Tag Archives: black

Don’t believe the slander: Americans are eating less crap.

by DoloresTrumper Posted on June 23, 2016

Don’t believe the slander: Americans are eating less crap.

By on Jun 23, 2016Share

Americans are eating less of our unofficial national dish — deep-fried sugar-frosted rot gut. Instead, we’re eating more fruits, nuts, and whole grains, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Diets are, on average, getting better. But the real strength of this study is that it asked how specific groups were doing and found major racial and economic disparities. The diets of both the rich and the poor improved in the decade after 2000, though the diets of rich Americans improved more. The percentage of white adults with what the study defined as a poor diet decreased. But the percentage of black and Mexican-American adults with poor diets didn’t change. Like many health problems, the causes of poor diets are rooted in economic and racial inequity.

One small caveat: This study relied on people reporting what they ate in the past 24 hours, a method which is sometimes better at gathering data on what people know they should have eaten, rather than on what they actually eat.

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Don’t believe the slander: Americans are eating less crap.

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New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

by FredericStonge Posted on June 8, 2016

New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

By on Jun 8, 2016Share

In May, New York City became the largest American city to tackle the plastic bag problem by narrowly passing legislation adding a 5 cent fee to each bag, both paper and plastic.

But, the New York Post reports, that law is hardly a done deal: The Republican-led New York Senate blocked the measure this week by passing legislation that prevents municipalities from imposing their own bag fees.

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito quickly responded that she would work around the bill by changing the language for the bag fee and amending it to start next year.

But even city-wide support for the fee is mixed. Some, including Democrats in the state Senate, say it will disproportionately effect low-income and minority shoppers, although those buying groceries with government benefits would be exempt.

Others object to where the money is going — namely, the retailers themselves. “I was in Washington, D.C., when the bag fee happened, and you know what? It was to clean up the river,” Bertha Lewis, a social justice activist who opposes the measure told the New York Times. “These funds are being dedicated to the pockets of the retailers.” Lewis’ group, the Black Institute, collected signatures against the bill, and they were backed by plastic bag lobbying group the American Progressive Bag Alliance.

Plastic bags have long been a source of ire for environmentalists and litter-haters, and it’s easy to see why: As my colleague Ben Adler wrote, “When they’re not piling up in landfills, they’re blocking storm drains, littering streets, getting stuck in trees, and contaminating oceans, where fish, seabirds, and other marine animals eat them or get tangled up in them.”

There’s still the question of whether paper or reusable bags are really that much better for the environment. Plastic is undeniably bad, but the paper isn’t great either: A 2007 study found that the carbon footprint of paper is actually higher than that of plastic, mostly due to manufacturing and transportation. The same study noted that reusable cotton has problems of its own: A pound of cotton takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce on average, and cotton isn’t recyclable in most places.

Clearly, the bag debate is far from over in New York and elsewhere. But we can be sure about one thing: While the environmental cost of any bag is high, it’s nothing compared to what you put in it.

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New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

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Report: School Suspensions Are Costing Taxpayers Billions

by DeweyHanlon23 Posted on June 3, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Suspend a student early in his high school career, and taxpayers could pay the price for years to come.

According to a study released Thursday by the University of California-Los Angeles, the suspensions of 10th graders across the United States in the 2001-02 school year prompted an estimated 68,000 students to eventually drop out of school. Those dropouts, researchers say, cost Americans some $11 billion in lost tax revenue and $35.6 billion in broader social costs—such as health care costs, job loss, and potential earnings—over the course of a lifetime.

UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies

The study’s co-authors—UC-Santa Barbara professor emeritus Russell Rumberger and Daniel Losen, director of UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies—calculated those costs by first looking at how likely students were to drop out after receiving a suspension. They compared graduation rates of 10th graders who’d been suspended in their first semester with graduation rates of those who hadn’t been suspended; they then controlled for factors such as family income and parents’ educational attainment. Later, the researchers determined the financial impact of those departures based on a previous cost analysis by a Queens College professor named Clive Belfield.

Nationally, suspension rates have generally been on the upswing since the 1970s, particularly for children of color. Since 2013, the report notes, many large districts have reduced the number of suspensions handed out. Black students, who made up 16 percent of the overall public school population in the 2011-12 school year, received at least 32 percent of suspensions that year. Overall, 3.5 million students were suspended by US public schools in the 2011-12 school year.

UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies

Researchers argue that by reducing the national suspension rate by just 1 percent—perhaps via alternatives to traditional discipline—we could save up to $2.23 billion in social costs. Losen described the figures as “conservative,” noting the costs associated with suspensions could be far steeper—at least $100 billion—if multiple graduating classes were taken into account. “We’re feeling the costs of kids,” he says, “who were suspended 20 years ago.”

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Report: School Suspensions Are Costing Taxpayers Billions

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Activists wanted to clean up a coal ash dump. Dump sued activists for complaining.

by Fanpepsi Posted on June 3, 2016

talkin’ trash

Activists wanted to clean up a coal ash dump. Dump sued activists for complaining.

By on Jun 2, 2016Share

Four residents of a tiny Alabama town are fighting back against a giant landfill operator after the Georgia-based company, Green Group, filed a $30 million defamation suit against them. The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal court to dismiss the suit on Thursday.

Green Group operates a toxic coal ash dump in Uniontown, Ala., a small, mostly black community where half the residents live below the poverty line. The Arrowhead landfill draws coal ash — the sludge left by burning coal — from across the country. Opposition to the landfill gained strength after waste from the largest coal ash spill in U.S. history was dumped in Uniontown. In total, Arrowhead takes up to 15,000 tons of toxic waste from 33 other states every day.

Three years ago, members of a group called Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice and other residents filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA against the Alabama Department of Environmental Protection (ADEM), the state agency that oversees the landfill. The complaint against ADEM says that dust from the dump gets into homes and on cars and causes serious health problems. Three years later, the agency is still investigating.

Black Belt Citizens operates a Facebook group where residents talk about the town’s toxic sites — the landfill, as well as the sewage overflow and massive cheese processing plant. The landfill sits on a former slave plantation, and borders a historic black cemetery.

After residents filed the civil-rights complaint, Green Group approached four members of Black Belt with a settlement offer. To avoid a lawsuit, Mary Schaeffer, Ellis Long, Benjamin Eaton, and Esther Calhoun needed to remove their names from the EPA complaint, retract all their statements about the landfill, then pin that retraction to the group’s Facebook page for two years. The agreement would have given Green Group the right to look through their phones and laptops for text messages and emails.

The four refused, and were slapped with a defamation suit for what they said online. They’re now represented by the ACLU.

“State officials would never have allowed the landfill to be here if we were a rich, white neighborhood,” said Esther Calhoun, president of Black Belt Citizens, in a statement from the ACLU. “They put it here because we’re a poor, Black community and they thought we wouldn’t fight back. But we are fighting back and we’re not afraid to make our voices heard.”

The legacy of racism and enslavement compound the environmental injustice that Uniontown faces today. Once a plantation, now a toxic landfill, where silence is expected and modest objection —  even simple Facebook posts — leads to ludicrous lawsuits.

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Activists wanted to clean up a coal ash dump. Dump sued activists for complaining.

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Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

by BonitaQGUN Posted on May 30, 2016

Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

By on May 30, 2016 7:00 amShare

If you’re traveling through the suburbs around Niagara Falls, you might notice that one of them is missing. There are still roads, and you see empty driveways and old sidewalks hiding in the grass. But no one lives here anymore.

There aren’t any signs saying where you are, so I’ll tell you: It’s Love Canal, an idyllic suburb that caught the country’s attention back in 1978 when its residents realized that they were living on a toxic-waste landfill. Love Canal’s residents organized, protested, and kept their story in the media for a year. Along the way, they helped launch the modern environmental movement.

rik-shaw

A new history of that struggle, Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present by the environmental historian Richard S. Newman, reveals details that I’d never heard before. Love Canal’s evocative name? The land used to be owned by William T. Love, a real-estate dreamer of the 1890s who dug the canal in the hopes of creating a model city along its banks. Love imagined his city would be powered by hydroelectric energy poached from Niagara Falls. In contrast to the dirty, coal-powered factory towns then powering the American industrial revolution, Love’s city would boast such luxuries as clean drinking water, lines for telephone, gas, and water, as well as mail delivered by pneumatic tubes.

In 1894, local papers reported that the excavators hired by Love “have already made quite a hole and a big pile of dirt,” but that was as far as the model city ever got. Love lost a ton of money, then quit and moved west. Local kids used the canal as a swimming hole in the summer and an ice pond in the winter, until a local producer of bleaching powder, rubber, and explosives noticed it.

From 1942 through the early 1950s, that company, Hooker Electrochemical, filled in the unfinished canal with 22,000 tons of toxic waste, much of it leftover from Hooker’s work outfitting the military for World War II.

In 1952, the Niagara Falls school board approached Hooker and asked if the company would be willing to part with the land so that it could build a suburb and a new elementary school on it. Several Hooker company officials objected. Maybe the land was safe for a park, they said, but not housing. Still, in April 1953, Hooker sold the former canal to the school board for $1. The deed of sale mentioned that the site was brimming with chemical waste, and that, by signing the deed, Niagara Falls assumed all liability for any problems.

When the school board then sold the land to a housing developer in 1957, Hooker executives warned city officials against putting houses on the site. “There are dangerous chemicals buried there in drums, in loose form, in solids and liquids,” A.W. Chambers, a Hooker representative, told the Niagara Falls Gazette. All they could do was warn, though — Love Canal was no longer Hooker’s property. The developers built hundreds of houses atop the landfill anyway.

To the thousands of people who moved in during the 1960s and 1970s, Love Canal was a nice neighborhood — working-class and friendly. But weird things happened. When the kids threw rocks against the pavement they exploded like firecrackers. Manhole covers launched themselves into the air without warning. Kids playing baseball would get strange, chemical burn-like rashes when they slid across the grass. Dogs went bald.

Neighbors shared stories and slowly realized they had more than their share of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer. In 1976, New York State health officials started testing the area around Love Canal for dangerous chemicals. The following year, a regional officer for the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency wrote a letter to his bosses in Washington, warning that the area around the canal was so polluted that the state’s only option was to buy up the 40 or 50 homes closest to the canal and tear them down. Local officials panicked, and asked for more tests.

University of Buffalo

More tests just made everything scarier: 82 different chemical compounds were found around Love Canal. They were sitting in puddles, hiding in sump pumps, and seeping through basement walls. Many, like benzene, were known carcinogens. State health officials found that women in the neighborhood miscarried at 1.5 times the level of the general population. Some 13 percent of the babies born in one section of houses near the canal had birth defects. The state health commissioner advised evacuating all pregnant women and children under the age of 2.

After years of rumors and unsettling data, news of the planned evacuation made the people of Love Canal go from afraid to ballistic. They began organizing protest groups, the most visible of which was the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA) led by a local housewife named Lois Gibbs. Another organization, the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association (CLCRA) is less well-remembered. It was run by a community activist named Elene Thornton, and consisted mostly of African American residents from a nearby federal housing project. Television crews and reporters, enchanted with the idea of white housewives turned activists, largely wrote the CLCRA out of their coverage of Love Canal.

What’s also forgotten is just how vicious the situation was. At one point, residents burned effigies of Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy Carter (who was 10 years old at the time).

University of Buffalo

But it was Carter’s executive decisions that paid for people to move from Love Canal. In 1978, Carter approved emergency federal aid so that New York State could start buying the homes of the 236 families closest to the canal.

That didn’t appease the other 710 families that still had to live there. In May of 1980, the EPA announced that blood tests of 36 Love Canal residents revealed nearly a third “exhibited chromosome damage of an abnormal nature.” The LCHA responded by holding two EPA representatives hostage. When the police arrived, they found the entrance to the LCHA offices blocked by hundreds of angry suburbanites armed with two-by-fours. Gibbs called the press, and the White House. “We’ll keep them fed, we’ll keep them happy,” she said of her hostages.

The homeowners association released their hostages after five hours. Gibbs later recalled that one of them, Frank Nepal, was kind of into it. “He was telling us how he used to be involved in the Vietnam War protests,” Gibbs said. “So he thought it was kind of cool, being held hostage.”

University of Buffalo

New York and the federal government squabbled over buying out the remaining 710 families. A compromise was finally reached in October of 1980, with the federal government providing $7.5 million in grants and another $7.5 million in loans to the state so that it could begin buying homes immediately. The following spring, Love Canal was a ghost town.

University of Buffalo

The Love Canal experience also led Carter to create the Superfund program in 1980. That way, when another Love Canal happened (and there would be many drums of toxic waste unearthed in the following decades), there would be funds ready to pay for any cleanup and relocation.

Time has edited the story of Love Canal. The EPA rescinded the chromosome study in 1983, saying that it was poorly done. Gibbs’s two children, both sickly as children, grew up to be healthy adults. A long-term study carried out by the New York State Health Department found the health of former residents wasn’t that different from those of others living in Niagara County and throughout the state. Sure, they died more frequently of heart attacks, car crashes, suicide, and bladder and kidney cancer, but overall, their mortality rates fell within the average range for the area.

Former Love Canal residents continue to dispute this research. For one thing, residents who died of cancer before 1972, or moved away before 1978, were not counted in the state’s study. For another, why compare the health of Love Canal residents to another group that lived nearby? Why not make the control group people who lived in a community with no pollution at all?

The toxic waste filling Love Canal proved too big to move, so the canal was covered in clay and entombed instead. Or, as Gibbs said, it lived in “a gated community for chemicals.”

In the 1990s, some 200 homes at the outer edge of the evacuation zone were refurbished and renamed Black Creek Village. A few years later, residents of Black Creek Village began complaining of miscarriages and mysterious rashes. Not possible, replied an EPA spokesperson. The area around Love Canal was surrounded by monitoring wells and “the most sampled piece of property on the planet.” Any leak in the landfill would be detected. Because it’s so closely watched, the story goes, what was once the most dangerous suburb in America is today one of the safest.

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Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

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This veggie burger is so juicy it literally bleeds

by WDCIsmaeltjydj Posted on May 24, 2016

Disclaimer: This burger is not vegetarian. Shutterstock

This veggie burger is so juicy it literally bleeds

By on May 24, 2016Share

At this point, we all know how bad meat is for the planet. A short list of the impacts of meat cultivation on land include deforestation, overgrazing, compaction, and soil erosion. One pound of beef requires about 1,800 gallons of water to produce. And our carnivorous tendencies produce, according to some estimates, as much as 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than cars, planes, trains and ships combined.

But it’s delicious, which is probably why 84 percent of vegetarians eventually go back to eating it (including this writer and at least 20 percent of the Grist staff). A person can only convince themselves that veggie burgers don’t taste like compacted sawdust for so long — until, possibly, now. A Los Angeles-area startup claims to have produced a veggie burger that can meet all your red-blooded desires.

Beyond Meat creates meat products sans meat, and their latest venture, the Beyond Burger, promises to look, taste, and feel just like the real thing. And apparently there’s an eager market for it: The Beyond Burger launched in the meat aisle — right alongside beef, poultry, pork, and lamb — at a Whole Foods in Boulder, Colo., Monday, and sold out within an hour, according to the company.

Unlike most veggie burgers, which are commonly blends of black beans and soy mash, the Beyond Burger is made of 20 grams of pea protein. The reviews, so far, are positive: A Whole Foods exec said it “tasted, felt and chewed like any other burger.” (Although, given that Whole Foods is selling it, maybe take that with a grain of organic, free-range salt.) It also looks like one — the burger “bleeds” beet juice when you bite into it.

Here it is, in all its flesh-free glory:

Plant-based alternatives to animal products make up a burgeoning trend: The New York Times reports that foods made from plant protein grew almost 9 percent from 2014 to 2015 — nearly three times the growth of overall food sales.

Unfortunately for vegetarians — or anyone — hankering for a convincing slab of pea protein to throw on the grill this summer, you’re going to have to wait: The Beyond Burger is currently only available in the Boulder Whole Foods (know your audience, as they say), but the company hopes to expand to other markets next year.

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This veggie burger is so juicy it literally bleeds

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The story behind Prince’s low-profile generosity to green causes

by JannieEWVI Posted on April 26, 2016

The story behind Prince’s low-profile generosity to green causes

By on Apr 26, 2016Share

In the outpouring of media coverage after Prince’s death at the age of 57 last week, fans around the globe began to learn more about the notoriously private star — including that he gave away a lot of money. Van Jones — the activist, author, former Obama administration official, and current CNN commentator — revealed that Prince had secretly funded causes from public radio to Black Lives Matter to the Harlem Children’s Zone. He also conceived of #YesWeCode, an initiative to train black kids for work in tech. And he supported Green For All, a group working to fight climate change and bring green jobs to underprivileged populations. Jones is in the leadership of the latter two organizations.

“I was an Oakland activist giving speeches about the need for green jobs,” Jones told me over the phone, recalling how he first came into contact with the musician 10 years ago. “Prince heard me in the media and sent a $50,000 check to support the work I was doing. But he did all his giving completely anonymously, so I sent the check back. You never know when someone is trying to set you up — it could have been from Chevron or from a drug dealer or whatever. So then he sent the check back and I sent it back again, and then he sent it back and then I sent it back, until finally a representative called and said, ‘Will you please accept this check? I won’t tell you who it is from, but the guy’s favorite color is purple.’ I said, ‘Well, now you have a different problem: I’m not gonna cash this check, I’m gonna frame it.’”

Soon after, Prince reached out to Jones, and the two became friends — a friendship that would last until his death. Jones’ role in Prince’s life was, he says, as “his lead guitarist for social impact, for lack of a better term.” Jones helped distribute Prince’s resources when he didn’t want the attention, including providing solar panels for families in Oakland. The families never knew who their benefactor was.

As a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince wasn’t permitted to advertise his good works. But even without his spiritual tradition, Jones says Prince would have been modest about his giving. “He thought it was in poor taste for these celebrities to get millions of dollars and then write a check and have their publicists all over the media bragging about it,” Jones said. “He was like, ‘This is ridiculous. We get enough attention. We’re celebrities.’”

Jones says that what Prince really cared about was humanity. “He cared about life and love and freedom,” Jones says. “His politics were not red. They were not blue. They were purple. He had a mind that let him see answers — musically, spiritually, even politically. Rather than argue about global warming, he said, ‘Let’s help kids put up solar panels.’”

It’s clear in conversation that Jones deeply mourns the loss of his friend. When asked what he will miss most, he takes a long pause, so long I think for a moment that the line has gone dead.

“Everybody will tell you about the songs, but the genius didn’t stop when he walked out of the studio,” Jones says. “He was so hilariously, ridiculously funny. He was Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart–level funny. Dave Chapelle is probably funnier, but he’s the only one. Everybody else, Prince could have eaten their lunch, and half the time with no curse words. That’s irreplaceable. You can’t find that on YouTube or iTunes.”

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This Actress Gets to Play Like a Dozen Clones on "Orphan Black"

by FranzisVangundy Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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When I try to tell my friends about Orphan Black, I get excited and things come out garbled: “It’s about clones, but it’s also a mystery. The clones get sick, and there’s this race for a cure, but also a quest to find out where they come from and why—and there are these crazy pop-science researchers who modify their own bodies. The military might be involved.”

More calmly put, the BBC drama, whose fourth season kicks off tonight, is a complex futuristic thriller with themes ranging from self-identity and scientific ethics to religious extremism. But perhaps the show’s greatest strength is the reproductive rights storyline that has won it acclaim as a feminist triumph—even though it was created by a couple of guys. I reached out to one of those guys, Graeme Manson, to talk about entertainment, science, and feminism. For a little catchup, here’s the season 1 trailer.

Mother Jones: How did you and co-creator John Fawcett get to a series about cloned humans?

Graeme Manson: We were looking for a high-concept feature film idea, and that’s where we came to clones. We’d been friends for 20 years. John’s a horror and sci-fi person. I was into sci-fi, drama, and comedy. Our tastes intersected at black comedy. John pitched the opening scene for “Orphan Black,” where a girl gets off a train, looks across the tracks, sees her double, and in that moment the double commits suicide. That was all we had! It was like a four-sentence pitch, and we took it from there. John got juiced by the technical aspects of shooting a single actor playing multiple roles, and I got juiced on looking at clones as a concept and as something that was beginning to happen in the zeitgeist in terms of Dolly the Sheep. I found the psychological implications really rich: What happens if we clone humans? How do you feel about your genetic identicals—after 50 years, do you not even care that you bump into them in the supermarket?

MJ: Where do you stand on the ethics of cloning?

GM: We’re a sci-fi show, and a conspiracy mystery, so we naturally look at the scarier, more conspiratorial aspects of science, and that’s not real science. There is a consistent civilian mistrust of science where 98 percent of the time, scientists have mankind’s best interests in mind. But corporate science, big science, for-profits, military science—they’re not necessarily creating science that’s good for mankind. We like that question of what’s going on beyond the lab door. We think about what’s occurring right now that’s sinister or could be misused or is complex ethically. CRISPR technology, gene editing, germ-line editing: These are sciences that could change the face of mankind. We’re such irrepressible creatures. If you give us a technology; if you put a gun in a human being’s hand, sooner or later they’re gonna squeeze the trigger.

MJ: What kind of science are you guys eyeing for the upcoming seasons.

GM: Everything from genetic patents to “neolution”—self-directed evolution where humans are offered the technological choice of intervention in their bodies, be that biohack DIY experimentation, gene editing, or whatever. We have one really strong science writer, Chris Roberts, and story consultant Cosima Herter is a science historian—we like a historical context. Eugenics runs through all of the science we’re doing. From Victorian times to the early Cold River Institute genealogical studies, all these eugenical movements thought they had a good intention: “If only we had the right kinds of people, we would improve society.” But what are the right kinds of people? You’re talking about immigration, all these hot-button topics. If you’re gay, straight, or bi. What’s right? What’s legal? What’s defined? And then you get in there and start messing with the genome—it’s like, “Ugh!”

That’s a pretty juicy side of the show for us. We always find something there to be mulling and putting forward in the show as an interesting take on science or ethics that we don’t have an answer for, but you put it on the table and because there’s always these two sides to it—cutting-edge science is a good thing, but how could it manifest otherwise?

MJ: The show also has a strong reproductive rights theme: One clone’s eggs are harvested without her consent. Another narrowly escapes having her ovaries forcibly removed. And the clones are monitored—usually by men. What are we to make of all this?

GM: Those are ethical things, and it certainly plays as a very strong feminist statement on our show, which is something lead actress Tatiana Maslany is passionate about. John and I always say that when we started with the concept of clones, we didn’t realize what a feminist statement it would become in terms of body autonomy. These things became very apparent to us as we dug deeper, and the show as a whole is very committed to those kinds of issues portrayed in their complexity.

MJ: Tatiana has formidable task of playing all these different clones. Which one is the most challenging for her?

GM: I think Rachel, because she’s stiff and formal and cold and powerful and corporate and all of that—the opposite of Tatiana. Certainly in the beginning Rachel was very foreign to her. I know that she loves playing Krystal, because it’s not the kind of role she ever gets offered. They’re all a challenge. We work really closely with her on who the characters are when they’re coming. We come up with something we might need for story, and then we’ll take it to Tat to talk character.

MJ: It sounds like you give your actors a lot of input.

GM: We do. Our core actors are real pros and they’re all very good at finding things that we don’t necessarily see in the script. We love to give a little bit of leeway for the actors to play at the end of scenes or to bring their own flair to the scenes. We give our actors and our directors a chance to do some of that. Certainly Tat has a lot of input. When we run into story problems in the writer’s room, sometimes we’ll jog down to set and see what Tat thinks one of her many characters might do in that situation. She’s always very good at coming at it from a character point of view.

MJ: Where did you find Tatiana, anyway?

GM: Due to the vagaries of financing, we had to cast a Canadian lead. We saw everybody in that age range in Canada! The show wasn’t going to happen unless we had buy-in from both Canadian and American networks. Luckily, it was unanimous that Tatiana could handle it. But it was only once we started to see those clone scenes put together that we were like, “Damn, she’s good.”

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This Actress Gets to Play Like a Dozen Clones on "Orphan Black"

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Ken Burns on His New Jackie Robinson Documentary: "It’s About Black Lives Matter"

by 0ge7rota Posted on April 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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To acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, it’s a no-brainer: If Jackie Robinson were still alive today, he’d be the most beloved figure in the African American community. “The tragedy is that we’ve mythologized him,” Burns says, “and the real tragedy is he died young.”

On Monday, four days before the 69th anniversary of Robinson’s major league debut at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, PBS will air the first episode of Burns’ latest documentary, the two-part biography Jackie Robinson. Burns says the film is influenced both by his 1994 epic on the history of baseball and the persistence of Jackie’s widow, Rachel—”without her,” he says, “Jackie would not have been able to make it.” At its heart, the doc is an attempt to go beyond mythology to reveal more about the complicated life of a pioneering ballplayer who, Burns adds, “helped to ignite the modern period of civil rights.”

Ahead of Monday’s premiere, Burns spoke with Mother Jones about the life obscured by Robinson’s legacy, about the limitations of the slugger’s fame, and about the apocryphal stories still making the rounds today:

Robinson the man was much more complex than Robinson the legend: “You get rid of this sentimental nostalgia about Jackie, that he’s the ‘good Negro’ who turned the other cheek and behaved the way a Negro is supposed to at that time, and understand the fiery, competitive kid who’s unwilling to accept second-class status—and how he carried that throughout his professional life and into his post-baseball life until the very end. It’s an existential story about not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. We begin to realize how important Jackie is. He is obviously the most important person in the history of baseball, and I would suggest in American sports. But the story goes way beyond that.”

“It’s about Black Lives Matter”: “We felt that once you’re free from the barnacles of that sentimentality, once you’ve liberated them from the mythology, then all of a sudden, what’s this film about? Well, it’s about Black Lives Matter. They didn’t call it that back then. It’s about driving while black. It’s about stop-and-frisk. It’s about integrated swimming pools. It’s about the Confederate flag. It’s about black churches that are torched by arsonists. It’s about the Southern strategy, beginning in the 1960s in more fully, took the party of Lincoln, founded in 1844 with one principle, the abolition of slavery, and turned it into and detailed a pact with the devil that Jackie witnessed firsthand. That they would then, because of the civil rights bill, go after disaffected Southern whites who had normally voted Democratic and employ what we call generously the Southern strategy.”

Despite Robinson’s influence, he couldn’t meet with Richard Nixon in the White House: “It goes back to the disappointment Jackie Robinson felt when he had been campaigning for Nixon. He was disappointed that Nixon wouldn’t go to campaign in Harlem, but was even more outraged when Nixon wouldn’t intervene when Dr. King was arrested and was going to be sent to a chain gang where he would’ve been killed. John Kennedy, who Jackie didn’t like at all because he wouldn’t look him in the eye and was terrible up to that point in civil rights, did intervene and called Corretta Scott King, and Bobby Kennedy intervened with a judge, and he did get out on bail. It’s a fascinating story about American politics in the 1960s, where he couldn’t even get into the White House to see Nixon.”

That story about Pee Wee Reese wrapping his arm around Jackie Robinson? Probably didn’t happen: “The most superficial and obvious is the famous story that’s repeated in children’s books and in statues of Pee Wee Reese throwing his arm around him in Cincinnati in the first year, when he was getting unbelievable abuse. The last thing is true. He was getting unbelievable abuse wherever he was going, from opposing teams and from the fans in the stadiums. But Pee Wee is supposed to have walked across the diamond from shortstop to first base, which would’ve never happened, and put his arm around him. There’s no mention of it in Jackie’s autobiography. Full admission: I did a 1994 series on the history of baseball that’s 18 and a half hours, and I promoted those myths, because that’s what Roger Kahn and others were writing and telling us about. But it didn’t happen. There’s no mention in Jackie’s autobiography. There’s no mention in the white press, and more importantly, there was no mention of it in the black press, which would’ve run 25 stories related to this. When we asked Rachel, his surviving widow, about it, she said, ‘I asked them when they were going to build the statue not to use that image.'”

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Ken Burns on His New Jackie Robinson Documentary: "It’s About Black Lives Matter"

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Jennifer O’Connor’s Lyrics Cut Straight to the Heart of a Desperate Situation

by DarrellBarreiro Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jennifer O’Connor
Surface Noise
Kiam

Courtesy of Kiam Records

Thanks to her dry, deadpan delivery, Jennifer O’Connor could fool a careless listener into thinking she’s cool and detached. Au contraire. On her fine sixth album, and first outing in five years, this unassuming yet gifted singer-songwriter quietly injects her catchy folk-pop with shots of undiluted raw emotion, telling gripping stories of hearts in turmoil without slipping into cheesy melodrama. As evidenced by the use of her music in an iPhone ad and such TV shows as Orange Is the New Black, O’Connor can craft smooth melodies you’ll want to hum all day, but her real gift is the casually tossed-off lyric that cuts straight to the heart of a desperate situation. “Where do you go, when the road ahead just ends?/’Cause you made the same wrong turn over and over again,” she murmurs in “The Road,” while “It’s Gonna Get Worse” finds her calmly asking, “Tell me why you stand there, staring at your feet,” adding tersely, “Take out the trash.” Elsewhere, the hushed closing track “Black Sky Blanket” would do Lou Reed proud. Title to the contrary, Surface Noise is insightful, subtle, and intriguing.

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Jennifer O’Connor’s Lyrics Cut Straight to the Heart of a Desperate Situation

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