivity being heightened in populations who experience a great deal of trauma.

Sterilization: A process or act that renders an individual incapable of sexual reproduction. Forced sterilization occurs when a person is sterilized after expressly refusing the procedure, without her knowledge or is not given an opportunity to provide consent.

Lobotomy: Lobotomy was an umbrella term for a series of different operations that purposely damaged brain tissue in order to treat mental illness. It is is a neurosurgical operation that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal lobe.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: P.T.S.S. is a theory that explains the etiology of many of the adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities throughout the United States and the Diaspora. It is a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery. A form of slavery which was predicated on the belief that African Americans were inherently/genetically inferior to whites. This was then followed by institutionalized racism which continues to perpetuate injury.

Let’s Get Into It

A Brief History

• In 1848 John Galt, a physician and medical director of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia, offered that “blacks are immune to mental illness.” Galt hypothesized that enslaved Africans could not develop mental illness because as enslaved people, they did not own property, engage in commerce, or participate in civic affairs such as voting or holding office. According to Galt and others at that time, the risk of “lunacy” would be highest in those populations who were emotionally exposed to the stress of profit making, principally wealthy white men.

• Dr. Benjamin Rush diagnosed Negritude which he described as the irrational desire by Blacks to become white.

• Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a pro-slavery physician diagnosed Drapetomania, a disease that caused enslaved blacks to flee their plantations and Dysaethesia Aethiopia, a disease that purportedly caused a state of dullness and lethargy, which would now be considered depression. He argued that severe whipping was the typically the best “treatment” for both conditions.

• Most pre-Civil War mental health facilities in the South usually barred the enslaved for treatment. Apparently mental health experts believed that housing Blacks and whites in the same facilities would detrimentally affect the healing of the whites.

• In 1895, Dr. T.O. Powell, the superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum observed an increase in insanity and consumption (tuberculosis) among Black people which he attributed to three decades of freedom. He argued that when the former slaves got their freedom, it caused them to have little or no control over their appetites and passions and thus led to a rise in insanity.

• In the 1930s Black Americans diagnosed as insane were the most widely sterilized group. Although sterilization lost some of its appeal when it was discovered Nazi Germany embraced the practice on a wide scale, by the 1970s some states in the South, including notably North Carolina and Alabama. In North Carolina in the 1960s, for example, more than 85% of those legally sterilized were Black women.

• Black Americans were victims of lobotomies from the 1930s to the 1960s.Dr. Frank Ervin, a psychiatrist, and two neurosurgeons, Drs. Vernon Mark and William Sweet ignored the systematic oppression, poverty, discrimination, and police brutality of the 1960s and argued that this violence was the result of a surgically-treatable brain disorder and promoted their agenda as a specific contribution to ending the political unrest of the period. While never widely accepted and practiced, some lobotomies were performed on Black children as young as five years old who exhibited aggressive or hyperactive behaviors.

• Today, Black Americans have a distrust of the medical system due to historical abuses of Black people in the guise of health care, less access to adequate insurance, culturally responsive mental health providers, financial burden, and past history with discrimination in the mental health system. (Columbia)

Generational Trauma

A growing body of research suggests that traumatic experiences can cause profound biological changes in the person experiencing the traumatic event. Cutting edge researchers are also beginning to understand how these physiological changes are genetically encoded and passed down to future generations. (Columbia)

Watch this 5 minute video for some truly amazing insight to generational trauma and what Dr. Joy DeGruy calls Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.

Stigma

Instead of seeking mental health care, useful strategies including religious coping and methods such as pastoral guidance and prayer often are the most preferred coping mechanism in the Black community. These ideas often lead people to believe that a mental health condition is a personal weakness due to negative stereotypes of instability and attitudes of rejection. Individuals may be more likely to believe that since they’ve survived so much adversity, they’re strong—and no one has a right to tell them that there is something wrong with them. (Columbia)

Due to a reasonable distrust of the medical system stemming from all of the past history discussed earlier, the church was consistently a place to go when there was nowhere else for Black people to seek refuge. Moreover, given that the Black community exists at the intersection of racism, classism, and health inequity, their mental health needs are often exacerbated and mostly unfulfilled. (Columbia)

The Black community, in particular, is at significantly increased risk of developing a mental health issue due to historical, economic, social, political influences that systemically expose the Black community to factors known to be damaging to psychological and physical health. Research consistently shows that these disparities are not a new phenomenon and have been present for generations. (Columbia)

Facts & Figures

• 25% of African Americans seek mental health care, compared to 40% of whites. (McLean)

• The adult Black community is 20% more likely to experience serious mental health problems, such as Major Depressive Disorder or Generalized Anxiety Disorder than their white counterparts. (McLean)

• The Black community comprises approximately 40% of the homeless population, 50% of the prison population, and 45% of children in the foster care system. (McLean)

• Only 1 in 3 Black Americans who could benefit from mental health treatment receive it. (McLean)

• Black individuals are less frequently included in research, which means their experiences with symptoms or treatments are less likely to be taken into consideration. (McLean)

• They’re also more likely to go to the emergency room or talk to their primary care physician when they’re experiencing mental health issues, rather than seeing a mental health professional. (McLean)

• Black individuals are also more likely to be misdiagnosed by treatment providers. This can fuel the distrust toward mental health professionals as a misdiagnosis can lead to poor treatment outcomes. (McLean)

• Black individuals are more likely to have involuntary treatment, whether it is forced inpatient or outpatient treatment. This contributes to the stigma, hostility, and lack of willingness to voluntarily seek care. (McLean)

• In the 1990s, a public opinion poll found that 63% of African Americans believed depression was a personal weakness and only 31% believed it was a health problem. (McLean)

• Today suicide rates in African American children aged 5-11 years have increased steadily since the 1980s and are now double those of their Caucasian counterparts.

Action Steps

Bring awareness to the use of stigmatizing language around mental illness

Educate family, friends, and colleagues about the unique challenges of mental illness within the Black community

Become aware of our own attitudes and beliefs to reduce implicit bias and negative assumptions

Rescources

Through their partnerships with Therapy for Black Girls, National Queer & Trans Therapists of Color Network, Talkspace and Open Path Collective, Loveland Therapy Fund recipients have access to a comprehensive list of mental health professionals across the country providing high quality, culturally competent services to Black women and girls.

The Loveland Foundation

Next week, we continue to talk about the history, trauma and stigma that plagues people of color when it comes to seeking and being adequately treated for mental health concerns. Personally, I’ve been very transparent about my mental health care, and feel like psychotherapy has been a fundamental part to my processing, healing and growing through both personal and generational trauma. I’ll see you next week to talk about Mental Health in the Indigenous Community.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Prison Reform: 2

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 17 of this newsletter! This is our second consecutive week focusing on the topic of Prison Reform. In case you missed the last newsletter, when we talk about prison reform, we are referring to the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of the prison system, implement alternatives to incarceration and find ways to reinstate convicted individuals back into society after they serve their sentence.

Last week, we talked about the history of the prison system in The United States, this week, I want to focus more specifically on current prison conditions and the reform that folks are pushing for. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

“Three Strikes, You’re Out”: Starting with Washington in 1993, over half the states and the federal government enacted “three strikes” laws. The exact application of the three-strikes laws varies considerably from state to state, but the laws call for life sentences for at least 25 years on their third strike. In California, for example, it required that a person convicted of a felony who has two or more prior convictions for certain offenses must be sentenced to at least 25 years to life in state prison, even if the third offense is nonviolent. People have been sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting a pair of socks or stealing bread. More than two-thirds of people serving federal life or virtual life sentences today were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including 30% for a drug crime.

Recidivism: The re-arrest, reconviction, or re-incarceration of an ex-offender within a given time frame.

Let’s Get Into It

The Current Situation: Bail

• The amount of bail depends on the severity of the crime but is also at the judge's discretion which means it is not standardized.

• Bail amounts vary widely, with a nationwide median of around $10,000 for felonies (though much higher for serious charges) and less for misdemeanors (in some places such as New York City, typically under $2,000, though much higher in some jurisdictions). (Vox)

• Bailed-out suspects commonly must comply with "conditions of release." If a suspect violates a condition, a judge may revoke bail and order the suspect re-arrested and returned to jail.

• Sometimes people are released "on their own recognizance," or "O.R." A defendant released on O.R. must simply sign a promise to show up in court and is not required to post bail.

• Historically, Black and brown defendants have been more likely to be jailed before trial than white defendants. (Prison Policy)

• As of 2002 (the last time the government collected this data nationally), about 29% of people in local jails were unconvicted – that is, locked up while awaiting trial or another hearing. Approx 7 in 10 (69%) of these detainees were people of color. (Prison Policy)

• Unconvicted defendants now make up about two-thirds (65%) of jail populations nationally. (Prison Policy)

• As people await court hearings for months or even years, they suffer from inadequate medical care, dangerous conditions, and many lose their jobs and housing. (Vox)

• They also have a higher chance of being convicted than if they hadn’t been assigned bail, as they take plea bargains just to get out of jail, whether or not they actually committed a crime. (Vox)

Reform: Bail

• Current bail practices are unconstitutional in violating due process rights and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, the prohibition against excessive bail in the Eighth Amendment, and the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. (ACLU)

• Organizations like the ACLU are specifically focused on ending in for-profit bail bond companies and the insurance companies who back them because the directly profit by providing bail, with high interest, for thee most vulnerable individuals who could not pay bail otherwise.

• Most folks agree on one solution, end cash bail. Especially because bail is not even seen as an effective method for guaranteeing people return for trial. The Bail Project has an amazing reimagining for pretrial justice.

The Current Situation: Prison Conditions, The Death Penalty And Punishment

Doing this research was heartbreaking. I was genuinely covering my eyes afraid to see conditions of America’s prisons. I just want to stress that these are human beings being put in the most inhumane and frightening circumstances. A blurb in a newsletter honestly cannot do adequate justice to the dignity that these people deserve.

• Private prisons house 8.2% (121,420) of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons. Private prison corporations reported revenues of nearly $4 billion in 2017. The private prison population is on the rise, despite growing evidence that private prisons are less safe, do not promote rehabilitation, and do not save taxpayers money. (EJI)

• The fastest-growing incarcerated population is people detained by immigration officials. (EJI)

• People who need medical care, help managing their disabilities, mental health and addiction treatment, and suicide prevention are denied care, ignored, punished, and placed in solitary confinement.

• More than half of all Americans in prison or jail have a mental illness.

• Incarcerated people are beaten, stabbed, raped, and killed in facilities run by corrupt officials who abuse their power with impunity. These are some examples taken from the Equal Justice Initiative:

  • Prisoners being handcuffed, stripped naked, and then beaten by guards (EJI)

  • Correctional officers forcing young incarcerated men to perform sex acts and threatening to file disciplinary charges against them if they refused or reported the abuse (EJI)

  • Correctional officers caught engaging in physical or sexual misconduct are often being transferred to other facilities, not fired (EJI)

  • Drugs and other contraband are often brought into the prisons and sold to prisoners by officers or staff (EJI)

  • Cuts are constantly been made to mental health and drug treatment services and rehabilitative programming, and recreation including the removal of books and other resources (EJI)

  • Sexual abuse including female inmates being raped and impregnated by male correctional officers and female inmates viewed showering and using the bathroom is frighteningly common and often unreported out of fear (EJI)

• Excessive punishments, especially for drug-related offenses

• Wrongful convictions are also an issue with the current prison system. Read more about them here.

• Despite growing bipartisan support for criminal justice reform, the private prison industry continues to block meaningful proposals.

The Death Penalty

• Black Americans make up 42% of people on death row and 34% of those executed, but only 13% of the population in America is Black. (EJI)

• The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions.

• By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time. Two-thirds of people executed in the 1930s were Black, and the trend continued.

• For every 9 people executed, there is 1 person found innocent on death row. (EJI)

• Children were executed in the U.S. until 2005, and only in the last decade has the Supreme Court limited death-in-prison sentences for children. Kids as young as 8 can still be charged as an adult, held in an adult jail, and sentenced to extreme sentences in an adult prison.

Excessive Punishment For Drug-Related Crimes

• According to the ACLU’s original analysis, marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana.

• An estimated 40,000 people today are incarcerated for marijuana offenses even as: the overall legal cannabis industry is booming; one state after another is legalizing; and cannabis companies are making healthy profits. (Forbes)

Reform: Prison Conditions

• The Centre for Justice and Reconciliation believes restorative justice can be achieved with these improvements:

  • Reduce Idleness: Reduce idleness and increase recreational activity in prisons

  • Classify Prisoners: Classify prisoners by their level of risk, lower risk groups require less security

  • Improve Sanitation: Improve sanitation and healthcare

  • Grow Food: Grow food and raise livestock to both improve nutrition and provide a skillful activity

  • Use Volunteers: Have volunteers create programming

  • Train Staff: Train staff beyond disciplinary measures

  • Review Cases: Reduce the number of non-sentenced prisoners by establishing a process for lawyers, prosecutors and judges to review the legal status of individual detainees

  • Speed Release: Speedily release those awaiting trail by organizing volunteer lawyers or paralegal volunteers to help inmates prepare for bail hearings

  • Increase Alternatives: Use alternative community-based punishments rather than prison for non-dangerous offenders

  • Use Furloughs: Permit trustworthy prisoners to leave during the day or weekends for employment, family visitation or community service activities

• Other recommendations for reform include increasing transparency to the public, treating the mentally ill in other facilities and ways rather than imprisoning them with little to no resources, making sure prisons are completely drug free to allow for rehabilitation, having a 0 tolerance policy with abusive correctional officers, creating a better schooling and vocational program, ending solitary confinement, rehabilitating communities of color where there are vulnerable ex-convicts.

The Current Situation: Re-Entry Back Into Society

• Within three years of release, 67.8% of ex-offenders are rearrested, and within five years, 76.6% are rearrested. (Simmons University)

• After you are legally a convicted felon, rights that you lose include: voting rights, right to bear arms, the ability to work in certain jobs and the difficulty of having to disclose your record on all job applications, the ability to receive student loans or financial aid, serving on a jury, traveling outside of the country (you can obtain a passport but travel restrictions may deny a convict admission), parental rights.

• According to the Bureau of Justice, only 12.5% of employers said they would accept an application from an ex-convict. (Simmons University)

• Phone calls and written communication to and from prisons are very expensive because of surcharges from companies and/or the prisons themselves. Because of this, inmates are often estranged from their family and have a harder time bonding and connecting after release.(Simmons University)

• Advances in technology, living will less regimented structure, unrealistic expectations, shifts in the home dynamics, and other large changes make it difficult to reintegrate and the prison system does not privide adequate support.

• 82% of prisoners expected that their parole officers would help in their transition home, after release only about half reported that their parole officers were helpful during their transitions. (Simmons University)

• Many ex-offenders are not given a new driver’s license simply because of their criminal record, but yet must drive to work, or drive to see their parole officers. They receive fines for driving without a license, which contributes to their debt and complicates their access to a license. (Simmons University)

Reform: Re-Entry Back Into Society

• Many of the challenges facing ex-offenders are systemic and require policy changes and a shift away from the attitude that punishment should continue after sentences have been served.

• People need support from the prison system and federal government when being released — from finding a job (without being discriminated against) to finding safe housing and becoming self sufficient.

• “Ban the Box” is a national campaign against continued punishment in hiring that calls for employers to remove the box on job applications that requires applicants to disclose criminal records.

• Programs like The Prison University Project help inmates earn college degrees while incarcerated. A 2013 National Criminal Justice Reference Service study found that when inmates complete degrees before re-entering society, recidivism rates substantially decrease.

• The “Ride Home Program External” in California employs ex-offenders to pick up inmates on the day of their release so they can get them home, but also help facilitate their transition to life on the outside.

• This start-up, Pigeonly, makes it less expensive to stay in contact with inmates.

Ultimately, the prison system in America is cruel. It strips humans of their rights and dignity and once they serve their time, these people are told they are still not able to be reinstated as full members of society. From bail, to the violent prison system, and ultimately through re-entry, these individuals, especially Black and brown people, are treated subhuman.

ACTION STEPS

It takes a few minutes to sign these petitions, don’t hesitate, make the time now.

• Bail Bond Industry Petition

• Support The Sentencing Reform And Corrections Act

• Protect Incarcerated People From COVID-19

• Support The Second Look Act

RESOURCES

• Prosecutors Need To Take The Lead In Reforming Prisons From "The Atlantic"

• After Cash Bail: A Framework For Reimagining Pretrial Justice

• Action Steps From The Sentencing Project

SUPPORT

I’ve personally donate almost $1,000 to The Bail Project in the last 6 months through fundraising classes, donation matching, and my own personal contributions. As you read above, the cash bail system is horrific. It’s responsible for the deaths of Sandra Bland, who could not pay her $515 bail and died in jail, and Kalief Browder, a 16 year old child who was stopped by police and accused of robbery, and ended up spending three years on Rikers Island as he awaited trial, because he could not afford bail. He was brutalized and suffered injuries both physically and emotionally, eventually committing suicide at home after the prosecutor dropped all charges and released him. Donate today.

THE BAIL PROJECT

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Prison Reform: 1

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 16 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Prison Reform. Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of the prison system, implement alternatives to incarceration and find ways to reinstate convicted individuals back into society after they serve their sentence.

I’ve talked about the Prison Industrial Complex before, but because there is so much to unpack here, this will be a 2-week long topic. This week I will share more resources on the history of our current prison system in America and the ways in which scholars, activists and prisoners have linked the exception clause in the 13th Amendment to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor. Next week, I will talk about prison conditions and the specific areas of reform we are fighting for.

On a personal note, reform is a key cause for me and something I have and will continue to advocate for for the rest of my life. Angela Davis said, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings,” and the ways in which human beings are so reduced, mistreated, tortured and killed in our prisons cannot be accepted. Let’s get into it.

Key Terms

Prison: An institution (such as one under state jurisdiction) for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes. So if you’re sentenced and serving your time, it’s probably in a prison.

Jail: Such a place under the jurisdiction of a local government (such as a county) for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes. So if you’ve committed a minor offense and are awaiting trial, it’s probably in a jail.

Bail: Bail works by releasing a defendant in exchange for money that the court holds until all proceedings and trials surrounding the accused person are complete. That means if a defendant goes to all of their proceedings and trials, they get their money back. The amount of bail depends on the severity of the crime but is also at the judge's discretion which means it is not standardized. If you cannot pay bail, you must stay in jail until trial.

Surety Bond: When a defendant cannot afford bond, they can contact a bail agent or bail bondsman. A bail agent is backed by a special type of insurance company called a surety company and pledges to pay the full value of the bond if the accused doesn't appear in court. In return, the bail agent charges his client a 10 percent premium and collects some sort of collateral like a house or car.

Corporal Punishment: Physical punishment.

War on Drugs: The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Richard Nixon started the “War on Drugs” and his domestic policy chief was quotes saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

The Black Codes: Restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.

Chain Gangs: Chain gangs were groups of convicts forced to labor at tasks such as road construction, ditch digging, or farming while chained together. Some chain gangs toiled at work sites near the prison, while others were housed in transportable jails such as railroad cars or trucks. Chain gangs minimized the cost of guarding prisoners, but exposed prisoners to painful ulcers and dangerous infections from the heavy shackles around their ankles.

Let’s Get Into It

A Brief History Of Prisons In America

Scroll down for more details on the prison system in relation to slavery and its impact on Black Americans specifically. 

• In colonial America, fining and corporal punishment were used as repercussions to crimes. This included whippings and hangings.

• In the 1800s prisons were more common over physical punishments or the death penalty, but prisoners shared common spaces and had access to goods like alcohol.

• In 1820, New York implemented the Auburn system named after Auburn State Prison where it was utilized. This was a system in which prisoners were confined in separate cells and prohibited from talking when eating and working together. They worked together in groups during the day and were in solitary confinement at night. The goal was supposedly rehabilitation and reflection. This system was widely adopted.

• In the 1860s, prisons were overcrowded and it was clear that reform and rehabilitation were not the focus. Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight implemented an education program focused on vocational training to remedy this problem.

• In the early 1900s, psychiatrists started to treat prisoners but most methods were the same including restraining and solitary confinement. Probation was introduced at this time.

• The 1950s brought a series of riots and an outcry for prison reform. Since the 1960s the prison population in the US has risen steadily, even during periods where the crime rate has fallen.

• The 1970s “War on Drugs” resulted in more densely packed prisons.

• By 2010, the United States had more prisoners than any other country and a greater percentage of its population was in prison than in any other country in the world. (Prison Policy Initiative)

• Today, 6 out of 10 people in U.S. jails—nearly a half million individuals on any given day—are awaiting trial. People who have not been found guilty of the charges against them account for 95% of all jail population growth between 2000-2014. (PJI)

The 13th Amendment And The Exploitation Of Black Americans

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

• The 13th Amendment abolished slavery (but not really) in 1865. That same year, The Black Codes were passed and things like not showing respect, “malicious mischief” or loitering were offenses that landed newly freed slaves in prison. (History)

• Many plantations in the south converted into prisons and stayed that way for over 100 years. The Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation, was founded by Terrell Don Hutto, who ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan in Texas until 1971. For-profit private prisons are concerned only with profit, not with rehabilitation. One prisoner wrote in his memoir that, as soon as the prison was privatized, his jailers “laid aside all objects of reformation and re-instated the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.”(Time)

• States put prisoners to work through a practice called “convict-leasing,” whereby white planters and industrialists “leased” prisoners to work for them. States and private businesses made money doing this, but prisoners didn’t. Convict leasing ended in 1910, however, companies like Whole Foods, Starbucks and Victoria Secret have benefited from prison labor in the past. (PBS)

• Today — we see modern convict-leasing in cases such as California using incarcerated people as firefighters, saving the state $100 Million per year with their unpaid labor. The inmates earn $2 a day while in the camps and $1 an hour when out battling fires. (KQED)

Statistics

• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its incarcerated population. (EJI)

• 32% of the US population is represented by Black and Hispanic people, compared to 56% of the US incarcerated population being represented by Black and Hispanic people. (NAACP)

• A Black man is more than 5 times more likely to go to prison is his life than a white man. (US Department of Justice)

• Compared to white men charged with the same crime and with the same criminal histories, Black men receive bail amounts 35% higher; for Hispanic men, bail is 19% higher than white men. (PJI)

• People who cannot afford bond receive harsher case outcomes. They are 3 - 4 times more likely to receive a sentence to jail or prison, and their sentences are 2 - 3 times longer.(PJI)

Support

Support the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI strives to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States. They fight for those who have been wrongfully convicted, especially Black Americans. They are champions of prison reform from fighting against the death penalty to fighting for children in adult prisons to improving prison conditions.

Support The Bail Project. The Bail project combats mass incarceration through their national revolving bail fund. Remember that statistic earlier about 6 out of 10 people in U.S. jails—nearly a half million individuals on any given day—are awaiting trial? Those individuals, who are innocent until proven guilty, should be awaiting trial at home, and would be if they could pay for bail.

Next week, I’ll be talking more about Prison Reform, specifically current prison conditions and the ways in which amazing organizations like EJI and The Bail Project, amongst others, are fighting for reform in various areas, as well as ways you can fight too. I’ll see you there.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Scientific Racism

“Common sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its presence in a Negro. . . .Tried by all the usual, and all the unusual tests, whether mental, moral, physical, or psychological, the Negro is a MAN...Fashion is not confined to dress; but extends to philosophy as well—and it is fashionable now, in our land, to exaggerate the differences between the Negro and the European.”

— Frederick Douglass

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 15 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Scientific Racism. Scientific racism is the pseudoscientific belief that evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Most of these claims about Black people were made to justify slavery, segregation and the torture that they endured at the hands of doctors and scientists. From forced sterilization to experimentation to the current day stereotypes that pervade American culture, these false scientific claims have real world repercussions. In this newsletter, we are going to dive into a few key terms, talk through a brief history of scientific racism in America, summarize some of the outrageous claims that this fake science championed and discuss how the ghosts of these lies still haunt Black people today. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Pseudoscience: Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method and often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims.

Physiognomy:The practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face.

Eugenics: The practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population.

Ethnic Cleansing: The attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups.

Genocide: An internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The word “genocide” was coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin who sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder during the Holocaust. He formed the word genocide by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing.

Polygenism: A theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins. This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.

Let’s Get Into It

A Brief History

• Beginning around the end of the 1790’s, as Enlightenment rationalism replaced faith and superstition as the source of authority and science became the preferred method for reconciling the difference between principle and practice.

• During chattel-slavery (1776-1865) scientific racism was used to defend the use of Black humans for hard labor. We’ll talk about that in more detail below.

• In 1917, American health officials in El Paso, Texas, launched a campaign to use toxic chemicals, including gasoline baths, to disinfect immigrants seeking to enter the United States through the US-Mexico border. This was because Mexicans were seen as dirty and disease ridden and in the wake of eugenics research, immigration officials sought to keep these people out. This campaign lasted well into the 1960s from the forced kerosene baths to the use of the poisonous gas Zyklon B to the fumigations of migrant workers. These “gasoline baths” later inspired Nazi scientist.

• Eugenics took hold in America in the late 19th century, and led to strict immigration policy, foreced sterilizations for those with physical and mental disabilities and even a supreme court ruling in favor of these steralizations until 1942. In the 1930s Puerto Rican women were sterilized without their consent by the thousands. According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.

• In the early 20th century, Scientists claimed interracial marriages could cause genetic “disharmony”, one example was that of someone from a tall race marrying someone from a short race and their offspring inheriting the genes for large internal organs from one parent and for small stature from the other causing sickness. Interracial marriage was illegal in America until 1967’s Loving Vs. Virginia.

We know that racists have cited many works supported by scientific racism to justify segregation in the community, separate schooling, incarceration and the overall oppression of marginalized groups. This is the most summarized history of scientific racism I could piece together, but as always, if something piques your interest, I hope you continue learning!

Claims Made Using Scientific Racism

• Slaves are more accustomed to warm weather and toiling in the sun, being from African, and they can withstand the sunlight better because they have an eye feature like those found in apes. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright (1815). (CHSTM + Washington Post)

• Drapetomania is a sickness that causes slaves to runaway and is only curable with physical punishment. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright (1815). (Washington Post)

• Slaves have no imagination or taste, are lustful but do not know how to love, and can tolerate more pain than other races. Ultimately either the Black or white race would have to be extinct for the other to survive. Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson in “Notes on the State of Virginia”.

• Black people are impervious to pain and have weak lungs that can be strengthened through hard work and intense labor. (NY Times)

• British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” To drive home his point, he added, “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” (NY Times)

• In his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” the physician J. Marion Sims— long celebrated as the father of modern gynecology—also claimed Black people could withstand more pain. He described the agony Black women suffered as he cut their genitals again and again in an attempt to perfect a surgical technique to repair vesico-vaginal fistula, which can be an extreme complication of childbirth. (NY Times)

How This Impacts Black Americans Today

• Cartwright (yeah, the same doctor that diagnosed Drapetomania) wanted to validate his theory about lung inferiority in Black people, so he measured pulmonary function with an instrument called a spirometer, that he designed. He calculated that “the deficiency in the Negro may be safely estimated at 20 percent.” Today most spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the assumption that Black people have less lung capacity than whites. (Breathing Race Into the Machine)

• Present-day doctors fail to sufficiently treat the pain of Black adults and children for many medical issues due to the remanence of slavery claiming Black people were stronger, tougher, had thicker skin and felt less pain. (AMA Journal)

• A 2016 survey of 222 white medical students and residents showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s. When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that Black people felt less pain. (PNAS)

• Stereotypes that pervade pop culture like Black people being pomiscusous, having larger genitals, being better athletes or stronger or less intelligent are all myths that remain from the studies of scientific racism.

Due to scientific racism, we are left with stereotypes that are so ingrained in American culture that even some of our best doctors and lawmakers believe them to be fact. From disparities in healthcare to mistreatment in the education system to the simple everyday practice of crossing the street when you see a Black person because something tells you they’re more likely to be a criminal—the lies of scientific racism pervades our current culture.

I highly encourage you to take a look at some resources Alok recently shared about physiognomy and eugenics and how those pseudosciences have and continue to oppress marginalized groups, with them specifically relating it to the queer and trans experience.

On Friday, we’ll be talking about Prison Reform. This is such an important topic to discuss because not only are Black and brown bodies disproportionately filling America’s prisons, but they are more likely to be arrested, victims of excessive force, and murdered by police. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite organizations at the front-lines of this work and ways to make an impact. See you there!

Microaggressions

“I do not use ‘microaggression’ anymore...A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor...Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.”

— Ibram X. Kendi, "How To Be An Antiracist"

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 14 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Microaggression. This is one of the most common topics I have been asked to write about or discuss over the past few months because microaggressions are so incredibly common. What makes microaggressions different from other rude actions or comments? They're something very specific: the kinds of remarks, questions, or actions that are painful because they have to do with a person's membership in a group that's discriminated against and because they are rooted in stereotypes. A key part of what makes them so disconcerting is that they happen casually, frequently, and in everyday life. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Microaggressions: A subtle, often unintentional, form of prejudice. Rather than an overt declaration of racism or sexism, a microaggression often takes the shape of an offhanded comment, an inadvertently painful joke, or a pointed insult. 

Microassaults: Conscious and intentional discriminatory actions: using racial epithets, displaying white supremacist symbols—swastikas, or preventing one's son or daughter from dating outside of their race.

Microinsults: Verbal, nonverbal, and environmental communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity that demean a person's racial heritage or identity. An example is an employee who asks a co-worker of color how he/she got his/her job, implying he/she may have landed it through an affirmative action or quota system.

Microinvalidations: Communications that subtly exclude negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color. For instance, white people often ask Latinos where they were born, conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own land.

Implicit Bias: The attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. They are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control and reside deep in the subconscious. The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages, early life experiences, the media and news programming.

Tokenism: The practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a marginalized group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.

Toxic Positivity: Positivity becomes toxic when it is implied that we should always look on the bright side at all times and not allow ourselves to feel difficult emotions. The downside of positivity culture is that it can vilify the normal range of human emotional experience. Toxic positivity undermines the pain of others. Example: We are all one human race, I don’t see color. Let’s focus on the positives instead of always talking about oppression.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Redlining

“The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that ‘a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood ... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.’ A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesireables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters - and ‘a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.’”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 13 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Redlining. The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Anywhere where Black Americans lived were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages. Let’s get into it.

Key Terms

were too risky to insure mortgages. Let’s get into it.

Key Terms

Redlining: The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Black inner-city neighborhoods were most likely to be redlined. Investigations found that lenders would make loans to lower-income Whites but not to middle- or upper-income African Americans. The result of this redlining in real estate could still be felt decades later. Examples of redlining can be found in a variety of financial services, including not only mortgages but also student loans, credit cards, and insurance. 

The Fair Housing Act (FHA): Titles VIII through IX of the Civil Rights Act. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex.

Racially Restrictive Covenants: Contracts placed in the deeds of homes by white property owners or developers that barred purchasers from selling or renting to ethnic and religious minorities.

Eminent Domain: The right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation. Eminent domain ''appertains to every independent government.  It requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty.”

Supermarket Redlining: Highlights how the locational decisions of food retailers are evidence of intentional disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Historically, supermarkets grew up along with the suburbs, relying on the sprawling, car dependent landscape of these low density communities. Supermarkets were created with suburban residents in mind, and so the forces that created the suburbs also shaped our food shopping options.

Let’s Get Into It

Timeline

Most Americans acquire wealth from the equity they have in their homes or land, but up until as late as the 1960’s, Black Americans were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs and denied loans. Let’s break down the timeline and the results of these racist policies:

• 1930’s: The term “redlining” was not yet in the lexicon but was actively happening. This dividing up of maps was created to tell banks where it was safe to insure mortgages. Anywhere Black people lived was considered too risky.

• 1940’s + 1950’s: Homes in the suburbs sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with a mortgage. Many Black families were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. 

• 1968: The Fair Housing Act is passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It's an empty promise because those homes are no longer affordable to the families that could have afforded them twenty years earlier when white families were buying into those suburbs and gaining the equity and the wealth that followed from that.

• Today: Those same homes sell for, on average, six to eight times the national median income.

• Today: On average, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family.

Black Communities That Have Been Destroyed

Way before redlining, there were policies and tactics used to make sure Black people did not acquire wealth. All of the communities below were owned—and then destroyed—all before The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was even a thought.

• Seneca Village, Modern Day Central Park (1854): In the mid 19th century, New York City decided it needed a park.  By the time the decision to create a park was made, there wasn’t enough empty space left in Manhattan. So the city chose a stretch of land where the largest settlement was Seneca Village, population 264, and seized the land under the law of eminent domain. Two thirds of the population was Black; the rest Irish. 50% of the heads of households owned the land they lived on, a fact conveniently ignored by the media of the time, who described the population as “squatters” and the settlement as “n***er village”.

• Black Wall Street (1921):  Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street, was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States. O.W. Gurley purchased 40 acres of land in 1906 and only sold it to Black people. There were banks, hotels, cafés, clothiers, movie theaters, contemporary homes, indoor plumbing and an advanced school system. Six Black families were even said to have owned their own airplanes. When a white women said she was raped by a Black man, an angry white mob destroyed thirty-five city blocks. 300 people died, and 800 were injured. The police disregarded due process, arresting blacks and interning them in detention camps; meanwhile, no whites were arrested.

• Bruce’s Beach (1924) : In 1912, Charles and Willa Bruce bought land, between  26th and 27th streets in LA, that they would soon turn into a resort for Black people in a time when beaches were segregated. In 1924, Manhattan Beach took over the resort via eminent domain. The city tore the resort down three years later. In 2007, this travesty was finally acknowledged by the city and commemorated by renaming it Bruce's Beach.

• Los Angeles Highways (1944): In 1910 approx 36% of L.A.’s Black population were homeowners in diverse communities (For context, this is during segregation, when the Jim Crow south was still in full swing and would continue for over 50 years.) To compare, in New York City, only 2.4% of Black residence were homeowners. LA’s red car system of public transportation offered easy, unsegregated access to the region’s growing economic opportunities. When the 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act allocated funds for 1,938 miles of freeways in California, planners used the opportunity, with full federal support, to obliterate these communities. Officials justified these actions as “slum clearance.” Freeways created physical barriers that made any non-white presence on the “white” side of the road conspicuous — and thus easier to target by law enforcement. Black and Latinx families were forced to find housing in the already overcrowded, segregated areas of South and East Los Angeles, away from established and emerging job centers — and in the middle of freeway pollution corridors.

• Sugar Hill (1963): The Black population of West Adams Heights started growing in the late 30s, after the Depression, when many historic mansions were for sale. Middle and upper class Black folks from L.A and other American cities began making their homes in West Adams Heights, renaming it ‘Sugar Hill’ as a tribute to Harlem. Sugar Hill became an icon of black Hollywood. Sugar Hill was bisected by the new Santa Monica Freeway, destroying dozens of mansions owned by Black Americans in the process. By 1964, almost all the old families who had called Sugar Hill home had moved away. 

Redlining still affects education—with educational funding tied to property taxes, redlining contributes to the systematic denial of resources to poor and minority neighborhoods. Redlining still affects healthcare—with many communities being located in the most undesirable locations near pollution, it is more likely for these families to develop asthma and other health risks (See my newsletter on Environmental Racism). They’re also often food deserts with little access to fresh produce and healthy options. Redlining is rooted into the fabric of the American landscape, and it is far from gone.

Resources

• Support Hunger Free America's Initiative To End Food Deserts

• Sign Color Of Changes Petition Calling For Credit & Debit Protections During COVID -- Credit Inequality Contributes To The Racial Wealth Gap

Next week, we will be talking about Microaggressions. I can’t believe I haven’t actually written a newsletter about this topic yet! The term microaggression refers to brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards a marginalized group. Odds are if you’re a human being, you’ve said a few microaggressions. Let’s talk about how to spot them, how to advocate for yourself if you’ve been victimized by one, and how to DO BETTER! See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Cultural Appropriation

“The key to understanding what cultural appropriation is (and is not), and why it matters lies not in the fact that traditions are transferred across cultures but in the social context in which this exchange is
happening.”

— Quote Source

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 12 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Cultural Appropriation. Cultural appropriation is a term for when members of one culture adopt attributes of another culture. These elements can include music, attire, food, art, or other iconography. The connotation of appropriation, which is "to take for oneself," differs from honoring or being influenced by other cultures. Most of the time, the question arises, “well how do you know the difference between appreciation and appropriation?” and I never quite knew how to answer that in the right way. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit more about it and see if we can come up with an answer. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Cultural Appropriation: The adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from marginalized cultures. Cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a marginalized culture by members of a dominant culture, these elements are used outside of their original cultural context. Often, members of the originating culture expressly state they do not condone being used in this way because the original meaning of these cultural elements are lost or distorted when they are removed from their originating cultural contexts, and such displays are disrespectful and can even be a form of desecration.

Strategic Antiessentialism: The act of adopting elements of culture outside of your own and using them to define yourself or your group to challenge an imposed cultural identity. Unlike cultural appropriation, strategic anti-essentialism can be practiced by both minority cultures and majority cultures

Antiessentialism: The idea that there is not a single experience shared by members of an identity group that defines what that group is.

Let’s Get Into It

Is it okay to get your hair braided in cornrows when you go on a cruise with your family to the caribbean? Should you have a Luau themed party? Can you dress as an Indian or a Geisha for Halloween? Is it okay to wear big hoop earrings? Should you wear henna? Is it okay to buy that shirt from etsy that says “Pizza is My Spirit Animal” without knowing what a spirit animal is? Can blackface be funny sometimes, like if a famous comedian wears it on a TV show or in a movie?

There’s no rule book on cultural appropriation, but there are some key reasons why it can be offensive and harmful. Let’s talk about where the term comes from, some examples of how it functions in our society, and how we can be more mindful, thoughtful, and conscious, while still appreciating cultures other than our own.

The History Of The Term “Cultural Appropriation”

Cultural diffusion was coined by cultural anthropologist, Edward Tylor, in the late 19th century and describes the human process of transferring elements of culture between societies. There are three mechanisms through which cultural diffusion occurs:

1. Direct diffusion: when two cultures are geographically close to each other, resulting in intermarriage, trade, and even conflict. For example, the exchange of culture, art, music, language, and food between the United States and Mexico.

2. Forced Diffusion: when one culture subjugates another and forces its own customs on the conquered people. For example, colonizers forcing indigenous peoples to adopt their religion.

3. Indirect Diffusion: when traits are passed from one culture to another culture, without the first and final cultures being in direct contact. An example could be the presence of pizza in Indonesia, influenced by global media and the market created by tourists and transplants from North America and Europe.

Examples Of Cultural Appropriation

• When actor Zendaya wore dreadlocks to the Oscars, Fashion Police host, Giuliana Rancic who said, “Like, I feel like she smells like patchouli oil. Or weed.” That same year, Kylie Jenner, was described as “edgy”, “raw”, and “boundary pushing” for wearing dreadlock extensions in her first Teen Vogue cover-shoot. Rancic apologized, citing the cliches and stereotypes she was reinforcing.

• Black children are expelled from school and Black women are fired from their jobs because their hairstyles are seen as unprofessional, yet celebrities like The Kardashians, are constantly praised for their “trendy” incorporation of traditionally Black hairstyles into their daily looks. Kim Kardashian called her Fulani braids “Bo Derek Braids” and after receiving backlash for crediting a white women with this traditional braiding style, captioned her instagram photo “Hi, can i get zero fucks please, thanks”.

• Miley Cyrus took out her dreadlocks, stopped wearing her grills, and denounced her hip-hop persona after wearing it like a Halloween costume by saying “I also love that Kendrick [Lamar] song [‘Humble’]: ‘Show me somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks,’ . . . I love that because it’s not, ‘Come sit on my dick, suck on my cock.’ I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that.” She doesn’t acknowledge hip hops rich history, birthing from the Bronx (where my mom and dad were both raised) in the 1970s. The way it revolutionized music, culture and fashion. Cyrus apologized saying her statements were “insensitive as it is a privilege to have the ability to dip in and out of ‘the scene.'”

I chose all of these examples specifically because their are paired with, what I believe, is the big differentiating factor between appreciating and appropriating culture: a lack of knowledge, understanding and education on the thing you are talking about or the element you are adopting. In my research, I found an article about a Vietnamese and Mexican YouTuber who captioned a photo of her in braids with an acknowledgement and appreciation for Black culture and the fact that many women and girls are expelled or fired for these same hairstyles. In my personal opinion, this seems like cultural appreciation, or a cultural exchange, rather than a taking. But remember, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, especially marginalized individuals who bare the burden of these inequities.

How To Be Mindful

I just got engaged to my Chinese, Korean and Puerto Rican partner, and his mom mentioned me wearing a traditional Chinese dress for a portion of our wedding. Folks might see pictures of that and think I have no ties to that culture, no understanding of that history, and no right to wear those clothes. I can do my research, learn from his family, and accept the invitation to be a part of their traditions, but the outside world might either not know that, or not think it is enough. For me, it’s about taking into consideration these things:

• Do I know what this cultural element means and how it is traditionally used?

• Am I wearing this culture like a costume?

• Am I trying to get a laugh or be funny?

• Have I given credit to the culture that has inspired me through education and acknowledgement?

• Am I profiting off of something that a marginalized group created?

Ultimately, no one knows if you have done the work to adopt an element of another culture in a thoughtful and conscious way, but you know. And if you get it wrong, there is always time to apologize and learn something new while taking responsibility.

Lastly, I leave you with this. When you’re considering a fashion statement, a themed party, a holiday celebration or a Halloween costume, ask yourself the tough questions. Do you need to celebrate “Cinco De Drinko” or can you reconsider how this could still be offensive? Do you have to have a Luau themed party, or can you just have a summer BBQ and instead spend some time learning about the potential detonation of WWII era bombs that could devastate local marine life in Molokini? When Halloween rolls around, instead of being an entire culture embodied in a single stereotypical form, could you be something else? And remember, blackface is never funny or appropriate. Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t always mean you SHOULD.

In Summary…

Cultural appropriation allows people to be rewarded for the heritage and labor of oppressed and marginalized communities, disregards the origins and significance of what is being taken, and embraces the products of a culture while reinforcing or ignoring the prejudice experienced by the people who originated it. When we dismiss the history and impact of cultural appropriation, we are continuing to prioritizing the feelings and desires of privileged communities over the rights of minorities.

Next week, we’re talking about Redlining. The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Black inner-city neighborhoods were most likely to be redlined. See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Colorism

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Week 11 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Colorism. Colorism is not just an American phenomenon limited to our society, it is pervasive throughout the world and a facet of various cultures and ethnicities. At its most basic definition, colorism is the practice of discrimination by which those with lighter skin are treated more favorably than those with darker skin. Today, I will be focusing predominantly on how colorism operates in the context of America, influenced by this country’s history of chattel slavery, but will also mention how it presents itself across the globe. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Colorism: Prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color

White Beauty Standards: When whiteness is the default and becomes the cultural ideal for beauty. Some examples are: straight hair, fair skin, large eyes, slim nose.

Passing: When a person classified as a member of one racial group is accepted ("passes") as a member of another. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a person of color or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination.

Let’s Get Into It

Because we often conflate race with skin color, sometimes distinguishing between racism and colorism can be tricky. In present-day society, skin color becomes a loaded signifier of identity and value. In the 21st century, as America becomes less white and the multiracial community—formed by interracial unions and immigration—continues to expand, color will be even more significant than race in both public and private interactions. Why? Because a person’s skin color is an irrefutable visual fact that is impossible to hide, whereas race is a constructed, quasi-scientific classification that is often only visible on a government form. It cannot be overstated that if America was not founded on racism, a discussion about varying skin hues would simply be a conversation about aesthetics. But that’s not the case. The privileging of light skin over dark is at the root of an ill known as colorism.

I spoke about white beauty standards in America on this podcast a few weeks ago. Here’s a brief summary:

• In the 1700s, Slaves being brought to the Americas had their hair constantly referred to as “wool”, this is when the phrase “good hair” starts making its way into the lexicon to describe hair that is softer, longer, straighter, easier to style, less coarse and spiraled. Slaves that were in the house were often given wigs or had their hair styled in a similar fashion to their masters. Most often, these slaves were “light-skinned”. House slaves had better clothing, food and housing. Slaves that were in the fields often wore head coverings not unlike durags to protect their hair from the dirt and heat. Field slaves were of a darker complexion. One of the most disturbing elements of this division between light-skinned and dark-skinned slaves was that often light-skinned slaves were treated somewhat better because they were direct descendents of their masters, with rape being rampant, such as with Sally Hemmings who was repeatedly raped by Thomas Jefferson and bore many of his mixed-race children.

• Racial theorists beginning around the 1800s published tons of literature praising the Caucasian race as the most beautiful. Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racism focused on the Afrocentric features of Black people that made them ugly and the fabled physical aspects that made them less intelligent, more promiscuous, and unable to feel pain. Scientific racism stems from the idea of chattel slavery, the necessity to see a Black human as an animal or object not unlink a pet or a chair. This “science” had the goal of proving Black people were less than human on a genetic level to continue perpetuating the industry of chattel slavery.

• As Black people were integrated into society when slavery ended, they (understandably) wanted to assimilate as much as possible. By the early 1900s we have relaxers and hot combs becoming more popular to straighten Black hair.

• Though the Civil Rights movement celebrated natural hairstyles, Afrocentric features and all complexions , mainstream media continued to champion Black people with lighter complexions and straightened hair. This continues into modern day.

Another crucial element of “beauty” is the idea that it is often a proxy for wealth. Maintaining flawlessly smooth skin, straight hair, straight teeth requires an individual to have the money for cosmetic products, surgery, braces etc. I think this is an important thing to remember. Not only is America founded on systemic racism, but capitalism.

Although colorism affects both men and women, the most prominent and researched examples I could find were those of cisgender women. This is something I’m going to continue to investigate as I learn more about colorism.

Colorism permeates pop culture and mainstream media, but this is about more than just seeing yourself represented on TV — though that is absolutely important. Colorism leads to results like this Harvard study that shows light-skinned individuals have a 40% chance of being arrested, while dark-skinned individuals have a 65% chance. A quote from the study states:

“Put bluntly, while being black (and poor) may already predispose one to have a higher probability of contact with the criminal justice system and harsher treatment…being perceived as blacker intensifies this contact further and may increase the harshness of one’s treatment by the [criminal justice system] as an institution,”  - Ellis Monk

Within the Black and Latinx community in the US, it’s not uncommon to be told by your family to date someone light-skinned, with good hair. Watch this video to learn more about how colorism affects those communities on a daily basis.

Outside of America’s struggle with colorism, this issue is ingrained in many other countries and cultures. In Africa, Jamaica, India, and throughout the continent of Asia as a whole, lightening creams that promise lighter complexions fill beauty store shelves. YouTube is flooded with before and after videos of individuals praising their lighter skin, but most often, harming themselves with the usage of these harsh chemicals. Many people make homemade concoctions with hazardous materials that cause permanent damage to their skin in hopes of making the right blend to bleach away their Blackness.

There is so much we could cover when it comes to this topic, I hope you keep learning as I do the same!

Resources

• Light Skinned Priviledge

• White Beauty Standards

• BLM And Colorism In India

• Petition: Ban Fair & Lovely Bleaching Creams

• Address Colorism In Schools

This week, I’m going to leave it up to you to decide the next newsletter! I’ll have a poll on my Instagram stories and see what you’re interested in. Feel free to comment below or send me an email if you have any areas of interest. See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

AAVE

“There are times when so much talk or writing, so many ideas seem to stand in the way, to block the awareness that for the oppressed, the exploited, the dominated, domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain – the pain of hunger, the pain of over-work, the pain of degradation and dehumanization, the pain of loneliness, the pain of loss, the pain of isolation, the pain of exile... Even before the words, we remember the pain.”

— Bell Hooks

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 10 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is AAVE or Ebonics. I am so excited to get into this topic and to learn more myself. Has there been a time in your life when you spoke to someone and found them more or less educated because of their canance, vocabulary, tone? Did you make judgements about them based on this vocal minutiae? While these instant decisions and choices are rooted in implicit bias, they are also rooted in a lack of understanding. When we talk about the ways some Black people speak in America, there is a lot of judgment and criticism, and most often, unnecessary correction to the way in which they speak. Let’s learn more about it. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Portmanteau: A linguistic blend of words in which parts of multiple words or their phonemes (sounds) are combined into a new word.

Ebonics: A portmanteau, a blend of the words ebony or black and phonics or sounds. The term was created in 1973 by a group of Black scholars who disliked the negative connotations of terms like 'Nonstandard Negro English' that had been coined in the 1960s when the first modern large-scale linguistic studies of African American speech-communities began. Scholars who prefer the term Ebonics wish to highlight the African roots of African American speech and its connections with languages spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora, e.g. Jamaica or Nigeria.

AAVE (African American Vernacular English): AAVE and Ebonics essentially refer to the same sets of speech forms. In theory, AAVE is specific to America.

Code Switching: The practice of interacting in different ways depending on the social context, and it isn’t limited to race. Because dominant culture is white, whiteness has been baked into institutions as natural, normal and legitimate. So there’s much more incentive for people of color to code-switch to adapt to the dominant culture and to improve their prospects. White people rarely, if ever, feel this same pressure in their daily lives.

Language Prejudice: Negative value judgments made about a person based on the way he or she speaks, usually directed toward a speaker of a vernacular dialect.

Pidgin Language: Language that arises when speakers of different languages come into contact (typically in trade situations), have no language in common, and have an immediate need to communicate. Features of pidgin languages include a simplified grammar and a relatively small vocabulary. An important and defining characteristic is that pidgin languages have no native speakers. Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea, is an example of a pidgin language. In some areas of the country, Tok Pisin has been creolized.

Creole Language: A language that develops when a pidgin language begins to be learned as a native language. Creoles tend to have more complex grammars and vocabularies than pidgins.

Let’s Get Into It

*NOTE: Since first posting this newsletter, I’ve seen some varying sources describe the term ebonics as outdated and even a slur.

The term ebonics originated in 1973, but did not come into the vernacular until December 1996 when the Oakland School Board recognized it as the 'primary' language of its majority African American students and resolved to take it into account in teaching them standard or academic English.

Ebonics is often stigmatized and associate with impoverished and undereducated demographics. This stems from anti-Blackness, because the dialect is closely associated with Black people who have historically been disenfranchised with less access to things such as “quality” education. It is imperative to understand that ebonics is not “bad grammar” or an uneducated way of speaking, it is a full-fledged dialect of English that is entirely rule-bound — meaning it has a very clear grammar which can be (and has been) described in great detail. We must end the stigma.

Ebonics has so many different facets.

• There are slang words that are trendy, usually used by teenage or young adult demographics, and often heard in Hip Hop and rap music. Words like lit, hype, bling, brick, tight, woke, bae, fleek, ratchet, hella, squad, turnt, swag, strapped.

• There are words that have been around for ages, that are not restricted to particular regions or age groups, and are virtually unknown outside the Black community. Words like kitchen (the curly hair at the nape of your neck) or ashy (dry skin).

• There is the way in which words are pronounced. With certain letters dropped or replaced. Phrases like they be, finna, imma, tryna.

Some grammatical rules are:

1. Deletion of verbal copula — This means that in some contexts, the word "is/are" can be left out. Speakers of Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin do this. Example. "he workin'."

2. A habitual aspect marker (known as habitual be, or invariant be) — Aspect refers to whether an action is completed or ongoing. Habitual aspect means that a person regularly/often/usually does a thing, but does not give any indication of whether they are currently in the process of doing that thing. Example: "He be workin'" (Meaning: He is usually working.)

3. A remote present perfect marker (stressed “been”) — This communicates that not only is something completed (ie. perfective aspect), but it has been for a long time. Example: "He been got a job." Meaning: He got a job a long time ago.

4. Negative concord — This means that negation has to all "match." If you've ever studied French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, you've seen this. It is often stigmatized in English, but is totally normal in many, languages and in many varieties of English. Example: He ain't never without a job! Can't nobody say he don't work.

5. “It” for the dummy expletive “there: — What's a dummy expletive? It's that word that's necessary to say things when there isn't really a person doing the thing in question -- like in "it's raining." Some languages can just say "raining," and be done with it, but in English we add the “it’.

   In this context, we use the word “it” instead of the word “there”. Example: "It's a man at the door here to see you."

6. Preterite “had” — This refers to grammatical constructions that in other dialects do not use had, but use the simple past. It's usually used in narrative. Example: "He had went to work and then he had called his client." Meaning: He went to work and then he called his client.

7. Some varieties have 'semantic bleaching' of words that are considered obscenities in other dialects - this is where a word loses shades of meaning over time.

Resources

• Support AAVE In Education

• Check Yourself When You Assume Someone Is Uneducated Because They Use AAVE

Next week, we are going to chat about Colorism. Colorism is defined as prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color. Ever heard of light-skin privilege? Or seen an article like this one in Teen Vogue in your inbox? Let’s take a closer look at what it is and how people (like me, who is mixed-race, with a lighter complexion, hair extensions and an overall conformity to white beauty standards) can be tokenized and fetishized while also grossly benefiting from Colorism. See you next week!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

The Right to Vote

“Let’s speak the truth: People are protesting because Black people have been treated as less than human in America. Because our country has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has plagued our country since its earliest days. It is the duty of every American to fix. No longer can some wait on the sidelines, hoping for incremental change. In times like this, silence is complicity.”

— Kamala Harris

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 8 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Voting. Today we will touch on the history of voting in America and then dive into some resources to make sure you are prepared to cast your vote, whether in person or via absentee ballot. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Reconstruction Era (1865-1877): The turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed slaves into the United States.

The Black Codes: Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Some examples are in Mississippi, Black people had to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest. In South Carolina, a law prohibited blacks from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100, which was a lot of money. Some states also forbade the right to vote.

The Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This gave citizenship to Black people born in America.

The Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”— The 15th Amendment granting African-American men the right to vote was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory practices were used to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. State legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of Black voters in the decades following Reconstruction. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied African-Americans their right to vote.

The Nineteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Let’s Get Into It

When the United States was founded, slaves were not seen as citizens and therefore had no voting rights. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons…of good character” which excluded all non-white people . States were allowed to grant voting rights at the state level, and some did, but eventually rescinded.

The 1857 Dred Scott Case upheld that Black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States." After the civil war, the Reconstruction Era promised the hope of suffrage for Black men, since a woman voting didn’t even seem like a possibility, but the Black Codes continued to make this difficult and often impossible.

Eventually the 14th (1868) and 15th (1870) Amendments were passed though voter intimidation was rampant by groups including the KKK. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states — this was 95 years later.

Black women gained the legal right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Keep in mind the suffragettes were not allies to Black women. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association was quoted after Black men were given the right to vote before white women saying, “You have put the ballot in the hands of your Black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!” Susan B. Anthony was quoted saying, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

The social hierarchy of America seems to demand the freedom of one oppressed group by their oppression of another. White women standing on the shoulders of Black men who stand atop Black women.

The 2020 election will be one of the most important elections of my life. The privilege to even consider abstaining from voting is not one afforded to Americans who fear for their safety, security and liberty under the current administration. Use your voice. You must vote come this election. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.”

The 2020 Presidential Election

Dates To Request + Return Ballots

When You'll Receive Your Mail-In Ballot

• The earlier you request your ballot, the sooner you'll get it. 

• This year, a record number of American voters are expected to cast their ballots from home for the November 3 election because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• If you're a registered voter in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, or the District of Columbia, you'll most likely be receiving a ballot in the mail from your local election officials and won't need to take further action.

Tips For Voting In 2020

• The Postal Service recommends that voters plan for their ballot to take at least a 14-day round trip to get to them and back, and advises voters sending their ballots back through the mail do so at least seven days before the election, but ideally sooner. 

• There's no guarantee that you'll get your ballot or that it'll be returned back to your election office by any specific date, or within a specific time. 

• Because election administration in the United States is decentralized down to the county level, the timeline for when states start sending out ballots can vary somewhat from county to county within states and may be changed due to the pandemic. When in doubt, check with your state and local election officials for more specific information. 

• If you send your ballot back at the last minute, you leave your vote up to chance. 

• Lack of funding for the Postal Service may cause issues for getting ballots. Scroll down to support the USPS.

• Experts say many voters will be unfamiliar with the mail voting process and they were concerned that voters could make unintentional technical errors when marking, signing, sealing or sending a ballot, leading to their ballots eventually being rejected.

• The counting could delay race calls for at least a day or two.

Facts & Figures

• Kamala Harris is now officially Joe Biden’s pick for Vice President

• Key issues for this election: Healthcare, climate change, immigration, student debt, gun control, the economy, racial and social justice (NY Times + Politico)

• A record 76% of Americans can vote by mail in 2020 (NY Times

Resources

• Register To Vote

• Support The Post Office

• A Comprehensive Guide To Voting

Next week we are going to be focusing on Language, one of my favorite topics. Having the words to articulate what you mean and what you stand for is empowering. We will also touch on the way language is weaponized against Black Americans who speak in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or “Ebonics” — a term created in 1973 by a group of Black scholars who disliked the negative connotations of terms like 'Nonstandard Negro English' that had been coined in the 1960s when the first modern large-scale linguistic studies of African American speech-communities began. See you next week!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Terms to Know

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 9 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Language & Terminology and it looks a little different than past editions. Think of it as an ever-evolving resource. Next week, in Part II of this newsletter, I’m going to dive deeper on language as it pertains to the Black community.

One of the most important aspects to me when discussing race is being able to say what I mean and to fully comprehend what those around me are saying. Language and the vocabulary we use in our anti-racism work becomes powerful when it is specific. Let’s get into it!

*NOTE: Since writing this newsletter, I actually wrote an entire book on this topic called ACTIV-ATING: Your Vocabulary, through my company, ACTIV-ISM

Race: A social construct developed in the late 19th and early 20th century in Western Europe, and claimed that humans could be divided into racial groups based on physical and behavioural traits linked to ethnicity, nationality, and related concepts like shared language. These theories were influenced by colonialism and imperialism, and the desire to show that non-white groups were inferior in order to justify the actions of Western nations. These false notions of racial difference have become embedded in the beliefs and behaviours of society, especially in Western nations. ‘Race’ is strongly linked to skin colour. 

Race Classifications According to the US Census :

• American Indian or Alaska Native: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

• Asian: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

• Black or African American: A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

• White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Ethnicity: A social construct that divides people into smaller social groups based on characteristics such as shared sense of group membership, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests, history and ancestral geographical base. It is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art or physical appearance. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, it is sometimes possible for individuals or groups to leave one ethnic group and become part of another. The social construct that ethnic groups share a similar gene pool has been contradicted within the scientific community as evidenced by data finding more genetic variation within ethnic groups compared to between ethnic groups.

Ethnic Classifications According to the US Census:

• Hispanic or Latino: A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. The term, "Spanish origin", can be used in addition to "Hispanic or Latino".

• Not Hispanic or Latino

• Read more about why this is the only ethnic classification here.

Nationality: A legal identification of a person in international law, establishing the person as a subject, a national, of a sovereign state. It affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state against other states.

Racism: Racial prejudice + power. Power here is defined as the authority granted through social structures and conventions—possibly supported by force or the threat of force—and access to means of communications and resources, to reinforce racial prejudice, regardless of the falsity of the underlying prejudiced assumption. Racism cannot be understood without understanding that power is not only an individual relationship but a cultural one, and that power relationships are shifting constantly.

Discrimination: Unfair or unequal treatment of an individual (or group) based on certain characteristics, including age, disability, ethnicity, gender, marital status, national origin, race, religition, sexual orientation, etc.

Prejudice: Prejudice is a baseless and often negative preconception or attitude toward members of a group. Negative feelings, stereotyped beliefs and a tendency to discriminate. Although prejudice is a noun and not a verb, the behavior is often influenced by bias. Once the switch is made from "thought/feeling" to "action," discrimination has occurred. 

Xenophobia: The fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between an ingroup and an outgroup and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, a desire to eliminate their presence, and fear of losing national, ethnic or racial identity.

Systemic Racism: "Individual" racism is not  created in a vacuum but instead emerges from a society's foundational  beliefs and "ways" of seeing/doing things, and is manifested in organizations, institutions, and systems (including education).

Colorism: Prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color

White Privilege: White privilege is the unearned, mostly unacknowledged social advantage white people have over other racial groups simply because they are white. The two-word term packs a double whammy that inspires pushback. 1) The word white creates discomfort among those who are not used to being defined or described by their race. And 2) the word privilege (especially for poor and rural white people) sounds like a word that doesn’t belong to them—like a word that suggests they have never struggled. This defensiveness derails the conversation, which means, unfortunately, that defining white privilege must often begin with defining what it’s not. 

White Fragility: discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice.

Microaggressions: Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups. Often, they are never meant to hurt - acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed regularly.

Implicit Bias: The attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. They are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control and reside deep in the subconscious. The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages, early life experiences, the media and news programming.

Allyship: an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group. Read my blog post on allyship here.

Cultural Appropriation: The adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from marginalized cultures. Cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a marginalized culture by members of a dominant culture, these elements are used outside of their original cultural context. Often, members of the originating culture expressly state they do not condone being used in this way because the original meaning of these cultural elements are lost or distorted when they are removed from their originating cultural contexts, and such displays are disrespectful and can even be a form of desecration.

Toxic Positivity: Positivity becomes toxic when it is implied that we should always look on the bright side at all times and not allow ourselves to feel difficult emotions. The downside of positivity culture is that it can vilify the normal range of human emotional experience. Toxic positivity undermines the pain of others. Example: We are all one human race, I don’t see color. Let’s focus on the positives instead of always talking about oppression.

Emotional Labor: When a person must constantly manage their emotions—either by suppressing them, showing them, or redefining them— in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. 

Tone Policing: Tone policing describes a diversionary tactic used when a person purposely turns away from the message behind another’s argument in order to focus solely on the delivery of it.

Historical Terms

The Black Codes: Restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.

War on Drugs: The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Richard Nixon started the “War on Drugs” and his domestic policy chief was quotes saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

The 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Scholars, activists and prisoners have linked that exception clause to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor.

The Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This gave citizenship to Black people born in America.

The Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”— The 15th Amendment granting African-American men the right to vote was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory practices were used to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. State legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of Black voters in the decades following Reconstruction. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied African-Americans their right to vote.

Having Conversations About Race

Intersectionality: Intersectionality is a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem as affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexity of prejudices they face.

Environmental Racism: The disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It refers to the institutional rules, regulations, policies or government and/or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based upon race.Communities consisting primarily of people of color continue to bear a disproportionate burden of this nation’s air, water and waste problems. Read my blog post on environmental racism here.

Prison Industrial Complex: The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. This term is derived from the "military–industrial complex" of the 1950s and describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit. Read my blog post on the prison industrial complex here.

Ebonics: A portmanteau, a blend of the words ebony or black and phonics or sounds. The term was created in 1973 by a group of Black scholars who disliked the negative connotations of terms like 'Nonstandard Negro English' that had been coined in the 1960s when the first modern large-scale linguistic studies of African American speech-communities began. Scholars who prefer the term Ebonics wish to highlight the African roots of African American speech and its connections with languages spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora, e.g. Jamaica or Nigeria.

Redlining: The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Black inner-city neighborhoods were most likely to be redlined. Investigations found that lenders would make loans to lower-income Whites but not to middle- or upper-income African Americans. The result of this redlining in real estate could still be felt decades later. Examples of redlining can be found in a variety of financial services, including not only mortgages but also student loans, credit cards, and insurance.

Tokenism: The practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a marginalized group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Prison Industrial Complex

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.”

— Angela Davis

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 7 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is The Prison Industrial Complex. The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. This term is derived from the "military–industrial complex" of the 1950s and describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Prison Industrial Complex: Describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit. The term also refers to the network of participants who prioritize personal financial gain over rehabilitating those that have been imprisoned.

The 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Scholars, activists and prisoners have linked that exception clause to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor.

Let’s Get Into It

Though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, it is responsible for approximately 25 percent of the world’s prison population. (Washington Post) The Prison Industrial Complex helps maintain the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that perpetuate stereotypes of marginalized communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. 

The most common agents of the Prison Industrial Complex are corporations that contract cheap prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, correctional officers unions, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them.

The portrayal of prison-building/expansion as a means of creating employment opportunities and the utilization of inmate labor are particularly harmful elements of the Prison Industrial Complex as they boast clear economic benefits at the expense of incarcerated human beings.

Do You Know What Happens To Your Rights When You Get Convicted?

Essentially, your citizenship is revoked. You serve your time and upon release, you are left with very little. In America, the systems in place don’t allow you to pay your debt to society and rehabilitate your life, they insist that you are punished for the rest of your life.

• Right to Bear Arms

• Right to Vote

• Jury Service

• Right to Travel Abroad

• Parental Rights

• Public Assistance and Housing

• Employee Discrimination

“The term “prison industrial complex” was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause
of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. ”

— Are Prisons Obsolete, By Angela Davis

Consider for a moment the term “crime and punishment” and how it is so often linked together. What about crime and rehabilitation? Or crime and social work? Or crime and therapy? Or crime and oppression? Can we envision a world where the answer to crime is not to put human beings in cages where corporations make millions off of their life and labor, but confront the human rights catastrophe that is mass incarceration?

Resources

This week I am only including one resource in the hopes that every single person that takes the time to read this blog follows through and watches this film. The documentary 13th is available in its entirety, for free, on YouTube. I urge you, I beg you, I implore you to watch this film immediately.

• Watch The Trailer

• Watch The Full Length Film

• Support: The Bail Project

• Support: The Equal Justice Initiative

• Support: The ACLU

Next week we are talking about Voting! There are less than 100 days until elections and abstaining from voting is NOT. A. CHOICE. This is an opportunity to be the change you want to see in the world. It’s on every newsletter because this is the motto to which I live my life: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Environmental Racism

“Race is the number one indicator for the placement of toxic facilities in this country.”

— NAACP

Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 6 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Environmental Racism. Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It refers to the institutional rules, regulations, policies or government and/or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based upon race. We’re going to look at a few examples of environmental racism in the US and the factors that contribute to this inequality. Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Environmental Racism: Communities consisting primarily of people of color continue to bear a disproportionate burden of this nation’s air, water and waste problems

Environmental Justice: The term has two distinct uses: 1. A social movement that focuses on the “fair” distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. 2. An interdisciplinary body of social science literature that includes theories of the environment and justice, environmental laws and their implementations, environmental policy and planning and governance for development and sustainability, and political ecology.

Environmental Equity: the government’s response to the demands of the environmental justice movement. Government agencies, like the EPA, have been trying to co-opt the movement by redefining environmental justice as “fair treatment and meaningful involvement,” which falls far short of the environmental justice vision. The environmental justice movement isn’t seeking to simply redistribute environmental harms, but to abolish them.

White Flight: The phenomenon of white people moving out of urban areas, particularly those with significant minority populations, and into suburban areas.

Frontline Communities: Those that experience first and worst the consequences of climate change. These are communities of color and low-income, whose neighborhoods often lack basic infrastructure to support them and who will be increasingly vulnerable as our climate deteriorates.

Environmental Colonialism: Refers to the diverse ways in which colonial practices have affected the natural environments of indigenous peoples. Colonialism concerns the exploitation of native peoples through European expansion over the past 400 years.

Let’s Get Into It

If we look at the footprint of climate change and environmental deterioration and who will bear the burdens of climate change, we see it will exacerbate the inequities that already exist between Black, Indigenous, Latinx communities and white communities. The location of Black and brown communities near sources of pollution springs from racist government policy that can be traced back to the early part of the century. In the 1930s, federal housing agencies redlined Black neighborhoods, locking Black people into crowded city centers, while helping white people flee to the more pleasant suburbs. (The Nation)

So Where Is This Happening In America?

• Los Angeles, California — The Largest Urban Oil Field: Los Angeles is the largest “urban oil field” in the United States, with over 5000 active oil wells. Most critically, over 800 of these wells are with 1,500 feet of working families. This means that working people and their children are constantly breathing and ingesting toxic chemicals and particulates that include benzene and formaldehyde, known carcinogens. A 2014 study by Liberty Hill found that 74.4 percent of these residents were people of color and 42.3 percent were living 200 percent below the poverty level. (Liberation + Sierra Club)

• Flint, Michigan — The Water Crisis: Six years ago, Flint officials turned off their water supply from Detroit and allowed Flint River water to start flowing into homes. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water. As a result, lead from aging pipes leached into the water supply, leading to extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin and exposing residents to elevated lead levels. At least 12 died and up to 12,000 children were exposed to contaminated drinking water. In June 2019, prosecutors in Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office dismissed all remaining cases against those charged with Flint water crisis-related crimes, and no one has gone to prison or been held accountable for actions related to this crisis. Today, the majority of Flint’s service lines and pipes have been replaced, but the majority of locals agree they fear drinking tap water. Flint’s population is approximately 60% Black. (Bridge MI + University of Utah)

• Louisiana — Cancer Alley: Cancer Alley is an 85 mile-long stretch of the Mississippi river lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In the town of Reserve, the risk of cancer from air toxicity is 50 times the national average. The highest of anywhere in the US. In November 2017 at a station at the fifth ward elementary school, chloroprene was recorded at a staggering 755 times above the EPA’s guidance. Nearly 400 young children attend the school, breathing the air each day. Residents talk about finding dead animals on their property and yellow rain, tinged with toxins. In 2012, the racial makeup of Cancer Alley was 55% white and 40% Black, compared to state averages of 64% white and 32% Black, and national averages of 75% white and 12% Black. (The Guardian + Propublica)

• Other examples:The Dakota Access Pipeline, threatening the safety of the the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s drinking water supply. Isle de Jean Charles, the historical homeland of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians which is collapsing after levees prevented the replenishing of the marshes along with climate change and sea level rise causing the land to erode into the water.

Facts & Figures

• According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black children are twice as likely to have asthma as white children. And black children are 10 times more likely than white kids to die of complications from asthma. This is a complicated issue because on the one hand, the majority of genetic studies, not just in asthma but in most diseases, are done in Caucasian- or European-descent populations making treatment less effective for Black people, and on the other hand, Black families are more likely to live in an area with poor air quality. Recent studies found that those who live in predominantly Black communities suffered greater risk of premature death from particle pollution than those who live in communities that are predominately white. (NPR + American Lung Association)

• Across the country, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to live in a home with substandard plumbing. (The Nation)

• More than 1 percent of black people live in houses without potable water and modern sanitation, compared to less than 0.5 percent of whites. (The Nation)

• People of color are exposed to a level of nitrogen dioxide—which emanates from cars and industrial sources and can cause respiratory problems—at an average rate 38 percent higher than white people. (The Nation)

Resources

• Flossy Podcast

• NPR article about Flossy

• What natural disasters reveal about racism and poverty

• Support: Undocfund

• Support: Movement Generation

• Support: NY Renews

• Support: Trans Disaster Relief Fund

Next week we are talking about The Prison Industrial Complex. Angela Davis, political activist, scholar, author, prison reform advocate, and so much more said, “Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages…But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.” Next week, we dive a little deeper. See you next week!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

COVID & the BIPOC Community

“Myths about physical racial differences were use to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today.”

— The New York Times

Hello Friends,
Welcome to Issue 5 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is A Pandemic Within a Pandemic: COVID + the BIPOC Community. Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put some members of racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting COVID-19, regardless or age. We will explore a few factors from long-head beliefs about Black people stemming from slavery to greater representation in front Line and essential jobs to a simple lack of culturally-appropriate messaging. Let’s get into it!

You might have noticed this week we are discussing how the Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities are all being affected by Coronavirus. Some individuals, like myself, identify in numerous ways. I am Puerto Rican and Dominican. I am Taino. I am Black. Intersectionality takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexities of the prejudices they face. It is important to realize this movement is about amplifying marginalized voices, including those with complex identities.

Today we are briefly touching on a lot of complicated and intense topics. Keep learning beyond this newsletter!

Let’s Get Into It

COVID-19 Stats

• American Indian and Alaska Native persons have a rate approximately 5 times that of white persons

• Black persons have a rate approximately 5 times that of white persons

• Hispanic and Latino persons have a rate approximately 4 times that of white persons

  (CDC)

Some Factors

• A lack of culturally-appropriate messaging in both English and Spanish

• Greater representation as front line workers and in essential jobs

• Economic barriers to healthcare

• Undocumented status resulting in no access to healthcare 

  (CNN/WFAA)

Slavery And Modern Medicine

Plantation owners tried to use science to prove that differences between Black people and white people went beyond culture and were more than skin deep, insisting that Black bodies were composed and functioned differently than white bodies.

Common beliefs were: larger sex organs which led to promiscuity, smaller skulls which showed a lack of intelligence, thicker skin, less sensitive nerve endings, high pain tolerance, lower lung capacity that needed to be repaired with long hours or hard labour to “vitalize” the lungs, susceptibility to a “disease of the mind” called Drapetaomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers, caused by being treated as equals and remedied with whippings.

These beliefs have been internalized by society, leading to individuals, including doctors believing that there are some truths in these myths.

Implicit Bias In Healthcare

The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics found that Black and Hispanic people — from children who needed adenoidectomies or tonsillectomies to elders in hospice care — received inadequate pain management compared with white counterparts.

In a 2016 study, 222 white medical students and residents were studied and showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s. Medical students and residents insisted that Black people felt less pain. 

These centuries-old beliefs in racial differences in physiology has continues to mask the brutal effects of discrimination and structural inequities, instead of placing blame on individuals and their communities for statistically poor health outcomes.

WATCH

Native Americans And Healthcare

If Native American tribes were counted as states, the fire most infected states in the country would all be native tribes, according to a compilation by the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA.

The United States allocates just $3,943 per person for health care for Native Americans through The Indian Health Service, less than half the $8,602 spent by the bureau of prisons for health care per prisoner.

Rivers run through Navajo lands and end up irrigating golf courses in Phoenix, while Natives lack legal rights to the water and can’t even get plumbing to wash their hands. 

COVID And ICE Detention Centers

Poor conditions in detention facilities allow the novel coronavirus to spread at a breakneck pace.

Immigrant advocates and lawyers argue the best way to stop the contagion in detention is to release the detainees, many of whom have only been charged with civil violations.

Detainees from La Palma say they’ve been forced to clean medical wards and common areas without enough protective gear. At Eloy, detainees say they don’t have regular access to showers.

“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition for that in my book is mass detention of civilians without trial.” 

Resources

• COVID racial disparities by state

• Seeing Patients : A Book on Unconscious Bias

• Support: Brooklyn COVID Response Fund

• Support: Navajo COVID Relief Fund

• Support: Raices

Next week I am tackling Environmental Racism—the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. IN LA, we see the largest urban oil field, in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In Louisiana, cancer alley. Residents of Flint, Michigan have not gotten justice. Detroit has the most pollution of any US zip code with an 80% Black community calling it home. Let’s break it down. See you next week!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

How To Be A Good Ally

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr

Hello Friends!
Welcome to Issue 4 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is How to Be a Good Ally. I was inspired to create this newsletter after having some really great talks this week with some friends, colleagues, and businesses who simply messed up and wanted to do better as an advocate for Black lives. We’ll be going over some key terms to know, my personal tips on allyship, and some solid resources, because it ain’t a trend, honey. 

Key Terms

Allyship: an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group.

Emotional Labor: When a person must constantly manage their emotions—either by suppressing them, showing them, or redefining them— in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. 

Implicit Bias: We use the term “implicit bias” to describe when we have attitudes towards people or associate stereotypes with them without our conscious knowledge.

Tone Policing: Tone policing describes a diversionary tactic used when a person purposely turns away from the message behind her interlocutor’s argument in order to focus solely on the delivery of it.

Systemic Racism: "Individual" racism is not  created in a vacuum but instead emerges from a society's foundational  beliefs and "ways" of seeing/doing things, and is manifested in organizations, institutions, and systems (including education).

White Fragility: discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice.

Let’s Get Into It

Being a good ally is not necessarily easy, simple or painless. It requires a great amount of soul-searching and self-reflection, and can often feel like you are taking apart your own ego. It’s not glamorous. These are some of my thoughts on being a good ally:

1. Believe People 

When a marginalized person tells you about their personal experiences, believe them. Validate their humanity. If the first thing you want to respond with is “Why?” Or “I don’t understand how that’s true.” — you’re assuming a few things. The first, that you have the choice to believe their real lived experience and even have the right to say “no”. The second, that you hold the power and have the final say in if their experience gets the respect and understanding it demands. If you do not have any experience or knowledge on what they are sharing, know that you are blessed with the resource of GOOGLE which can enlighten you further without causing that individual the added emotional labour of having to explain things that you can learn with the tap of your phone. 

2. Continue To Learn

Setup a schedule and hold yourself accountable so you remember to read that book every week, listen to that podcast as each new episode releases, or watch those documentaries, like you said you would. Subscribe to newsletters that come to your inbox every week. Continue to have conversations and engage with people in a respectful and humble way.

3. Be Willing To Make Mistakes

Silence isn’t a solution. Be willing to put yourself out there and make a mistake. Know that they will happen. Some will be glad to hear you say, “I was wrong, these are some examples of how I am now going to do better.” Some won’t be interested in staying around to see how you rectify those mistakes, and that’s their choice, which is also worthy of respect. 

4. Don’t Tell Marginalized People How To Express Themselves

Tone policing (defined above) is toxic. It’s inappropriate to tell someone how to verbalize their grief, trauma, anger, or any other emotion they might be experiencing. “When you debate a person about something that affects them more than it affects you, remember it will take a much greater emotional toll on them…For you it may feel like an academic exercise, for them it feels like retelling their pain only to have you dismiss their experience and sometimes their humanity. The fact that you might remain more calm under these circumstances is a consequence of your privilege, not increased objectivity on your part.”(Jean Elie)

Resources

• Learning and un-learning is a lifelong journey. There are many complex topics to explore. Below are some simple, digestible introductions to massive, complicated and fundamental concepts. I cannot stress enough that these graphics barely scratch the surface and require careful research and reflection.

• Toxic positivity

• Cancel culture

• Microaggressions

• How to listen better

• Covert forms of white supremecy

• Support: ACLU

• Support: Equal Justice Initiative

Next week we are focusing on COVID and it’s effects on the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Community. Let’s learn more about why nearly 23% of reported COVID-19 deaths in the US are African-Americans as of May 20, 2020, even though black people only make up roughly 13% of the US population. See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Pride Month: Supporting the Black LGBTQ+ Community

“If your concept of Black Liberation does not include Black trans, queer, & disabled folxs, you’re not for Black Liberation.”

— @blkwomenradical

Hello Friends!
Welcome to Issue 3 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Supporting the Black LGBTQ+ Community. If you support Black liberation, you have to support justice for ALL Black people. This week, we’ll be going through some important vocab to understand, a breakdown of statistics that make it abundantly clear that Black trans people, specifically Black trans* womxn (we will define that word more below) experience violence more than any other marginalized group, and sharing resources to continue your education.

I encourage you to make a real donation to one of the organizations listed at the end of this newsletter, because while learning and having conversations is fundamental and imperative, donating is paramount. Next week I will be donating $1 for everyone that works out with me on Monday and Thursday to an LGBTQ+ organization. Why not workout with me and then match my donation? Let’s get into it!

Key Terms

Gender: Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men, such as norms, roles, and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed.

Sex: “Sex” tends to relate to biological differences. For instance, male and female genitalia, both internal and external are different. Similarly, the levels and types of hormones present in male and female bodies are different.

Sexual Orientation: An inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people.

Gender Identity: One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One's gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.

Queer: An umbrella term to describe individuals who don’t identify as straight and/or cisgender

Trans*: An umbrella term covering a range of identities that transgress socially-defined gender norms. Trans with an asterisk is often used in written forms (not spoken) to indicate that you are referring to the larger group nature of the term, and specifically including non-binary identities, as well as transgender men (transmen) and transgender women (transwomen).

Gender Non Conforming: A gender descriptor that indicates a non-traditional gender expression or identity. A gender identity label that indicates a person who identifies outside of the gender binary.

Cisgender: Agender description for when someone’s sex assigned at birth and gender identity correspond in the expected way 

Womxn: A woman (used, especially in intersectional feminism, as an alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequences m-a-n and m-e-n, and to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary women) 

Folxs: A variation on the word folks, folx is meant to be a gender-neutral way to refer to members of or signal identity in the LGBTQ community.

Non Binary: Noting or relating to a person with a gender identity or sexual orientation that does not fit into the male/female or heterosexual/gay divisions.

Let’s Get Into It

There are tons of resources to better understand the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in America and around the world, but let’s just cover some of the big issues.

Often, the first thing we hear about the LGBTQ+ community is related to the violence and discrimination that they experience. While those facts are valid and important, it’s also necessary and vital to celebrate the innovation, creativity, resilience and joy of the LGBTQ+ community. Check out the links below for a celebration of LGBTQ+ greatness.

• 20 LGBTQ+ people who changed the world

• How Black and Latinx drag queen gave us today’s slang

• 43 LGBTQ+ influencers and creators

Under Trump, LGBTQ+ Progress Is Being Reversed In Plain Sight

• Just a few weeks after his inauguration, Trump’s administration rescinded the transgender student guidance which required schools to protect transgender students from harassment, accommodate their preferred names and pronouns and give them access to the locker rooms and bathrooms of their choice.

• In a reversal from the Obama administration, the Trump administration has repeatedly taken the position that laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex do not cover a person discriminated against for being gay or transgender.

• The administration has barred transgender people from joining the military.

• Trump’s position is that being gay or transgender as a category of identity that is different from “biological sex” and therefore not protected under current law.

Learn more about the various examples of violence and oppression that LGBTQ+ people face under this administration.

Facts & Figures

• 16% of Americans over 18 report knowing or working with someone who is transgender. (GLAAD)

• In 2019, advocates tracked at least 27 deaths of at least transgender or gender non-conforming people in the U.S. due to fatal violence, the majority of whom were Black transgender women. (HRC)

• 2020 has already seen at least 15 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported -- or misreported. (HRC)

• LGBTQ+ young adults has a 120% higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual and cisgender. (HRC)

• Black survivors of hate violence are 1.3 times more likely to experience police violence than their non-Black counterparts. (HRC)

Intersectionality is a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people or social problem as affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexities of their experience.

Resources

• Disclosure: A Netflix Documentary

• Podcasts to listen to

• Black Queer literature

• Subscribe to the THEM newsletter

• Don’t subscribe to these podcasts or read these books just to “celebrate pride” as many of these websites suggest —- do it because queer people, trans* people, gay people, gender non-binary people and all Black people deserve to be understood, seen, protected, heard, valued and supported.

• Support: The Okra Project

• Support: The Audre Lorde Project

• Support: LGBTQ+ Freedom Fund

• Support: The Black AIDS Institute

Next week we are focusing on How to Be a Good Ally. Believe Black people! Listen! Hear! Keep talking and learning and growing. See you next week!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Defund the Police: What Does That Mean?

Hello Friends!
Welcome to Issue 2 of this newsletter! This week’ topic is Defending the Police: What Does That Mean? This Phrase has been permitting social media and news outlets over the last week or so, let’s take a closer look. 

Also— Juneteenth is coming up this Friday. “What’s Juneteenth?” Honey, I am going to tell you. Keep scrolling on down and let’s get into it. 

Key Terms

Qualified Immunity: Shields police from lawsuits

Defund: Prevent from continuing to receive funds

Abolish: Formally put an end to a system, practice or institution

Reform: Make changes in an institution in order to improve it

Let’s Get Into It

There are a million articles you can read on this, but let’s break down the main points. I‘ll also link my sources below if you want to delve a little deeper.

Defund The Police

Reducing police budgets and reallocating those fund to social services like education, healthcare, housing, youth services and resources to support the community.

Police departments are tasked with maintaining order in society; however, they are often calling in response to situations that social services (healthcare, housing, youth development, etc) are better equipped to handle. We could invest in social services and send specialists like social workers, violence interrupters and mental health practitioners to address non-criminal issues more effectively. 

Facts And Figures

• In a fiscal year, 2020 New York City’s expenses for the New York City Police Department will total $10.9 billion (CNBC)

• LA’s proposed police budget fro 2021 is $1.8 billion, which is more than half of the city’s total spending for the year. (The Cut)

• The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s total prison population. (Washington Post)

• According to the bureau of justice statistics, the annual cost of mass incarceration in the United States is $81 billion dollars. (EJI)

What Is Juneteenth?

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.

Celebrate it with the color red which symbolizes perseverance. Strawberry soda, red velvet cake, strawberries, red beans and rice and watermelon.

Next week, we are focusing on how to support the Black LGBTQ+ community. Remember, ALL Black lives matter—trans*, disabled, queer, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, all of them. Next week we delve a little deeper. See you there!

Resources

• Defunding v. abolishing the police

• Angela Davis books

• Register to vote

• Support: Color of Change

• Support: Therapy for Black Girls

• Email government officials

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae

Black Lives Matter

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.”

— President Barack Obama

Hello Friends!

Last week I decided to transition this weekly newsletter on fitness to a weekly newsletter in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a Black person in America, it feels important for me to use my voice now more than ever. If you're new to my IG or boxing classes, welcome welcome welcome.

My goal for this newsletter is to break down smaller topics and offer action steps and resources to really get sh*t down. This week is just an intro with some background resources on being a good ally and just beginning to understand systemic racism. Continue reaching out to me on social media and via email, I love to hear from you guys,and on that note, let’s get into it!

Whatever you're good at (for me it’s fitness and talking and graphic design) use that to start making positive change. We can’t all do everything and everyone’s contribution is valuable. Because of this mindset, I turned all of my digital classes into a safe space to hold conversations on blackness and racism and all of my fitness newsletters into, well, this!

Every week we will delve deeper on specific topics and issues. To start us off, here are some of my favorite resources, videos, articles and the organizations I have been donating too. Check them out.

Resources

• Tips for being an ally

• Systemic racism explained simply

• What is a microaggression?

• Register to vote

• Support: The Bail Project

• Support: NAACP LDF

Check out some tips on communication from Rachel Cargle below:

1. Yes/But also known as “whataboutism” , is a variant of the “tu quoque” logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. (source: Zimmer, Ben. WSJ, 2017 ).

Every week, new topics, new talks, new action steps, new organizations. This is the first of many newsletters. I am so excited to get specific on ways to make real change. See you there!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change we seek” — With love and light, Taylor Rae