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salted-barbed-wire · 7 years ago

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Gangster (pt. 1)

A/N: So I found this prompt on either Pinterest or Insta from this writing prompt account. I fell in love with it and one of the first people I thought of when I saw it, was Samoa Joe. So hopefully this is good. It’s got kind of a slow build so bare with me, the juicy bits will come. This is going to be 3 or 4 part series.

Summary: OC, (Y/N), is a recently divorced, up and coming journalist who thinks she’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time when she gets held up in a bank heist. That is, until the criminals recognize her and immediately retreat with fear that their Boss will come down on them because she is on his “No Harm” list. Why, she doesn’t know. As the web hunt begins to figure out who this “Joe” is, (Y/N)’s high school sweet heart, Joel Seanoa, shows up unannounced but with a big revelation. Featuring: Samoa Joe (Nuufolau Joel Seanoa), Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Eric Young, Alexander Wolfe, Nikki Cross, Killian Dane ..... more to come soon! Warnings: None. Rated F for FLUFF-ish Word Count: 3100+

Enjoy or don’t!

Click, click, click.

The sound of my heels on the pavement were all I wanted to focus on. I didn’t want to get distracted from my task and there was too much going on.

Horns honking, dogs barking, cars whizzing past- if I let myself absorb my surroundings too much, I’d talk myself out of it.

You just must do it, (Y/N). I told myself internally. This is what cuts him off from you completely. It’s time to get away.

I approached the bank, clutching the file folder in my hand. Its contents were papers from the court offices, acknowledging the fact that I was recently divorced from my venomous, mooch of an ex-husband. I needed them only to remove him from accessing my bank account, so he couldn’t pay for one of his little sluts’ new pair of tits.

An exasperated sigh escaped my lips as I reminisced on the last four, horrific years. John and I had met at my work and fell in love instantly. Fresh out of high school, I had just become an intern at a local newspaper’s office and hoped to have a solid job as a journalist at the company by the end of the year. John worked in the mail room when we first started dating. I should’ve seen the signs then- no real drive to amount to anything, no goals, flirting around with any girl that looked his general direction. Soon, we were married, he began bouncing from job to job, while I moved up from being an intern to a secretary to working on a small editorial section. John definitely had way more free time than I did, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with his three other girlfriends.

The railing was cold against the brisk winter air as I brushed my fingers along it to walk up the steps. Perhaps if I had been paying attention to the signs that John was no good for me, I would’ve never said yes to marrying him in Vegas, I would’ve never allowed him to cheat on me, then use me as a meal ticket.

I pushed passed the revolving doors to my bank, the tile hard beneath my heels.

Perhaps if I paid attention at all, I would’ve heard the men behind me carrying guns and bags.

“Everyone, freeze!” A deep voice boomed from behind me.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“On the ground! Now!” He shouted again.

Lowering myself to my knees, I watched as everyone tried their best not to panic. Fantastic. I thought to myself, what a day to have to go to the bank.

“Cell phones! Give them up!” A different voice shouted.

From the sound of their footsteps, there was about three or four of them. I felt cool metal press against the side of my head as one of the men held out a basket for me to drop my phone in. I did so, without hesitation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the inconvenience but we have a job to do, everyone does as we ask and no one gets hurt.” A hand touched the back of my head, stroking my hair. I didn’t want to look up to see the eyes of my capture, too terrified to move. “Don’t,” he continued, “and I’ll pick you off one by one and make an example of you. Everyone understand?”

There was no response.

The robber growled, “I asked you a question.” Click. “Do you understand?” And suddenly there was a defining sound of bullets being shot into the air above me. I covered my ears and screamed as glass from the lights fell around my body. I could hear other screams from the hostages too.

“Good.” The man said. “Boys, get to work.”

Three black, clothed figures walked around me carrying dangerous looking weapons. One appeared to be a woman, short but held herself as if she was ready to pounce on anyone that got out of line. Then two more men, one larger than the other. All of them wearing ski masks, all of them moving quickly to finish whatever job they needed to do.

“Did I scare you sweetheart?”

It was the man who had been giving the orders earlier, he knelt to level himself with my face.

I shook my head ‘no’ but couldn’t hide the fact that the rest of me was terrified.

“You got a nasty cut on your cheek, darlin’. Lemme take a look-see.” His gloved hand gently took my chin and he observed the cut on my face. It was stinging from where the glass had sliced my skin open. I could feel blood dripping onto my hand.

“Say, sweetheart. You look familiar…” his blue eyes squinted over my features. “Wish I could say where I knew your pretty face from.”

I didn’t like the way he was touching me or trying to be nice to me. Not at all. So, I did what any rational thinking girl would do when faced with a possibly dangerous man that made her uncomfortable; I bit him.

Just in the right spot too. My teeth clenched down over the exposed skin on his wrist. The masked man screamed as I broke the skin, tasting blood in my mouth.

“Fucking, bitch!” He screamed.

I spit his blood onto the floor, “Don’t touch me!” My voice shouted back at him.

“Oh, I’m going to do much more than that, you little cunt!” His hand struck my face, causing my head to reel.

“E!” One of the men interrupted him. “Stop!” He walked over to us, putting his body in between our fight.

“You heard the boss, Wolfe, if anyone gives us trouble-”

“Yeah but do you recognize her?”

They both stared down at me for a few heart beats while I glared at them, head aching all the while.

“It’s her!” The man called ‘E’ gasped.

“Yeah, we need to go, NOW!” Wolfe pleaded.

“He’s going to want to know,” E scratched the top of his mask. “He’s going to kill me for touching her.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” I spoke up finally, “Why do you guys look so scared suddenly?”

E crouched down again, “He is our boss. And He isn’t to be messed with. We’ll let him know we ran into you.”

“Come on boys, let’s go!” Wolfe called out for the other two who came around the corner with two full duffle bags.

I watched the four men go, but not before E turned around to address everyone in the bank. “Goodnight ladies and gents. Thank you for letting us steal from you, hope you’ve had a pleasant experience and have a wonderful day!”

----

I had never felt so happy to take a shower in my life. After spending all afternoon and most of the evening at the police station, being forced to run through the robbery repeatedly was maddening. The detective had asked me over and over again why the group of robbers had been talking to me, because, of course, the other witnesses swore that they saw us having a “long chat”.

The water poured over my skin and I played through everything that I had heard from the men working the case. Detective Rollins and his two partners Ambrose and Reigns had been looking into these men for some time. They seemed to think they were part of a crime organization and the four criminals were just henchmen.

“Sanity,” Detective Rollins had told me, “that’s what they call themselves. We’re not sure who exactly they’re working for, but we know it’s for one of the big bosses in town.”

“Big bosses?”

Detective Ambrose nodded, “There’s quite the underground network going on in our city. Most of the bosses have gotten away with keeping they’re identities as secrets, the rest of them are closely monitored by yours truly.” His smile was wolfish as he stared down at me.

“We just need anything you might be able to remember to identify these men,” Detective Reigns pushed his way in between Ambrose and I. “Features, names, anything.”

I pursed my lips together, trying to remember. “The shorter man was called ‘E’ but he did call one of the other guys ‘Wolf’ I think. There was a girl there, but I didn’t catch her name, nor did she speak to me. Then there was a larger man, he was terrifying.”

Rollins nodded, “Wolf, huh?”

“Does that mean something?” I asked.

“It might. Please, ma’am, just sit tight. We’ll have you out of here short amount of time.”

They walked off and they thought I was earshot. I bit my lip and listened the best I could to the quiet muttering on the other side.

“You think it’s him?” Reigns asked.

“He supposedly left town, Seth. We haven’t seen or heard from him in over a year.” Ambrose muttered.

Seth was quiet, I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head as the other men talked through everything.

Reigns’ voice sounded strained, “Is it worth checking into?”

“The thug we picked up the other day was muttering something about a return of the king,” Rollins mused. “He’s not part of the family, Ro, but have you heard any whispers.”

“Not from our family.” He said. “My father seems to think Joe is dead.”

Joe.

Such a popular name but something told me I needed to look into it. Getting out of the shower, I wrapped a towel around me and took one last deep intake of the steam that filled the bathroom before opening the door. I opened my laptop up to load up google.

Hours later, I was still at square one. All I knew was the name Joe as a previous mob boss in the city. There were plenty of articles written about crimes attached to his name. But there was no last name, no history on the man. It’s like he came from nothing and then disappeared when he was being investigated.

The last few articles prior to his disappearance kept referencing a turf war between his people and another mob who was ran by someone who was referred to as “The Demon Head”. There was nothing on this “Demon” either.

Fed up and exhausted I slammed my laptop shut and forced a nightshirt over my head only to slide under the covers to my bed. People on Facebook were sending me messages all day after seeing my face on tv earlier in the day at the bank robbery. I scrolled through them and read a few, until I passed out, phone in hand and my bedside lamp still on.

---

I sipped on my coffee as I sat inside my haven called the Java Spot. I had brought my laptop, hoping to be able to do more research on this ‘Joe’ but hadn’t gotten very far. Instead, I decided to respond to my facebook messages. Luckily, my boss had called me this morning and practically begged me to stay home for a few days. Michael promised I’d get paid time off that wouldn’t affect my vacation hours that I had been saving for a rainy day.

Most of the messages read the same; ‘Hope you’re doing okay!’, ‘Saw you on TV!’, ‘Thoughts and prayers’. Blah, blah, blah. Most of them seemed half-hearted or impassive. Hell, even my ex-husband messaged me asking if I was okay. I don’t think I’ve ever hit the ‘delete’ button so fast.

I pinched the bridge of my nose together, begging for a sign, for a lead, for anything pointing me in the direction I needed to go to find this man.

“Well, well, well,” I deep, soothing voice resounded through my ears. I looked up to see a familiar face with dark eyes in front of me. “(Y/N)(Y/L/N), it’s been a while.”

“Joel?” I smiled, jaw nearly on the floor. I damn near jumped out of my chair to wrap my arms around his neck and hug him. “Oh my God! It’s been 4 years since we graduated, and I thought you’d left town! It’s so good to see you.”

“Believe me, darling, the pleasure is all mine,” he pulled back to meet my eyes. His expression was soft, intimate, like we were the only two people in that coffee shop; maybe in the world.

Nuufolau Joel Seanoa, I hadn’t seen him since my high school graduation. He always went by Joel, unless you were family. Joel was the all state wrestling champ, salutatorian, and my ex-boyfriend. Our relationship was strange but comfortable. Seanoa managed to keep me from meeting his family for our whole three-year relationship, yet, my parents loved him. I never got over how supportive of me he was when I was working on the school paper and he was always the greatest listener and the way he touched me…

I cleared my throat, taking a step back from his embrace. “Sorry, I- uh…”

“Is this seat taken?” He asked interrupting me holding a hand out to the empty chair in front of me. He was wearing a black business suit with a paisley silver tie. He looked like he was heading into a very big meeting that would make him a lot of money.

“No, please! Sit!”

He glanced at my screen just before I shut it, “light reading?”

“Urm, you could say that. I was doing research for an article I’m writing.” It was only a small fib. Besides, who knows if I could actually write a story about this one day.

“How have you been, (Y/N)? I haven’t seen you since-“

“We broke up?” I asked with more spite in my voice than I intended.

Joel pretended not to notice but simply smiled, “Yes, well I was going to say, ‘Since we graduated’.”

I swallowed a bit, feeling guilty, “I- I didn’t mean…”

He held his hand up, “Please, (Y/n), I deserve it. There were… sensitive matters that I didn’t want to involve you in and it was incredibly selfish of me. Especially since you’re growing up even more beautiful than I could’ve even imagined.”

“Sensitive matters?”

Joel’s face never wavered, he held the same smirk on his face. “Yes, and I’m sorry I left you.” His dark brown eyes traced along my figure and his tongue flicked out against his lips, “Very sorry,” he muttered.

A shiver ran down my spine. A sudden desire to cover every inch of exposed skin came over me.

“You’re a journalist now?” He asked, breaking the silence. “I remember how much you loved being apart of the school newspaper when we were in high school. You wrote quite a few amazing works back then, I’ll bet you’re practically Louis Lane now.”

“God, I miss that stuffy journalism room in high school. Now I’m in an office and it’s crowded and full of people that constantly judge you. My boss, Michael Cole, he’s awesome though.”

Joel chuckled, “I remember how fond you were of that room.” His eyes met mine again, this time full of mischief. “We used to sneak off to that supply closet a few times a day.”

I bit my lip and blushed. Joel and I dated all through high school, up until the day after we graduated. We were inseparable, always next to each other. He was on the varsity wrestling team and I came to every match. When I was writing, he’d sit there patiently and watch as I worked, or proof read for me.

“You’re blushing an awful lot, beautiful,” He noted.

“It just feels like ages since then. We were quite naughty sneaking around the school and making out. Just a couple of horny teenagers.”

“You never let me get passed second base,” his smile was teasing.

“I was a prude back then.”

I got a raised eyebrow in response, “So not anymore?”

A nervous giggle slipped out, I bit my lip again to force the rest of it back.

“Don’t bite your lip,” he tilted his head. “I’d rather do that for you.”

This time I laughed, a full laugh. “That’s a sorry excuse for a pick-up line.”

“It was only plan A.” I felt his knee bump mine under the table.

I bumped it back, “So what, pray tell, is plan B?”

“To kidnap you.”

Gulp

There was silence between us that was tense. His hand reached out and brushed mine, “I do have to say, there is an ulterior motive behind me coming to see you.” Another pause, “I saw the news yesterday.”

I sighed, “Just please don’t say you’re sorry, or that you feel bad for me.”

His eyebrows knitted together, “I wouldn’t do that.”

My eyes rolled, “and why is that?”

“Because, someone who has been through so much doesn’t want sympathy, they want answers, they want justice. If I knew who this Eric fellow was that cut you… So reckless.” He squeezed my hand in attempt to comfort.

My heart slammed into my chest, “Eric?” Something flashed in front of his eyes, his smile grew. “I never gave a name to anyone but the cops, and it wasn’t Eric. Who’s Eric?” My head was screaming at me into a horrific realization. “E? Is E Eric?”

“Boss!” Another familiar voice interrupted us. A man charged in, mostly bald and thickly bearded. Our gazes met, and I froze. Blue eyes; the same ones from yesterday. He shook his head and turned his attention back to Joel. “Joe, we need to go. Now!”

I turned back to the man in front of me, “Joe? Joel, these are your… employees?”

He stood and adjusted his tie, “Darling, it’s time we have a talk.”

Panic slammed into my chest, my first reaction was to scream.

Joel- JOE held his hand up, “Don’t scream. We need to talk, but we have to go somewhere safe.”

My lips parted, I sucked in air.

“Do. Not. Scream.” He commanded, irises fading to black. My mouth snapped shut. “Now, I will escort you outside, we’ll get into my car, and we are going to go have a talk. This is Mr. Young, he will not hurt you, will you Eric?” He turned a glare to the man.

Eric quickly shook his head, “No sir, she’s in safe hands.”

“And if I don’t?” I asked Joe.

His face was emotionless. “Then I suppose I’ll have to drag you out of this coffee shop, kicking and screaming.”

“Thought you didn’t want to make a scene?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“No, but I’m sure I can find a way to... persuade these wonderful people to refrain from calling the cops.”

“You’d pay them off?” I spat the question, “Not all of these people would take your money. There are good people in the world, Joe!”

His hands slammed down on the table, “As a journalist, you should know better than that. You should also know there are other ways to ensure silence from these folks.”

I felt the air catch my chest. My eyes darted around the room. How many of these people were good, honest people? Would Joe really hurt them or their families? A feeling of dread choked my heart, I would be to blame. My attention snapped back to Joe.

“Fine.”

“Come with me,” he said, placing his hand at the small of my back, guiding me towards the door. “I don’t want to make anymore of a scene, it’s time you know the truth.”

We walked out to the car, an all black Buick, Joe’s hand still lightly pressed against my blouse. I could feel his warmth, it prickled my flesh sending shivers through me. It was a confusing mix of emotions; comfort in an old friend’s touch and fear of the gangster looming over me.

—

TAGGING: @rainbowbox @wrecklessint @theprogresskid @bettergetusetoit @empress-with-the-crown @thirstiswet @styleslee @lip-sync @poisonarrow24 @sophvas1 @hoes4joe @newjapan @crookedmoonsaultpunk @were--goingnowhere

Please let me know if you’d like to be tagged in the next installment to know what happens next!

#samoa joe #samoa joe x reader #gangster joe #wwe fanfic #wwe fanfiction #samoa joe fanfic #samoa joe fanfiction #santity #eric young #dean ambrose #roman reigns #seth rollins #nikki cros #killian dane #alexander wolfe

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notbemoved-blog · 4 years ago

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Appreciation - Meredith C. Anding, Jr. (1941 – 2021) and the Tougaloo Nine

Upon first meeting, many a visitor may have been tempted to consider Meredith Coleman Anding, Jr., a reticent, almost opaque, man. Soft spoken, terse yet amiable, sphinxlike, enigmatic. Instead, he was the epitome of John Wayne’s character in The Quiet Man—with a preternatural calm on the surface, but with a fierce, almost primal determination to get what was his due: freedom and the respect that came with it. For this, he will be remembered down through the ages.

For it is Meredith Anding’s name, thanks to its alphabetical primacy, that leads the list of quiet Mississippi freedom fighters that we now know as the Tougaloo Nine. These courageous (and, by their own later admission, a bit naive) college students from nearby Tougaloo College, “stepped into history” (as Tougaloo’s former President Beverly Hogan often said of them) on Monday morning, March 27, 1961, when they calmly entered the Whites-only municipal library in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. It was the first student-led civil rights demonstration in the state, all the more remarkable because it was carried off in the Magnolia State’s capital city, under the noses of the most powerful White supremacist politicians, police force, and spy agency in the country and in an environment of intense racial segregation that had been hardening ever since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Meredith Anding’s Tougaloo Nine mug shot on 3/27/1961. [Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH)]

Secretly assisted and urged on by the NAACP’s “Man in Mississippi,” Medgar Evers, Anding and his cohort created shock waves of horror throughout the White community by the simple act of entering a library, selecting books from the shelves, and calmly sitting down to read. Their actions made a mockery of Jackson’s Mayor, Allen C. Thompson, who as President of the American Municipal Association had gone on a nationwide tour to tout his city’s racial amity despite its harsh segregationist strictures.

For their crime, Anding and his four male and four female colleagues were arrested for “Breach of Peace”—a newly coined law in many Southern states that allowed police to intervene if individuals were creating a situation that put someone’s peace of mind in jeopardy. When the police first arrived, they tried to persuade the students to leave on their own volition, hoping to avoid a showdown in court. But Meredith and his fellow Tougalooans ignored the pleas of the cops. Once told they were under arrest, however, all of them stood and began to march out to the waiting police cars, ignoring the police and the rowdy crowd that had gathered to sneer and shout racial epithets at them.

All Tougaloo Nine participants posed for a celebratory photo once safely back on campus. Pictured from l-r: Joseph Jackson, Geraldine Edwards, James (Sam) Bradford, Evelyn Pierce, Albert Lassiter, Ethel Sawyer, Meredith Anding, Janice Jackson, Alfred Cook. [Signed photo courtesy of MDAH]

This coordinated action ensured that the group would not be charged with resisting arrest and instead their case would be appealed by the NAACP all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, testing the validity of such “breach of peace” statutes. Although the case was thrown out on a technicality, nevertheless, the Tougaloo Nine, Meredith Anding among them, would forever stand in dramatic opposition to the false narrative of White Mississippi perpetrated by Thompson and others that “all of our nigras are happy.” Two months later, the Freedom Rides would come to Mississippi and the state would become ground zero for the Movement for Black Equality.

Meredith C. Anding, Jr., was born in 1941 in the small enclave of Myles, Mississippi, about 40 miles southwest of Jackson. The first-born of the Adings lived among extended family for a few years, where he was dubbed with the nickname “Junior Man.” His parents moved to the state capital when Meredith was just five years old. He attended a variety of segregated schools in Jackson, including Adams Economy—a small church school—Sally Reynolds Elementary, and Isable Middle School, and graduated from Jim Hill High School in 1958. Anding attended Jackson State College, not far from his family’s home, for one year and then transferred to Tougaloo in the fall of 1959 to begin his sophomore year.

Meredith’s civil rights bona fides were something of a family affair. Though his mother Nellie was unassuming and reserved—a trait the quiet Junior Man adopted—her sister, Meredith’s aunt A.M.E. Logan, was a forceful personality who involved herself in every conceivable method of citizen activism throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When the Jackson Branch of the NAACP reconstituted itself in the late 1950s after a long period of dormancy, Logan served as the elected secretary of the group and went door to door, even while pregnant, to drum up new members for what was considered by most White Mississippians as a radical Communist agitation group. Later she served as the chapter’s hospitality chair, welcoming various dignitaries—including the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.—to her home. Anding, who lived nearby, was present at many early Mississippi civil rights gatherings.

Meredith Anding pointing to his image in a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Tougaloo Nine leaving the Jackson Municipal Library with police escort. The mural was installed in the Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center on Tougaloo College Campus. [Photo: M.J. O’Brien]

It was Anding’s father, impressed with his sister-in-law’s activism, who signed young Meredith and his sister up for membership in the newly forming West Jackson Youth Council, the youth arm of the NAACP. The group would meet at the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street in the conference room adjacent to the office of Mississippi’s civil rights leader. “Medgar would come over and talk to us every meeting when he was around,” Anding recalled in an oral history interview. As for his own budding role, Anding saw his participation “as kind of a duty,” he said. “I felt obligated to go to meetings and to participate because most of the kids my age weren’t willing to.”

The young activist benefitted from his closeness with both his aunt and with Evers. On several occasions he was chosen to represent the West Jackson Youth Council at gatherings of NAACP youth from throughout the South. It was at these sessions that he became aware of the possibilities that real activism held. “Most other kids from other states had already participated in some kind of protest activities,” he recalled. “It was there that we started thinking, ‘OK, we really have to do something as Mississippians.’”

Indeed, upon returning from one of these week-long sessions, Anding and his cousin, A.M.E.’s son Willis Logan—serving as president of the Youth Council—decided in the summer of 1960 that some form of protest needed to occur in Jackson. They headed over to the Jackson Zoo and sat on a bench reserved for Whites only. The police were called, but nothing came of the infraction. The youth were just scolded and told to go home. The incident didn’t even make it into the newspapers. But Meredith had had his first taste of dissent against the established segregationist order—and his first scrape with the police, as well. Thus, he was not intimidated when the call came to participate the following March in the library sit-in.

Many of the Tougaloo Nine returned in August 2017 to Jackson for the unveiling of the Mississippi Freedom Trail marker commemorating their historic “read-in.” Pictured L-R: Beverly Hogan, then-President of Tougaloo College; Meredith Anding; Alfred Cook; Geralding Edwards Hollis; Ethel Sawyer Adolphe; Janice Jackson; Albert Lassiter; and James Bradford. (Gentleman at far right, unidentified.) [Anding family photo]

Like his other eight colleagues, Anding endured more than 30 hours in jail after his arrest for the library protest, including an arduous interrogation by detectives intent on pinning the lawless “read-in” on Medgar Evers. Despite repeated and harsh questioning, neither Anding nor his accomplices ever gave up any information that might incriminate their leader. Anding’s steely reserve and inbred confidence was something of a shock to the White detectives. “Your mother would be ashamed of you!” the cops admonished him. “No, she wouldn’t,” Anding calmly volleyed. “Why not?” they persisted. “Because my father pays taxes and I have a right to go to the library.”

Because of his participation in Mississippi’s first student-led civil rights demonstration, Anding lost his funding for college, which was being provided by a local church group, and was forced to suspend his education. Undeterred, he moved to Chicago for a year, then volunteered to serve in the Air Force security force. After four years, mostly spent in Turkey, Anding returned to Tougaloo and completed his Bachelor of Science degree with a specialty in Mathematics. He also gained acceptance into graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo for an advanced degree in Math. He met his wife Maurice while in grad school and the two forged a lifelong partnership. They stayed in Buffalo and made careers teaching mathematics and designing teaching protocols to help youth learn higher mathematics principles.

For their efforts, each of the Tougaloo Nine were awarded keys to the City of Jackson on October 14, 2006, 45 years after their historic nonviolent protest. [Key in Meredith Anding Collection]

Meredith Anding died on Friday, January 8, of complications from leukemia. Maurice survives him, as does the Andings’ son Armaan and several grandchildren. Their son Gordon, who had cerebral palsey, died in 2018.

In summing up his breakthrough activism, the example of which would lead many more of Mississippi’s young Blacks to challenge the segregationist system, Anding was, as usual, understated but eloquent. “We were the first to show resistance,” Anding said about the legacy of the Tougaloo Nine. “We were the pace setters. We seized a moment of time that had arrived for the state of Mississippi to move forward.”

Author M.J. O’Brien and Meredith Anding outside of the Anding’s home along the Niagara River in Grand Island, New York. Just like Anding, the seemingly quiet river disguises a powerful undercurrent below the surface. About 10 miles downriver, the placid Niagara River becomes Niagara Falls.

M. J. O’Brien is the author of the award-winning “We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth’s Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired.” He is currently at work on a book-length narrative study of the Tougaloo Nine and their legacy.

#Meredith Anding #Tougaloo Nine #Tougaloo College #Meredith C Anding Jr #A.M.E. Logan #Medgar Evers #Breach of Peace #West Jackson Youth Council #NAACP #Mississippi NAACP #Beverly Hogan #Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center #Jim Hill High School #Tougaloo Alumni

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getlostinasia · 7 years ago

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Ikigai: A Japanese concept to improve work and life For Japanese workers in big cities, a typical work day begins with a state called sushi-zume, a term which likens commuters squeezed into a crowded train car to tightly packed grains of rice in sushi. Essentially, ikigai is the reason why you get up in the morning The stress doesn’t stop there. The country’s notorious work culture ensures most people put in long hours at the office, governed by strict hierarchical rules. Overwork is not uncommon and the last trains home on weekdays around midnight are filled with people in suits. How do they manage? The secret may have to do with what Japanese call ikigai. There is no direct English translation, but it’s a term that embodies the idea of happiness in living. Essentially, ikigai is the reason why you get up in the morning. You may also like: Can you work yourself to death? Is this the secret to Swedish success? ‘We had to give them bonuses’ to leave early To those in the West who are more familiar with the concept of ikigai, it’s often associated with a Venn diagram with four overlapping qualities: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. For Japanese however, the idea is slightly different. One’s ikigai may have nothing to do with income. In fact, in a survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women conducted by Central Research Services in 2010, just 31% of recipients considered work as their ikigai. Someone’s value in life can be work – but is certainly not limited to that. A closer look In a 2001 research paper on ikigai, co-author Akihiro Hasegawa, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at Toyo Eiwa University, placed the word ikigai as part of everyday Japanese language. It is composed of two words: iki, which means life and gai, whichdescribes value or worth. According to Hasegawa, the origin of the word ikigai goes back to the Heian period (794 to 1185). “Gai comes from the word kai (“shell” in Japanese) which were deemed highly valuable, and from there ikigai derived as a word that means value in living.” There are other words that use kai: yarigai or hatarakigai which mean the value of doing and the value of working. Ikigai can be thought of as a comprehensive concept that incorporates such values in life. There are many books in Japan devoted to ikigai, but one in particular is considered definitive: Ikigai-ni-tsuite (About Ikigai), published in 1966. The book’s author, psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, explains that as a word, ikigai is similar to “happiness” but has a subtle difference in its nuance. Ikigai is what allows you to look forward to the future even if you’re miserable right now. Japanese people believe that the sum of small joys in everyday life results in more fulfilling life as a whole Hasegawa points out that in English, the word life means both lifetime and everyday life. So, ikigai translated as life’s purpose sounds very grand. “But in Japan we have jinsei, which means lifetime and seikatsu, which means everyday life,” he says. The concept of ikigai aligns more to seikatsu and, through his research, Hasegawa discovered that Japanese people believe that the sum of small joys in everyday life results in more fulfilling life as a whole. A concept for longevity? Japan has some of the longest-living citizens in the world – 87 years for women and 81 for men, according to the country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Could this concept of ikigai contribute to longevity? Author Dan Buettner believes it does. He's the author of Blue Zones: Lessons on Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, and has travelled the globe exploring long-lived communities around the world, which he calls “blue zones”. One such zone is Okinawa, a remote island with a remarkably high number of centenarians. While a unique diet likely has a lot to do with residents’ longevity, Buettner says ikigai also plays a part. “Older people are celebrated, they feel obligated to pass on their wisdom to younger generations,” he says. This gives them a purpose in life outside of themselves, in service to their communities. According to Buettner, the concept of ikigai is not exclusive to Okinawans: “there might not be a word for it but in all four blue zones such as Sardinia and Nicoya Peninsula, the same concept exists among people living long lives.” Buettner suggests making three lists: your values, things you like to do, and things you are good at. The cross section of the three lists is your ikigai. But, knowing your ikigai alone is not enough. Simply put, you need an outlet. Ikigai is “purpose in action,” he says. For 92-year-old Tomi Menaka, her ikigai is to dance and sing with her peers in the KBG84 dance troupe, she told the Mainichi newspaper. For others, it might be work itself. Take action In a culture where the value of the team supercedes the individual, Japanese workers are driven by being useful to others, being thanked, and being esteemed by their colleagues, says Toshimitsu Sowa, CEO of HR consulting firm Jinzai Kenkyusho. CEO of executive recruiting firm Probity Global Search Yuko Takato spends her days with highly qualified people who consider work as their ikigai and, according to Takato, they all have one thing in common: they are motivated and quick to take action. “If you want to start a company but you are scared to dive into the unknown, go and see someone who is already doing something similar to what you have in mind.” By seeing your plans in action, Takato says, “it will give you confidence that you can do it too”. Think smaller That’s not to say that working harder and longer are key tenets of the ikigai philosophy – nearly a quarter of Japanese employees work more than 80 hours of overtime a month, and with tragic outcomes – the phenomenon of karoshi (death from overwork) claims more than 2,000 lives a year. Ikigai is about feeling your work makes a difference in people’s lives Rather, ikigai is about feeling your work makes a difference in people’s lives. How people find meaning in their work is a topic of much interest to management experts. One research paper by Wharton management professor Adam Grant explained that what motivates employees is “doing work that affects the well-being of others” and to “see or meet the people affected by their work.” In one experiment, cold callers at the University of Michigan who spent time with a recipient of the scholarship they were trying to raise money for brought in 171% more money when compared with those who were merely working the phone. The simple act of meeting a student beneficiary provided meaning to the fundraisers and boosted their performance. This applies to life in general. Instead of trying to tackle world hunger, you can start small by helping someone around you, like a local volunteering group. Diversify your ikigai Retirement can bring a huge sense of loss and emptiness for those who find their ikigai in work. This can be especially true for athletes, who have relatively shorter careers. Champion hurdler Dai Tamesue, who retired in 2012, said in a recent interview that the fundamental question he asked after he retired was: “what was it that I wanted to achieve by playing sports?” “For me, what I wanted to achieve through competing in track and field was to change people’s perceptions”. After retiring, he started a company that supports sports-related business. Tamesue’s story shows the malleable nature of ikigai and how it can be applied. When retirement comes, it is helpful to have a clear understanding of why you do what you do beyond collecting a payslip. By being mindful of this concept, it might just help you live a more fulfilling life. To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us onTwitter. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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cnfhumss12a-blog · 6 years ago

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Receipts of Binondo

By Ingrid Deldgado

When I was a child, I used to spend my nights helping my father in his home office just a floor below our family bedroom. Night after night, I would pull out handwritten receipts, all crumpled and stained with blood, from his old Seiko wallet and read it aloud to him. These receipts were from the meat supply business my family that has been passing on since my great grandfather started the business almost a hundred years ago. I would always goggle at these tiny scraps of paper, trying to decipher my father’s unique handwriting, as they lay carelessly scattered around the house. It didn’t take too long for me to recognize each scrawled word and memorize certain institutions that regularly appeared in the address line. The names Ha Yuan, Toho, and Sa Lido in particular remained stuck in my head because I always found them funny when reading out loud. It wasn’t until recently did I found out that Ha Yuan, Toho, and Sa Lido were not just names of old Chinese businessmen. It was, as a matter of fact, Chinese restaurants named after the old Chinese businessmen (close enough, though) along the business districts of Binondo.

As someone born and raised in Manila, the Binondo district wasn’t a stranger in my stream of consciousness. For one, I’ve known it as the birthplace of my former school’s Mother Foundress (Venerable Ignacia of the Religious of the Virgin Mary, potentially the first Filipina saint if her canonization pushes through). It was also my parents’ go-to place for furniture needs (a nice Chandelier? Soler Street has tons; new sofa? T. Pinpin has an array; plumbing needs? Sta. Elena has a gallery of toilets). And of course, I have always known it as a delivery hotspot for my father’s pork and meat supply.

When the task of finally visiting Binondo personally came at hand, my father was naturally the first person that came into my mind. It seemed that he was just as enthused at the idea as I was because he didn’t just allow me to be dropped off but also had an itinerary in mind. The day was going to be our date as we both explored the hidden charms of the old business district.

Amidst the blinding sun of high noon, my father and I rode a single motorcycle to – in his words – give me an “immersive experience” of the bustling city. Scooped up in my father’s back, I was not protected from the stench of the esteros nor from the deafening shrieks of cars parading along Ongpin Street. Of the things I wasn’t shielded from was also the pulse of the streets’ energy as people hurriedly cross from one street to the next and sidewalk vendors call out for their next customers. Binondo’s streets boast of colors against the polluted Manila skylines, with red lanterns and Feng Shui hangings hovering overhead the idle traffic and tiny shops selling colorful treats tucked in narrow eskenitas. Though Chinese New Year had well passed, traces of the celebration still loomed in the side streets. Piles of Tikoy were still on display, as were the lucky charms and crystals that blessed the streets of Binondo.

First in my Dad’s agenda was lunch at the old Toho restaurant. Toho is the home of my favorite Spicy Squid, a dish unique to Toho as it was adapted from visiting an Indonesian local’s recipe that was shared to the family owner. It married the rich taste of ginger with 3 types of bell peppers and large squids, breaded and spiced with their “secret recipe”, and sautéed in garlic, butter, and atsuete oil. There wasn’t anything grand about the restaurant aside from the fact that it was one of the oldest restaurants still standing in Binondo. As a matter of fact, it looked more like an eatery than a proper restaurant per se with its scratched walls, worn out light fixtures, and darkened tiles. Of course, I was too polite to say these while the restaurant’s current owner, Mr. Al Wong, was with us during our visit. Surprisingly, however, he shared the same sentiments as mine. He spoke of his disappointments on the gradual decline of the restaurant that he had been with his family for more than seven decades. He lamented on the fact that every day, he only sa the same faces eating at his diner. He referred to the group behind our table as the same construction workers and laborers who routinely spend their hour-long breaks drinking cheap beer and eating warm Asado as pulutan. I listened closely as he talked to my father about renovating the space, saying that he was in talks with the architect of Mary Grace Cafes in hopes of modernizing the restaurant into something millennials could enjoy and rave about, maybe even get it trending online.

After a hearty lunch, he allowed me to take a look at the exclusive kitchen where the magic happens. The place itself wasn’t as magical since it looked even older from the inside. What – or who, rather – left me enchanted were the people working inside. I met Mang Ben, an elderly cook of the kitchen, who specializes in their trademark Pork Asado. I was fortunate to catch him in his element as he was just tossing ingredients inside a dark, large pan when I walked in. One couldn’t immediately tell that he was a chef in charge of the kitchen. He wasn’t in uniform unlike the employees visible to the customers. Instead, he was dressed in an oversized t-shirt and paint-stained shorts. He has been working in the restaurant for almost three decades, and was able to work with my now passed Lolo who used to manage the meat shop when it was still a small stall in Quiapo.

My little tour of the kitchen ended with me watching how my favorite Spicy Squid was cooked. I also brought home some takeaway for me to munch on for dinner later. I took one last look at the gloomy restaurant, knowing that it might be the last time I see it in its original architecture from seventy years ago.

I rode my father’s scooter once again, still fully fueled from our stopover in Toho. We decided to roam around Ongpin for a while and visit small stores selling all sorts of minerals and stones that promise calm and peace and prosperity. It’s funny how their staff must have been already immune to the charms’ effects, seeing how they can be unnecessarily rude to the street children who happen to wander carelessly into their store.

The distasteful trip to the old charm store was followed by a stopover at Lord Stow’s which I am most excited about. I had my first Lord Stow’s egg tarts in a quick trip to Macau and since then, I would always be on the lookout for branches here in Manila. The bakery is internationally famed for its luscious, melt-in-your-mouth egg tarts. Fortunately, their small bakery in Ongpin St. was accessible and just as tasty as the ones I found abroad. The egg tarts were just as smooth and fluffy, with sweetness and saltiness waging a war as the cream filling melted in my mouth. I ordered a box of four for takeout as I made a mental note to save it for a movie I have to watch later that night.

The final box in our itinerary list is one of Dad’s customers, hidden away at the second floor of a commercial building hosting a jewelry shop at the ground floor. With signs barely visible, I unknowingly climbed the crusty stairs of the time-worn Sa Lido restaurant. We were welcomed by the shocking sight of old Chinese men sleeping on their own tables, one with his mouth open and others asleep above a newspaper they were supposed to be reading. My dad was greeted by the gracious staff. They knew Dad by his name as he was often there to deliver rations or to collect payment. “Panganay ko” he introduced me as I was curiously smiled at by baristas manning the old drip coffee machines. We were still full from our lunch earlier which was why we just opted to take a few pictures of the restaurant. With one look, the place is easily recognizable as an authentic Chinese restaurant due to its antique furniture and Feng Shui marks around. One of the staff whose name I cannot recall (sorry, Ate!) but who Dad knew well pointed out that it is their authentic brewed coffee that garnered such a loyal following from the Chinese residents of Binondo. These patrons come back so often that they have their own mugs stored at the cafe. She showed us samples of these mugs to show how some of these even have pictures of their owners. We didn’t stay too long as not to disturbed the few but loyal clients they have at the moment and once again rode the scooter to head home.

As I settled on the back of my father’s scooter, I began recounting the day’s events, trying to relish every detail of the day’s trip. I finally saw Toho and Sa Lido in real life. They were no longer funny names in the receipts that I gathered from my father’s worn wallet. I met the owners and the staff that allowed to have a glimpse of the life my father has been leading. I saw the friendships he had to build in order to build us a life of satisfaction – a life where I couldn’t ask for more.

Beads of sweat formed in my temples as we rode away under the scorching sun. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I got home and fell asleep almost immediately while my father drove away to supply more of his rations. I was so tired after a day’s worth of roaming under the sun, and I began to imagine what it must have been like to do just the same for longer than I have lived, and do so always with much joy. This was his life and I am glad that I got to see this part of him through the streets of Binondo.

Gallery: https://cnfhumss12a.tumblr.com/tagged/Ingrid

#english #Ingrid

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foodtellsastory · 8 years ago

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Ben Carson and the Fate of Soul Food

70. Dr. Ben Carson, a brilliant pediatric neurosurgeon, is now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), because he’s….Well, I suspect the internal discussion went something like this: The U in HUD stands for “urban,” and, as Paul Ryan showed us, “urban” is a code word for “black.” So, let’s make Ben the head of HUD. A match made in Heaven or wherever, quod erat demonstrandum.

(By the way, this post will be about food. I promise.)

Anyway, back on March 6, 2017, his first day in office, Dr. Carson spoke to his HUD employees, declaring: “That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Let’s just say that the world of social media noticed. The Food Network’s Sunny Anderson had one of the more restrained reactions:

Carson’s statement did seem odd. When we think of “immigrants” coming to America, we probably don’t picture it like this:

Later in the day, on his first attempt to talk his way out of it, Dr. Carson appealed to a linguistic technicality: An immigrant might be defined as an individual member of a migration. Some migrations are voluntary, and some are not. (Ask the Cherokee people about the “not” version.) And so, it was as he first said: The enslaved were “involuntary” immigrants.

Well, ok. Some still objected. Jelani Cobb noted that calling an enslaved person an “immigrant” is like calling a kidnapping victim a “house guest.” At the time, slaveholders insisted that they were merely importing farm equipment, like a farmer today might import a Volvo tractor. The enslaved were considered property, not tourists. (Except when it came to seats in Congress. Then the slaveholders wanted their “property” to count the same as them. That’s where the infamous 3/5ths rule came in as a compromise.)

But even if we’re charitable and grant Dr. Ben that technical definition, it still wouldn’t explain his characterization that the enslaved had “worked even longer, even harder for less” in order to win the American Dream for their descendants.

On the face of it, it sounds like a backhanded argument against raising the minimum wage. Can’t make it on $7.25/hr? Stop whining, and work 16 hours instead of 8.

If that’s your politics, fine. But don’t compare it to life under enslavement. If we say they were working “for less” instead of “for free,” then we’re assuming that the enslaved at least got “paid” in free room and board, so it was ok. I mean, a hovel and a cup of cornmeal is worth something, right? There’s no free lunch.

And the rest of your “compensation”? Whippings were thrown in for free. Character-builders, I guess. Maybe Frederick Douglass wouldn’t have gotten up the gumption to escape and become an abolitionist hero if he hadn’t been beaten up so much.

Fact fact (not an “alternative fact”): Many of the enslaved who escaped made their way to Canada. What do we make of that? Carson said the African immigrants dreamed that their descendants “might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” But for many, “this land” was Canada, not America. So were they just un-American ingrates who didn’t realize how good they had it here? (See painting above….)

And while we’re at it, the enslaved weren’t quite allowed to have dreams for their descendants, because those descendants automatically inherited their enslaved status, simply by being born. They were, legally, the property of another person from birth. The tragic reality was something more like this newspaper clipping found by Michelle Munyikwa:

Before the day was over, the good Doctor was in full retreat. Carson insisted that he knows the difference between slavery and immigration. But that’s not so obvious. As Tera Hunter pointed out, this wasn’t the first time that Carson has waded into this swamp. He has compared Obamacare to slavery. He has compared reproductive freedom to slavery.

2014: One of the good ones had the guts to speak up

That rhetoric plays well on the right. Some insist on minimizing the horribleness of American enslavement, like Bill O’Reilly’s ridiculous comments last summer about “well-fed slaves.” We just don’t expect to hear it from a guy with ancestors who were, we assume, enslaved.

Bill O’Reilly, between lawsuits, pronounced slavery not so bad

But let’s turn the clock ahead to the early 20th century. Now, talk of “immigrants” (or more accurately, “migrants”) dreaming of a better life might be more plausible. We’re referring to the period known as “The Great Migration,” lasting from World War I into the 1960s, when millions of African Americans managed to leave the southern states for the north and west.

In this case, we certainly have the element of free choice. Indeed, as Carol Anderson summarizes in the second chapter of her book, White Rage, the southern white power structure used every tool at its disposal, short of starting another Civil War, to prevent African Americans from leaving. By that measure, it was the opposite of a forced migration.

We also have the motives that traditionally lured Europeans to America. Some went northward in search of better economic opportunities than were available in the segregated economy of the south. Others were running for their lives, seeking to dodge the renewed outbreak of lynchings and violence encouraged during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

In this sense, one might compare the experience of African American migrants in the north to the experience of foreign immigrant groups across our history, from the Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Chinese, Italians, Mexicans, Koreans, and Vietnamese, to the Somalians, Ethiopians, and other more recent arrivals.

Food. Talk about Food…

For many reasons, migrants often seek out the food they ate back home. Opening small operations, such as cafes, food stands, pushcarts, and catering businesses has been a first step available for many minority groups in the face of racism, bigotry, and restriction.

Then, two things happen. First, the original “ethnic” dishes begin to take on the flavor of their surroundings. That was certainly the case for African American migrants. Some of the ingredients that were common and cheap down south were either unavailable in the north or their seasonality was more restricted. Much of today’s debate over yellow cornbread vs. white cornbread, for example, stems from the simple reality that up north, yellow cornmeal is what’s more likely to be on the grocery shelves. Northern wheat flour is different too.

We see this in the various menus of the Sweet Home Cafe at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. What we probably think of as “soul food” is well-represented by the “Agricultural South” menu, with items like fried chicken, collard greens, mac and cheese, Hoppin’ John, and so on. The “Creole Coast” menu, representing the Low Country and Louisiana traditions, still sounds like soul food, with items like fried catfish (as a Po’Boy sandwich), and candied yams.

But as we move into the “North States” and “Western Range” menus, we run into items that don’t sound like “soul food” at all, like smoked Haddock, Yankee Baked Beans, “Son of a gun” Stew (with beef short ribs), and BBQ Buffalo brisket.

Sweet Home Cafe: soul food surrounded by history (NMAAHC photo)

These menus remind us that “soul food” is more than a particular list of dishes or ingredients. As a general rule, “soul food” dishes are characterized by close attention to seasoning, no matter what the dish is. There’s also that more esoteric quality of putting “love” or “soul” into the cooking. That’s impossible to pin down scientifically, but we know whether it’s there or not.

Both distinctions are important. Sometimes, we make “soul food” shorthand for “what black people eat.” By that measure, a Big Mac is soul food. In some areas, food redlining, like housing redlining, has helped create or reinforce segregated neighborhoods where people without sufficient money, transportation, or free time often end up going to the ubiquitous fast food places to grab cheap items made from government-subsidized ingredients. A Big Mac may not be a nutritionist’s dream food, but it is an economical way to get a lot of calories in a hurry.

No offense to the good folks at McDonald’s, but Big Macs are the antithesis of “soul food.” They’re not particularly well-seasoned, and it’s hard to put that indefinable element of “love” into food designed to be mass-produced quickly with minimal human intervention. There’s also no sense of down-home regionality in a Big Mac. Franchising’s raison d’être is that sandwich you buy in Bangor, Maine should taste like the one you buy in Pensacola, Chicago, Topeka, Sioux Falls, Salt Lake City, Oakland, or whatever McDonald’s in DC is closest to the NMAAHC.

Just don’t call it soul food

On the positive side, the historic regional flexibility and adaptability of African American cuisine offers a key to its survival. Fair or not (and in this blog, we say Not), many criticize the traditional soul food menu as unhealthy. But there’s no reason why soul food restaurants can’t include lower fat, less sweet items or vegetarian/vegan items and still be made with love and good flavor. The African roots of soul food point to an emphasis on vegetables over meat, and developing flavors beyond what we can get from fats and sugar. “Soul food” was inherently adaptive, and still can be.

The other thing that happens to migrant foods is more challenging: As migrant groups become more fixed in the community, people from outside that group start frequenting the local eateries, and over time, the food itself changes to meet the tastes of the new customer base. Americanized versions of Chinese, Italian, or Mexican dishes are typically unrecognizable to visitors from those nations. The taco you buy at a Taco Bell in Minneapolis is not like the taco you might buy from a food truck in Los Angeles, let alone one from Mexico.

Midwesterners have discovered this with the influx of Latin American immigrants in the last twenty years. Here in Sioux City, when we’re sorting out dinner plans, “Let’s have Mexican!’ is inevitably followed by “You mean real Mexican or Taco Bell?” Many local Mexican restaurants cater to both tastes. For instance, you can usually order a taco “American style” (i.e., with cheese, ground beef, and no cilantro).

One meme put the issue succinctly. Don’t look up chingadera. Use your imagination.

Even the “real Mexican” menu is an invention. There is plenty of regional diversity in Mexican cuisine, and most restaurants pick and choose. Some “real Mexican” restaurants around here include Dominican or Guatemalan dishes, in an attempt to cater to the needs of as many groups as possible.

How far can “authentic” soul food be stretched before it becomes something else? I’ve heard it said that “southern” cooking is nothing more than soul food dumbed down in taste, fancied up in looks, and boosted up in price. I can order fried catfish and a side of collards at the Cracker Barrel, and it’s ok…but it’s not quite soul food either.

In real estate, “gentrification” describes the phenomenon of young white professionals moving into older, predominantly African American neighborhoods in search of cheaper rents or home prices. They fix up their houses, and open up coffee shops and such. In the process, property values increase, rents go up. Then, those without the incomes to support the new requirements find themselves being driven out.

In 2015, “Saturday Night Live” doctored up a real-life business in Bushwick to create their “Martha’s Mayonnaise” spoof of what happens under gentrification in Brooklyn.

Recently, this phenomenon of “gentrification” has been applied to soul food.

Two things happen with gentrification: First, we risk losing the historical significance of soul food. Think of it this way: There’s nothing more All-American than hamburgers and hot dogs, but we never think of their German roots. What was the “Hamburg” style of meat? Do we ever stop to think that “wiener” refers to Vienna? Does eating a chicken and roadkill hot dog oozing with white filler move us to seek out the rich sausages of the Central European tradition? Likewise, if soul food survives by the gentrification route, would it get disconnected from its soul?

Gentrified German soul food

Second, with gentrification, the people who created soul food may well be left out in the cold. On the eater’s side, Eboni Harris noted the phenomenon of how “‘ethnic’ foods are ‘discovered’ by well-meaning foodies – often white – who then raise the price of these meals until the original purveyors and consumers can no longer afford to eat them.”

Once upon a time, for instance, oxtails were considered so useless that some butchers gave them away for the asking. Today, oxtails are expensive, especially considering the small amount of meat on them. Barbecue aficionados have noted the same when it comes to brisket.

This is significant for soul food because one of the historic keys to soul food was in the ability of African American cooks to apply the legacy of West African cuisine to make less desirable foods, like neckbones or collards, taste great. But it’s hard for the average person to practice cooking and perfecting traditional dishes if the ingredients break the budget. (When I wanted to make oxtails, I practiced on cheaper stew meat before I dared invest in actual oxtails.)

On the cook’s side, we run into appropriation, aggravated by the multitude of ways in which institutionalized racism hinders African Americans from being able to capitalize on their food heritage. The difficulties faced by trained African American cooks in becoming chefs are quantifiable. We can work our way through the lists of the annual James Beard award winners. We can count up the black chefs that make it onto Chopped episodes, or check cookbook sales.

Last fall, there was a minor media fluff over Neiman-Marcus selling collard greens. We titled our reaction, “Greens for People Better Than You.” The gist of the piece was to wonder why anyone would pay so much for frozen greens rather than go to a local soul food restaurant and by some fresh greens for a fraction of the cost, and probably with superior flavor to boot.

Robert Irvine no doubt makes fine collard greens. Does it matter if his face becomes the face of collards, and his seasoning sets the standard?

For some, this is when “gentrification” begins to sound more like flat-out appropriation: white folks coming in and taking over, obscuring the history, and making money off of other people’s food traditions and hard work, while using the tools of contemporary segregation, such as equal access to capital, to shut out or shut down competitors.

It’s a double injustice. Many southern/soul food dishes were created or perfected by enslaved cooks paid nothing, or by underpaid cooks working under Jim Crow. Spin the clock ahead to 2017, and their descendants are feeling cheated again. Many soul food places are closing down just at a time when southern cuisine and barbecue are coming to national attention and popularity.

At that point, the broader quest for social and economic justice will have an impact on the fate of soul food. If the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice, the impact will be positive. The restaurant business is always challenging, but people who want to cook soul food, or include soul food dishes, will benefit from increased opportunities to follow their dreams.

Those of us who like to eat and/or cook soul food have a moral obligation to those who passed it down to us to invest ourselves not just in groceries but in the broader quest for justice. That requires, in the first place, knowledge. We should learn the history behind the cuisine, and also understand the current situation. More on that in a moment.

Soul food may also benefit from a renewed interest in home cooking. Some watch food programming on TV just for its entertainment value, but others get curious enough to try their own hand at things. I can tell from the new options on the grocery shelves at my neighborhood Walmart that people’s kitchen horizons must be broadening.

For some, cooking is a lost art. I’ve had the disconcerting experience of being asked to give advice, tips, or soul food recipes to younger African American women. I’m always flattered, but it just feels weird that they’re asking an old white guy for something that would be better learned from their parents or grandparents. What do I know? I’m just a student myself, and a pretty elementary one at that. I feel like John the Baptist meeting Jesus: “You want me to baptize you? Dude, you should be baptizing me!”

Cooking takes time and practice, a willingness to learn by trial-and-error, screw up a dish, apologize to your family…and then come back and try it again. The current level of interest in cuisines and cooking may give soul food a boost, both in terms of learning to cook them the old-fashioned way, and in adapting the classics to meet our interest in healthier options.

Hopefully, this hands-on practice in the kitchen may also get more people interested in the history behind the soul food. It’s in the nature of that cuisine that some of us are curious about what has gone into the “soul” part.

We know how this works in music. When Chuck Berry died in March, many of us on the downhill half of life’s mountain climb paused to reflect on the music of our childhood.

Chuck Berry in London, 1965. His music ended up teaching me more than music.

Like a lot of white teenagers in the 70s, I discovered Chuck Berry retroactively. I had learned his songs first from the covers done by the Beatles and the Stones. But then I got interested in going back and finding Berry’s originals, and that, in turn, led me to dig back even further into the roots of rock and roll in the r&b and jazz of the 1930s and ’40s. It wasn’t just the music either. Learning how the Delta blues became the Chicago blues, for instance, led to my introduction to the topic of the moment: the Great Migration.

The same has been true in exploring soul food. It prompted me to go back and learn a lot of history that I was never taught in school, and then to think about how that history continues to impact us. This blog reflects some of that journey. I’m sure some react to putting food and history together the same way that some react to putting pineapples on pizza. But I like it.

So, the question of authenticity may solve itself. Some will surely try to capitalize on dumbing-down soul food dishes for a broader audience, but others will respond by offering something more faithful to the living traditions.

Bottom line? Food is always in transition. Techniques, equipment, ingredients, and tastes change. “Soul food” isn’t a museum piece. It’s a living cuisine, and it would be inauthentic to try and somehow freeze it in time. Even the name may change. “Soul food,” after all, was a 1960s invention. The great Edna Lewis, it will be remembered, called it “country cooking.” But my educated guess is that it, whatever “it” is, will survive.

#appropriation #food history #gentrification #great migration #soul food

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Blavity has a big opportunity with Black millennials, despite struggling to fit the VC formula

Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history, according to four different polls cited recently by the New York Times that suggest anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people in the U.S. have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others since Floyd’s death in late May.

Blavity, a six-year-old, L.A.-based media company that’s focused on Black culture, could hardly be better positioned to help outraged Americans better understand what’s really been going on. Blavity founder Morgan DeBaun says the outfit receives at least a handful of videos each week that feature egregious acts against Black Americans, and the same has been true since DeBaun, working at the time at Intuit, founded the company in 2014 after unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown was gunned down by a police office in her native Missouri.

Blavity tells the stories that the mainstream media has largely been missing, but that’s only part of the story. The company has also become a go-to destination for a growing number of Black millennials interested in fresh takes on culture and politics; in Black Hollywood and travel (via two other properties it runs); and in its sizable networking events, one of which attracted 10,000 people last year.

Last week, we talked with DeBaun about Blavity — which has raised a comparatively conservative $11 million to date, including from GV, Comcast Ventures, and Plexo Capital — to learn more about how the company seizes this moment, and whether investors see the opportunity. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity (you can hear the full discussion here).

TC: You started Blavity in part to address a need you were feeling to connect with others after Michael Brown’s death. What were you reading at the time?

MD: The unfortunate answer is I wasn’t reading anything. I hadn’t really felt the need to stay connected to local or regional or Black issues until I moved out of my community and found myself wondering [from California], what is going on.

Historically in the Black community, we’ve had our own networks and platforms and brands: the African American newspapers in various cities, Essence, Jet, Ebony, and more recently, The Root. [But] a significant amount of media publications are still focused on entertainment and Hollywood and not necessarily on news. And so there was a huge gap of information that I felt wanting to understand.

This was before Twitter really became a source of information and truth for so many people, so there was a gap of information from what I saw happening on the ground in St. Louis and in text messages and as part of an email list with friends who were on the ground, and what I saw in the mainstream media. And to me, that was a huge miss, because we needed to be connected at that point more than ever so we could help impact change.

TC: There’s a lot of social injustice covered by Blavity. Two of the most popular stories on the site as we speak are about Sacramento police officer who placed a plastic bag on a 12-year-old’s head, and a cop who was arrested and charged after tasing a pregnant woman on her stomach. Are these stories central to making Blavity a resource to its readers?

MD: We tend to be a reflection of the pulse of the reality and the Black experience, and we do share stories and news that people might not find other places. I get the question more recently about: Does this time feel different? Are we covering different things? And unfortunately, the answer is that we’ve been covering these stories weekly since Michael Brown happened. It’s been a critical part of our publication and ethos to ensure that we’re sharing the stories of our community and bringing light to the injustices that are happening.

We also share joy and happiness and celebrations and moments of great accomplishments and local stories of heroes. But certainly right now, we’re making sure that we’re doing our diligence and covering the stories that are very important for this moment in time.

TC: You recently told Forbes that advertisers and marketers do not want to spend money next to Black death and violence. You have to cover these stories because it’s core to what you do, but it’s a double-edged sword for you, it sounds like.

MD: Blavity as an organization has five different brands. So we have a diversified revenue stream where we don’t just rely on display advertising against our news business, because if we did, we would wind up very much similar to what we’ve seen happen [to other struggling media companies]. There was a time when our Facebook page was even blocked because [stories] have gotten flagged as being too violent. And it’s like, well yeah, violence against Black bodies is real. It’s the truth; it’s real news.

So we do have this weird kind of balance that we strike in terms of really making sure that we’re telling the truth and that we are pushing back against our clients, our advertisers, and even Facebook to ensure that Blavity can continue to distribute content. But overall, the news business isn’t our highest revenue-generating business. It’s our conference business and our display ads business across all of our brands, some of which are lifestyle brands.

We also have an ad network that we don’t advertise publicly much, but essentially, we run ads and sales operations for other publishers of color who maybe don’t have the scale to necessarily have their own sales team and ad tech and engineers and things of that nature. We’re fighting for deals against a Vice or a Refinery 29 that also have ad networks, so we wanted to make sure that we could also win those deals and we needed that huge inventory and [that business has] allowed us the flexibility to reinvest [in the rest of the business].

TC: I understand that you’re also starting a paid-for membership-only professional network.

MD: We have an exciting announcement that’ll come out in a few weeks about a new platform that will specifically be a place for young Black professionals to come together to have discussions to learn; to get jobs, because that’s one of our core competencies through [our conference business]; but most importantly, to have discussions around the issues and topics that are trending and that matter. We already do daily conversations through Facebook Live and YouTube and Instagram Live. So we’re trying to build a place where we can have a more private space for those conversations that feels safe and also is a place where people can connect on a deeper level.

TC: Have you noticed a real change in Silicon Valley in the last month or so among investors? Are you seeing interest from firms that previously hadn’t reached out to you?

MD: There are a lot of VCs that perhaps are paying attention, but the bias is so deep that I don’t even think they know how to get out. It.

Have I seen more requests for conversations? Yes. Do I think that that’s going to result in more investments and wires and checks? No. I’m very skeptical of this kind of like performative ‘we care’ flag. The most important metric of success for VCs are returns on their investments. [Venture money] is not a donation; it’s not charity. [VCs look for companies that] meet the metrics of success. And my metrics may be different because I’ve been chronically underfunded despite how much we’ve done.

TC: Can you elaborate?

I think the argument that [later-stage] investors make is, ‘Well, there are just not that many Series A Series B companies to invest in. [But] there are enough companies to invest in, that have your revenue criteria and your goal criteria in terms of a potential exit, but that may not call themselves startups. They may look different. And so you need to do more work to go get them.

There are certainly a lot more people raising funds and having really success in terms of raising their first fund, or that are now on their second fund as a result of this [focus on diversity] and that’s very encouraging and that’s really going to help the seed- and early-stage founders.

I wish I was a founder right now who was raising a seed [round], because I could raise $10 million, there’s so much money going around.

TC: It’s incredible that you could be at a disadvantage because you’re now running a real business with multiple properties, particularly given the opportunity ahead. As you’ve mentioned in the past, there will be a majority minority population in this country in 10 years or so. Are you developing products for other communities, including the Afro-Latino community?

MD: We’ve thought a lot about the sub communities that have huge audiences, are growing quickly, but perhaps don’t have a space or a place to connect. And originally, one of our ideas was to build out our tech platform, then change the UI to accommodate all these [ideas] and become a true house with brands that serve people and communities on a niche level — so Gen Z, Black, LGBT, Afro Latina, for the many Caribbean folks who are in the U.S. and Nigerian Americans; there are so many sub communities within the diaspora.

What we realized is that the overhead and operations of doing that over and over would not be a good idea and that we should figure out how to a build the operations side instead. That’s why we invested in our own ad network, because we can say, ‘Hey, creator in Brooklyn who’s amazing, you have a million monthly unique visitors, which is better than half the publications out there. You don’t have ad sales team. Let’s partner with each other.’ That was the first solution.

The second is this social networking platform that we’ve built. Part of the frustration and tension I felt when I started the company was feeling like there was no one like me. I couldn’t find other Black women who wanted to build a huge company and change the world and do it through tech. There was no one walking around Mountain View who looked like that, and I didn’t know where to go. We want to solve that through technology and through a platform that makes it easy for people to find each other. Hopefully then, once people are more connected, they can build their own companies and come up with their own organizations.

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years ago

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TC: You started Blavity in part to address a need you were feeling to connect with others after Michael Brown’s death. What were you reading at the time?

TC: I understand that you’re also starting a paid-for membership-only professional network.

TC: Have you noticed a real change in Silicon Valley in the last month or so among investors? Are you seeing interest from firms that previously hadn’t reached out to you?

MD: There are a lot of VCs that perhaps are paying attention, but the bias is so deep that I don’t even think they know how to get out. It.

TC: Can you elaborate?

I wish I was a founder right now who was raising a seed [round], because I could raise $10 million, there’s so much money going around.

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#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

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mastcomm · 5 years ago

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Trump Threw Weighty Refugee Decisions to Local Government, With Painful Results

EAST LONGMEADOW, Mass. — In a gray-walled, institutional hall usually reserved for prosaic debates over traffic and town budgets, Mohamoud Abdirahman rose from the audience last month and approached a panel of five town councilmen sitting in judgment.

Civil war had forced his family to flee their native Somalia in 1991, when he was a child. The Abdirahmans traveled for two days by cargo ship to Kenya, where they stayed for a year and a half before securing refuge in the United States. Now, it was his turn to fight for those trying to follow his footsteps to this town abutting Springfield and the Connecticut border.

“A lot of people like me just want a second chance at life,” an emotional Mr. Abdirahman pleaded.

A similar refrain is echoing across the country in town councils, county commissions, mayors’ offices and governors’ mansions after an executive order signed by President Trump in September granted local politicians a veto over the placement of refugees in their communities.

That order has carried the national tension over the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda from the halls of Washington and detention camps along the southwestern border to places like East Longmeadow, population 16,000, and turned refugees and those who work to resettle them into lobbyists of sorts.

The anxiety among resettlement officials here has grown in recent weeks after the mayor of neighboring Springfield, one of the largest cities in Western Massachusetts, became one of the first politicians in the country to announce that he would not allow refugee resettlement. That was amplified by the decision of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas last month to block resettlement for the entire state, which has welcomed more refugees than any other state in the past five years. And on Friday, Mr. Trump put refugees who have lived in Western Massachusetts for years at risk of continuing to stay separated from their relatives abroad when he added Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania to a list of countries facing stringent travel restrictions.

“This goes against everything we know,” said Maxine Stein, the chief executive of the Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, a refugee resettlement agency.

The vetoes issued so far in Texas, Springfield and counties in Minnesota and Virginia were suspended in recent weeks by a federal judge who issued a temporary injunction against the executive order. The ruling delayed a Jan. 21 deadline for resettlement agencies to submit funding requests — along with letters of consent from governors and local officials — to the State Department.

But the resettlement agencies say there is still an urgent need for the resettlement approvals. Judges issued similar temporary injunctions for Mr. Trump’s other immigration polices, only to have the Supreme Court side with the administration.

It is also, the resettlement agencies say, about education. Some local officials were wholly unfamiliar with refugee policy before Mr. Trump tasked them with deciding whether resettlement should continue in their communities. Under the executive order, if a town board, county official or mayor declines — or neglects — to make a decision, silence equates to a veto.

“What we’ve seen in the courts is that the deadline may be pushed back, but it often doesn’t go away,” said Sara Bedford, who works with refugee families for the Jewish Family Service. “As long as the Springfield mayor doesn’t opt in, I think refugee communities will feel just a little bit less welcome.”

The vague wording of the executive order also caused confusion among refugee resettlement officials, who questioned which local official had the power to consent to the State Department.

Under the order, consent is required from governors and “localities,” which in many places was interpreted as the county leadership. But some Western Massachusetts towns are not represented by a county government, so the decision in Springfield fell to Domenic J. Sarno, the son of Italian immigrants and the longest-serving mayor of one of the poorest cities in the state.

Mr. Sarno, a Democrat, issued his veto even after Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts formally consented to allow refugees into the state and the Springfield City Council unanimously voted to allow them into the city.

“You cannot continue to concentrate poverty on top of poverty,” Mr. Sarno wrote in Springfield’s newspaper, The Republican. He demanded that more affluent communities “step up to the plate and put their money where their mouth is — to take on their fair share of social justice responsibilities.”

Mr. Sarno’s words echoed those of Mr. Trump, who has said the country is “full” and has threatened to send immigrants by the busload to Democratic cities and towns that have denounced his policies. Michael A. Fenton, the Springfield councilman who introduced the resolution to welcome refugees, said he had been fielding calls from residents demanding the city “let them go to the suburbs.” Mr. Abbott argued, “Texas has carried more than its share.”

But most government officials who responded to the executive order have decided to accept refugees into their states and counties, including those dominated by Republicans. At least 42 governors and more than 110 local governments have consented.

They include Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas and former under secretary of homeland security, who in 2015 opposed allowing Syrian refugees into the state, citing security concerns. Last month, Mr. Hutchinson testified before his State Legislature to defend allowing refugees into Arkansas, taking with him a Congolese business owner and an Afghan refugee who assisted the American military.

Gary Stubblefield, an Arkansas state senator, pressed his fellow Republican, lamenting, “Every morning when I wake up and turn on the national news, sometimes I ask myself a question: ‘Am I still in the United States of America?’”

Mr. Hutchinson held his ground: “You’ve got a choice to make. You can create fear, or you can help resolve fear. I challenge you to help resolve fear.”

In a twist, Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview that he was encouraged to allow refugees into Arkansas since a limited number would most likely be resettled in the state after Mr. Trump capped the number for 2020 at 18,000, down from 30,000 in the previous year. President Barack Obama set the cap at 110,000 his last year in office.

Still, Mr. Hutchinson’s staff spent the first days after his decision fielding angry calls from constituents, an uncomfortable task that Mr. Fenton in Springfield knows well. By signing the executive order, Mr. Trump has put municipal leaders in an unfair position, Mr. Fenton said.

“Municipal officials in the Northeast, we deal with snow, we deal with potholes, we deal with property taxes, trash pickup,” he said. “We do not deal with the complications associated with refugee immigration policy.”

He worries that the mayor’s decision will have a lasting effect on Springfield’s reputation.

“Those active and contributing members of our society don’t feel good about themselves in the place that they live when people say they’re not welcome,” Mr. Fenton said.

Mr. Sarno’s rejection of refugees surprised Fikiri Amisi and Jacqueline Asumani, Congolese immigrants who came to Springfield last year after spending more than 12 years in a refugee camp in Zimbabwe. When he first came to Springfield, Mr. Amisi said, it felt as though he had been saved. Both work full time, Ms. Asumani at a hotel and Mr. Amisi at a factory that manufactures medical supplies. Mr. Amisi is also studying for his associate degree. They have three children and plan to buy a house next year.

The couple wonders what they have done wrong.

“They don’t want more refugees here,” Ms. Asumani told her husband. “It shows they don’t love us.”

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Amisi looked through a photo album and stopped at an image showing the refugee camp where he used to wait in limbo. A friend called him to express concern over the mayor’s decision. He has been waiting for a ticket to the United States for four years, though long ago he cleared the refugee screening process.

The resettlement officials at Jewish Family Service have tried to meet with officials on a near daily basis. Municipal leaders often ask about costs to the school system and whether the local government will need to provide housing for the refugees. The staff reassures them that the onus is on the resettlement agency, which helps families find work and pay for the first three months of housing.

While a veto by a local official cannot prevent a refugee from moving to a city from within the United States, it prohibits the resettlement organizations from providing that initial financial support and could harm their overall funding, according to Ms. Stein.

“When you’re sleeping on relatives’ floors or extra beds, and you’re all jammed into the kitchen, and it’s chaotic in the morning to get to school so you just don’t get to school, it’s just not a good scene,” Ms. Stein said.

She made that case to the East Longmeadow Town Council, hoping councilors would open the door to refugees shut out of Springfield. Some seemed moved by the testimonies, including the story of Mr. Abdirahman, who now holds a master’s degree and works as the assistant director of behavioral health services at Jewish Family Service.

“To our residents who took the time to speak from your heart, thank you for doing that,” said Kathleen G. Hill, the Town Council president. “And come visit anytime.”

But the Council already voted to take no action on Mr. Trump’s executive order in November, weeks after it was signed. Local government rules stipulated that they could not take the matter up for another six months.

Their hands were tied. And under Mr. Trump’s policy, doing nothing meant turning the refugees away.

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awkwardlyamusing-blog · 6 years ago

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Daily News Briefs: Aug. 8

New Post has been published on http://doggietrainingclasses.com/daily-news-briefs-aug-8/

Daily News Briefs: Aug. 8

Deputies find dog on meth while searching suspect’s home

CLINTON — Authorities say they encountered an aggressive dog on methamphetamine while searching a North Carolina property where a suspect stashed a stolen boat, chain saws and a motorcycle.

The Sampson County Sheriff’s Office issued a statement saying the case began Tuesday when deputies stopped a suspect towing a lawn mower that was reported stolen from a police department. Authorities say they found oxycodone in Matthew Denton Pope’s vehicle.

Investigators then searched Pope’s home and found more stolen items, the release says. Animal Control officers were called because a dog there was acting aggressively and strangely. Authorities say the dog tested positive for methamphetamine.

Pope was being held Thursday on charges including drug possession and possessing stolen goods. A woman answering a phone listing for him declined to speak to a reporter.

Folwell stopping fight for now with hospitals over pricing

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s state treasurer is cutting bait for now on efforts to bring on board dozens of additional hospitals to accept a new payment model for medical services incurred by state employees, teachers and retirees.

Treasurer Dale Folwell said Thursday that the 725,000 participants in the state employee insurance health plan will still receive in-network hospital coverage through the current provider network offered through Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

But they’ll also have similar preferred benefits with providers who agreed to the new pricing model Folwell pushed for the past year. He says that model would lead to lower and more transparent plan expenses.

A second deadline passed this week with only five hospitals agreeing to the new model. Time was running out to act with fall open enrollment approaching.

Changes to reading program Senate leader backs gets final OK

RALEIGH — North Carolina lawmakers have given final approval to provisions aimed at improving a public school literacy program that’s yet to meet expectations.

The House approved a compromise measure Thursday, the day after a favorable Senate vote.

The bill adjusts the 2013 “Read to Achieve” program, which is championed by Republican Senate leader Phil Berger and is aimed at ensuring that students are reading-proficient by third grade.

The measure directs teachers to create tailored individual reading plans for at-risk children. It also seeks more training for teachers and gives them incentives to work in summer reading camps.

Gov. Roy Cooper must now sign the bill to make it law. Some fellow Democrats were unhappy that an amendment allowing local school boards to decide on reading diagnostic tools was omitted.

Man arrested in 1980 rape, murder of N Carolina teenager

DOBSON — North Carolina authorities say a man arrested for the 1980 rape and murder of a teenager had been questioned several times over the course of the investigation.

Media outlets report 62-year-old Robert James Adkins of Dobson was arrested Aug. 2 on charges of raping and killing 14-year-old Ronda Blaylock. Her body was found in Surry County on Aug. 29, 1980, three days after she and a friend voluntarily got into a truck for a ride.

Surry County sheriff’s Capt. Scott Hudson declined to say at a news conference Wednesday what led to Adkins’ arrest but said authorities spoke with him several times during the investigation. A task force was formed in 2015 to investigate new leads.

It wasn’t clear Thursday if Adkins has an attorney to speak on his behalf.

Parole approved for woman who plotted husband’s murder

RALEIGH — North Carolina officials have approved parole for a woman serving a life sentence for plotting the murder of her husband.

The state parole commission said Thursday that it had approved parole for 67-year-old Donna Westbrooks.

Westbrooks was convicted in 1993 of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation to commit murder.

The Guilford County woman enlisted two friends to kill James Westbrooks Jr. by promising to share the payout from his life insurance policy.

James Westbrooks, who worked for a beer distributing company, died after being stabbed 30 times at his Colfax home.

North Carolina lawyer accused of threatening to kill judges

FAYETTEVILLE — Authorities in North Carolina say a lawyer with a suspended license has been arrested on charges he threatened to kill county judges.

News outlets report Cumberland County sheriff’s deputies arrested 48-year-old Dee Wayne Bray Jr. Tuesday on a felony charge of threatening an executive, legislative or court officer.

The Fayetteville Observer says records show the North Carolina State Bar suspended the defense attorney’s license in 2017, because he couldn’t represent his clients due to health reasons. A state bar fund reimbursed his clients more than $165,000.

The newspaper reports court documents say Bray’s acquaintances notified law enforcement after he told them a week ago that he wanted to kill judges in the Cumberland County Courthouse.

Bray is in county custody with a $100,000 bail awaiting a first appearance this week.

Small biz insurance strategy nearing legislative finish line

RALEIGH — A method designed to help North Carolina small businesses offer more affordable health insurance is one vote away from final legislative approval.

The measure developing the rules for “Association Health Plans” will return to the Senate after clearing the House this week.

The plans could be formed by trade groups and organizations with common interests so small companies, sole proprietorships and independent contractors could obtain insurance. State insurance regulators would subject plans to financial and coverage standards, such as treating pre-existing conditions.

The idea has been pushed by groups such as the NC Realtors and the state Retail Merchants Association.

Almost 20 House Democrats joined all Republicans in voting Wednesday for the legislation. If the Senate agrees to changes, the measure would head next to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk.

Lawsuit: Deputy fired for not training woman due to faith

SANFORD — A former sheriff’s deputy in North Carolina is suing over his firing, saying he lost his job because his religious beliefs prevented him from training a woman.

The Sanford Herald reports that Lee County Deputy Manuel Torres is claiming religious discrimination in the lawsuit he filed July 31 in U.S. District Court.

The lawsuit says the 51-year-old Torres believes the Bible prohibits him from being alone with a woman who’s not his wife for extended periods of time. It says he requested a religious accommodation in July 2017 when he was told to train a female deputy.

It says he was fired about two months later.

The newspaper reports Sheriff Tracy Carter declined comment. Torres is seeking reinstatement to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, along with compensatory and punitive damages.

Information from: The Sanford Herald, http://www.sanfordherald.com

NC town awarded for promoting monarch butterfly population

WAKE FOREST — A North Carolina town is being recognized for its commitment to preserving monarch butterflies.

Wake Forest announced Wednesday that it the recognition was awarded by Monarch City USA, a nonprofit organization that promotes the species and recognizes areas that work on recovering butterfly populations.

The nonprofit group says that the butterflies rely on milkweed and nectar plants. The butterfly’s population has declined as the plants have dwindled.

Wake Forest, which is northeast of Raleigh, features the plants that attract the butterflies at E. Carroll Joyner Park.

The town has installed signs that identify the butterfly habitat and one noting Wake Forest’s designation as a “Monarch Town USA.” The nonprofit says it’s the first in the state to receive the designation.

NC virtual school teachers no longer face temporary layoffs

RALEIGH — A payroll change has saved roughly 220 North Carolina Virtual Public School teachers from being temporarily laid off this fall.

The Office of State Human Resources tells news outlets that officials met Tuesday to find a solution and ultimately decided to change who handles the teachers’ payroll. The payroll has been handled by Temporary Solutions, which requires teachers take a 31-day break in service to satisfy state laws for temporary workers.

It will now be managed by the Department of Public Instruction and paid directly through the state’s payroll system. The Office of State Human Resources communications director, Jill Warren Lucas, says in a statement that none of the teachers will miss a paycheck.

The layoffs would have prevented nearly 7,300 students from using state-run online program.

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acoolchristianchick · 6 years ago

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INDIA Biometric SYSTEM

ASIA

India's Biometric ID System Has Led To Starvation For Some Poor, Advocates Say

October 1, 20182:06 PM ETHeard on

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Ashok Kumar (foreground) works at a food ration distribution shop in Jharkhand. He uses a small machine to scan people's fingerprints and check them against Aadhaar ID numbers.

Lauren Frayer/NPR

India has 1.3 billion people, and no equivalent of the Social Security number. About 4 in 10 births go unregistered. Less than 2 percent of the population pays income tax.

Many more are eligible for welfare benefits but may never have collected them, either because they can't figure out how or a middleman stole their share.

To try to address these issues, the Indian government rolled out the biggest biometric ID system in the world. It's voluntary, but in just eight years, India has managed to collect the fingerprints, photos and iris scans of more than 1.2 billion people.

ASIA

For India's Undocumented Citizens, An ID At Last

The government says this system, called Aadhaar — "foundation" in Hindi — has helped to distribute welfare to the country's neediest; streamline the civil service; purge hundreds of thousands of names from voter rolls; and allow for people to move between states without losing benefits.

But privacy advocates are alarmed that the government has collected so much personal data. And advocates for the poor say some technical glitches have actually led to denial of benefits — even costing lives.

Collecting biometrics

Here's how Aadhaar works: An applicant goes to an Indian post office or ID enrollment center and shows proof of address and identity. (In cases where people don't have a fixed address, or any ID, another Indian can legally vouch for them.)

An Aadhaar enrollment worker scans applicants' irises, takes their fingerprints and photos, and assigns them a unique 12-digit number. The biometric data are stored on government servers. Several weeks later, an ID card arrives in the mail.

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The rollout was accompanied by a big patriotic PR campaign, with TV ads showing smiling elderly people using Aadhaar to collect state pensions and villagers using it to collect food rations.

It was geared especially to India's poor.

Helping the poor

"In India, you're nothing without Aadhaar," says Manisha Kamble, 17, who is homeless.

Kamble is from the Dalit community — formerly known as untouchables. She, her widowed mother and about 25 other street children sleep every night on the asphalt in a circle, under a highway overpass in Mumbai.

She had no address and no birth certificate. She was basically invisible to the state, until the charity Save the Children helped her enroll in Aadhaar.

GOATS AND SODA

India Aims For The World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

It has helped her get into a decent school. She is looking forward to turning 18, when she can use her Aadhaar to register to vote.

Kamble says she is proud to be counted, to become official, to feel equal to other Indian citizens, regardless of caste.

"I want to study and make sure that there are no more Manishas like me, who have to struggle like I did — and I want to take care of my mom," she says.

Kamble studies at night under streetlights and got the highest marks in her class last spring.

Uses for Aadhaar

Aadhaar can be used to verify your identity when you do anything involving the government — get married, pay taxes or draw welfare — and also when you open a bank account, sign up for a cellphone contract, or set up an e-wallet online. It's mandatory for some state health benefits.

GOATS AND SODA

India Wants To Go Cashless. But It's Easier Said Than Done

The system is designed to cut fraud — after all, it's hard to counterfeit your irises.

But it requires electricity to scan people's biometrics, and Internet access to check them against government databases. You'll find those in India's big cities. In poorer places, you often don't.

Technical difficulties

In Jharkhand, one of India's poorest states, Aadhaar is mandatory for food rations. A long line forms outside a tiny stucco booth, painted lavender, with a corrugated metal roof. It's a government food ration shop. Inside, the distributor scoops out rice, weighs it and delivers it to customers.

More than half of Indians are eligible for free or subsidized food. In rural Jharkhand, the figure is 86 percent.

The government says Aadhaar has helped eliminate nearly 30 million fake or duplicate food ration cards.

Ashok Kumar distributes government food rations to customer Leela Devi at his shop near Ramgarh, in India's Jharkhand state.

Furkan Latif Khan/NPR

At this ration shop, Ashok Kumar, 57, scans people's fingerprints with something that looks like a credit card machine. It runs on batteries and needs a 3G or 4G cellphone signal.

But the network is shaky. Kumar walks across the street, lifting his machine up overhead, until he finally gets a signal. He sets up shop instead on the steps of a Hindu temple.

One by one, he types people's Aadhaar numbers into the machine and then asks them to place their fingers on a small scanner. The machine checks their numbers against biometric data on government servers and prints out a receipt for food rations — bags of rice.

But one customer isn't so lucky. Karu Bhuiya, 48, has done manual labor all his life. His fingertips are worn. Kumar tries to scan them five times, but gets an error message.

The machine here is rudimentary, and only scans fingerprints — not irises. So Bhuiya is turned away. He goes home without food.

Pushed to starvation

Technical difficulties like this are blamed for pushing some of India's poorest into starvation. Jean Dreze, a Belgian-born economist who lives in Jharkhand, says he has counted a dozen such deaths in recent months. He provided NPR with a detailed list of their names and circumstances surrounding their deaths.

Women harvest rice in rural Jharkhand, one of India's poorest states, where at least a dozen people have died from starvation amid glitches in welfare distribution.

Lauren Frayer/NPR

"I would actually prefer to call these destitution deaths, because they're all cases of people who went hungry for days, who would have survived if they had had some resources," Dreze says. "See, this is the unfortunate thing: that the most vulnerable people are those who are also more likely to be excluded by this system."

When Aadhaar scanners break down, there's supposed to be a backup system on paper. But at the ration shop NPR visited, near the town of Ramgarh, the paper log was blank — unused.

Aadhaar's architect

"Nobody should be denied benefits — either for lack of Aadhaar, or for lack of authentication," says Nandan Nilekani, the key architect of the nation's Aadhaar system. "There have been some challenges, but that doesn't take away from the enormous benefit of empowerment, mobility and savings this project has given India."

Nilekani is the former CEO of Infosys, a big Indian IT and consulting company. He is a tech billionaire who left the private sector to create Aadhaar for the Indian government.

In an interview in May, Nilekani told NPR that the benefits of Aadhaar far outweigh any glitches.

POLITICS

Facial Scanning Now Arriving At U.S. Airports

"Our whole goal is to give people control. They should be able to get their digital footprint from their smartphone, from their payments, from whatever," Nilekani said. "I'm using my own data to make my life better. That's a fundamental inversion of how you think about data."

Nilekani is from Bangalore, India's version of Silicon Valley. His critics questionwhether a private sector "move fast and break things" approach is appropriate for a government program like Aadhaar. They argue the fundamental job of government is different — to protect the most vulnerable citizens, rather than race to be the most high-tech.

That debate was underway when suddenly reports of data breaches began.

Data privacy

In January, investigative journalist Rachna Khaira discovered that the laptops of some Aadhaar enrollment workers — those who scan irises and take fingerprints — had been hacked. Khaira managed to buy access to up to 1 billion people's Aadhaar data — for less than $7.

After her report, the government agency behind Aadhaar, the Unique Identification Authority of India, took legal action against Khaira, accusing her of cybercrime.

"I am not against Aadhaar," Khaira says. "My only concern was this: that if we implement this project, it should be foolproof. We should not be scared. We should not be feeling jittery about giving out our Aadhaar numbers."

PARALLELS

Facial Recognition In China Is Big Business As Local Governments Boost Surveillance

Keeping people's Aadhaar data secure is not just a job for the Indian government, though. One of the ways it managed to enroll so many people was by partnering with banks, utilities and cellphone providers, many of which require Aadhaar.

So now people's data reside with all those companies as well. It's impossible to know how many data breaches have occurred. In India, the newspapers carry reports of them almost daily.

"When it comes to Aadhaar, it's the Wild West out there in India. Millions and millions of people have been compromised by the process," says Nikhil Pahwa, a privacy activist and founder of the digital news site MediaNama. "I see this as a major national security risk."

Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, has also criticized Aadhaar, calling it a mass surveillance system that will lead to "civil death" for Indians.

Supreme Court weighs in

Data privacy advocates have taken their concerns all the way to India's Supreme Court. Last year, the court ruled that privacy is a fundamental right.

Then last week, it ruled that private companies can no longer ask for people's Aadhaar data. It also said schools can no longer require biometrics for admission.

THE TWO-WAY

Indian Supreme Court Declares Privacy A Fundamental Right

But the information is already out there, being used by marketing companies — and possibly by political parties.

In August, the Unique Identification Authority of Indiaintroduced new directives to enhance security, including two-factor identification using facial recognition.

A small number of residents of India, including the economist Dreze, have nevertheless refused to enroll in Aadhaar.

In India, though, data privacy is still mostly a concern of the educated, urban class. People in the food ration line may not be as worried about their digital footprint. They have more dire concerns.

Those most vulnerable

Not far from the ration shop NPR visited in rural Jharkhand, migrant workers huddle in sagging thatch huts covered with blue tarps, during the monsoon rains. They are members of India's tribal Adivasi community, who are among the country's poorest citizens. They often migrate between states, with no fixed addresses.

In June, one of the men in their community, Chintaman Malhar, died at age 50. Relatives say he hadn't eaten in days. Based on his field work, Dreze, the economist, concluded that Malhar had lived in a "state of semi-starvation."

Nisha Devi lives in a rudimentary hut covered with a tarp near Ramgarh, in India's Jharkhand state. She believes hunger led to her uncle's recent death before he could get an Aadhaar card. The rest of the family has scrambled to enroll since his death, but Devi has been unable to draw welfare benefits so far.

Lauren Frayer/NPR

Malhar died before he could get an Aadhaar card. After his death, his relatives and neighbors all rushed to try to enroll.

"A local official came and advised us all to enroll in Aadhaar," says Malhar's niece, Nisha Devi, cradling her toddler. "He told us it would help us get residency, and finally have an official address, and get benefits."

She believes hunger killed her uncle, and she wants to avoid a similar fate.

Devi hasn't yet been able to collect any food rations. She is still mired in bureaucracy.

But she hopes that Aadhaar — perhaps the world's most sophisticated biometric system — might one day help her.

PLANET MONEY

Episode 770: When India's Cash Disappeared, Part One

PLANET MONEY

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

By Paul Mozur, NY Times, July 8, 2018

ZHENGZHOU, China--In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station.

In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival.

In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor.

With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.

“In the past, it was all about instinct,” said Shan Jun, the deputy chief of the police at the railway station in Zhengzhou, where the heroin smuggler was caught. “If you missed something, you missed it.”

In some cities, cameras scan train stations for China’s most wanted. Billboard-size displays show the faces of jaywalkers and list the names of people who don’t pay their debts. Facial recognition scanners guard the entrances to housing complexes. Already, China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras--four times as many as the United States.

Such efforts supplement other systems that track internet use and communications, hotel stays, train and plane trips and even car travel in some places.

Even so, China’s ambitions outstrip its abilities. Technology in place at one train station or crosswalk may be lacking in another city, or even the next block over. Bureaucratic inefficiencies prevent the creation of a nationwide network.

For the Communist Party, that may not matter. Far from hiding their efforts, Chinese authorities regularly state, and overstate, their capabilities. In China, even the perception of surveillance can keep the public in line.

Some places are further along than others. Invasive mass-surveillance software has been set up in the west to track members of the Uighur Muslim minority and map their relations with friends and family, according to software viewed by The New York Times.

The intersection south of Changhong Bridge in the city of Xiangyang used to be a nightmare. Cars drove fast and jaywalkers darted into the street.

Then last summer, the police put up cameras linked to facial recognition technology and a big, outdoor screen. Photos of lawbreakers were displayed alongside their names and government I.D. numbers. People were initially excited to see their faces on the board, said Guan Yue, a spokeswoman, until propaganda outlets told them it was punishment.

“If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbors or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it,” she said. “That’s too embarrassing for people to take.”

China’s new surveillance is based on an old idea: Only strong authority can bring order to a turbulent country. Mao Zedong took that philosophy to devastating ends.

His successors also craved order but feared the consequences of totalitarian rule. They formed a new understanding with the Chinese people. In exchange for political impotence, they would be mostly left alone and allowed to get rich.

It worked. Censorship and police powers remained strong, but China’s people still found more freedom. That new attitude helped usher in decades of breakneck economic growth.

Today, that unwritten agreement is breaking down.

China’s economy isn’t growing at the same pace. It suffers from a severe wealth gap. After four decades of fatter paychecks and better living, its people have higher expectations.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has moved to solidify his power. Changes to Chinese law mean he could rule longer than any leader since Mao. And he has undertaken a broad corruption crackdown that could make him plenty of enemies.

For support, he has turned to the Mao-era beliefs in the importance of a cult of personality and the role of the Communist Party in everyday life. Technology gives him the power to make it happen.

“Reform and opening has already failed, but no one dares to say it,” said Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, citing China’s four-decade post-Mao policy. “The current system has created severe social and economic segregation. So now the rulers use the taxpayers’ money to monitor the taxpayers.”

Mr. Xi has launched a major upgrade of the Chinese surveillance state. China has become the world’s biggest market for security and surveillance technology, with analysts estimating the country will have almost 300 million cameras installed by 2020. Chinese buyers will snap up more than three-quarters of all servers designed to scan video footage for faces, predicts IHS Markit, a research firm. China’s police will spend an additional $30 billion in the coming years on techno-enabled snooping, according to one expert quoted in state media.

Government contracts are fueling research and development into technologies that track faces, clothing and even a person’s gait. Experimental gadgets, like facial-recognition glasses, have begun to appear.

Judging public Chinese reaction can be difficult in a country where the news media is controlled by the government. Still, so far the average Chinese citizen appears to show little concern. Erratic enforcement of laws against everything from speeding to assault means the long arm of China’s authoritarian government can feel remote from everyday life. As a result, many cheer on new attempts at law and order.

In China, snooping is becoming big business. As the country spends heavily on surveillance, a new generation of start-ups have risen to meet the demand.

Chinese companies are developing globally competitive applications like image and voice recognition. Yitu took first place in a 2017 open contest for facial recognition algorithms held by the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A number of other Chinese companies also scored well.

A technology boom in China is helping the government’s surveillance ambitions. In sheer scale and investment, China already rivals Silicon Valley. Between the government and eager investors, surveillance start-ups have access to plenty of money and other resources.

In May, the upstart A.I. company SenseTime raised $620 million, giving it a valuation of about $4.5 billion. Yitu raised $200 million last month. Another rival, Megvii, raised $460 million from investors that included a state-backed fund created by China’s top leadership.

At a conference in May at an upscale hotel in Beijing, China’s security-industrial complex offered its vision of the future. Companies big and small showed off facial-recognition security gates and systems that track cars around cities to local government officials, tech executives and investors.

Private companies see big potential in China’s surveillance build-out. China’s public security market was valued at more than $80 billion last year but could be worth even more as the country builds its capabilities, said Shen Xinyang, a former Google data scientist who is now chief technology officer of Eyecool, a start-up.

“Artificial intelligence for public security is actually still a very insignificant portion of the whole market,” he said, pointing out that most equipment currently in use was “nonintelligent.”

Many of these businesses are already providing data to the government.

Mr. Shen told the group that his company had surveillance systems at more than 20 airports and train stations, which had helped catch 1,000 criminals. Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.

At a building complex in Xiangyang, a facial-recognition system set up to let residents quickly through security gates adds to the police’s collection of photos of local residents, according to local Chinese Communist Party officials.

China’s surveillance companies are also looking to test the appetite for high-tech surveillance abroad. Yitu says it has been expanding overseas, with plans to increase business in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

At home, China is preparing its people for next-level surveillance technology. A recent state-media propaganda film called “Amazing China” showed off a similar virtual map that provided police with records of utility use, saying it could be used for predictive policing.

“If there are anomalies, the system sends an alert,” a narrator says, as Chinese police officers pay a visit to an apartment with a record of erratic utility use. The film then quotes one of the officers: “No matter which corner you escape to, we’ll bring you to justice.”

For technology to be effective, it doesn’t always have to work. Take China’s facial-recognition glasses.

Police in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou recently showed off the specs at a high-speed rail station for state media and others. They snapped photos of a policewoman peering from behind the shaded lenses.

But the glasses work only if the target stands still for several seconds. They have been used mostly to check travelers for fake identifications.

China’s propagandists are fond of stories in which police use facial recognition to spot wanted criminals at events. An article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, covered a series of arrests made with the aid of facial recognition at concerts of the pop star Jackie Cheung. The piece referenced some of the singer’s lyrics: “You are a boundless net of love that easily trapped me.”

In many places, it works. At the intersection in Xiangyang, jaywalking has decreased. At the building complex where Number 1 Community’s facial-recognition gate system has been installed, a problem with bike theft ceased entirely, according to building management.

“The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and that uncertainty makes people more obedient,” said Mr. Chorzempa, the Peterson Institute fellow.

He described the approach as a panopticon, the idea that people will follow the rules precisely because they don’t know whether they are being watched.

#China #surveillance in China #facial recognition technology

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mindthump · 7 years ago

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I’ve Sent Out 1,018 Open Records Requests, and This is What I’ve Learned http://ift.tt/2ETECpR

If you want to know how much money the city of Chicago spends on holiday parade security in a given year, you can file an open records request with the city for the details.

If you want to know how a college president spends his or her time, you can ask for his or her official calendar through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

FOIA allows anyone to request information from the government. In my first six months at ProPublica Illinois, I’ve sent over 1,018 requests for information, to everyone from the Department of Transportation to the state lottery.

As a data reporter, I need to understand what information government bodies across the state keep, how they keep those records and what they don’t retain in documents or databases. To do that, I need to know different state and local agencies, and maintain a list of contacts throughout the state.

Finding your way through some of the records systems is like walking in the dark — and getting information can take a lot of time. While I’ve sent requests all over the country, I’ve learned Illinois has its own quirks.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about FOIA in Illinois that might help you get the information you want.

Tip 1: Do your research and know the law. Be patient and diligent about follow-ups.

Filing records requests takes time, persistence and putting a bit of pressure on officials to have them produce information on time. Illinois law requires agencies to respond to requests within five business days, so typically I give them a call if I don’t hear back when the deadline passes.

With every request, I think about how agencies might respond and where they might raise objections. Here’s a sample denial letter, as well as a sample grant of request, I like to reference.

Compared to other places where I've filed FOIAs, agencies in Illinois seem more likely to immediately ask for an extension and they often cite the same reason.

Then there are agencies that try to scare you away by suggesting that fulfilling a request will take a ridiculously long time. Unfortunately, this tactic is not unique to Illinois.

In this case, the agency initially claimed it would take 542 days to comply with my request. Once I explained how they could more easily do the work, 542 days turned into three.

Sending out these requests also requires me to know the exemptions to the law that allow agencies to withhold information from a request. For example, I know I can’t get law enforcement records that interfere with an open case; business trade secrets or personal information (social security numbers, for instance) that could identify a person. Other exemptions include information that, if disclosed, could compromise national security or endanger someone’s life or physical safety.

If you believe a request has been wrongly denied, you should be prepared to appeal. Anyone can request review from the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor (PAC), which helps to resolve open records requests, within 60 days of a denial of a request. I find that it also helps to keep diligent notes about your dealings with employees and any correspondence with the agency.

If I didn’t have a system for tracking my records requests, I would run the risk of letting them slip. So I keep a spreadsheet that includes notes on each request, which FOIA officer is handling it and the date of the initial response.

The state requires every agency to display and make a directory available designating who its FOIA officers are on its website and how requests should be sent (electronically or through mail). I’ve had to think about alternative ways of finding records officers, especially in smaller towns where there are often just four or five municipal employees, and there’s no official website. Sometimes, the only way I can get a phone number or a name of the FOIA officer is to do some deep diving on social media or in newspaper clippings. Here’s a list of some FOIA officers in Illinois.

And perhaps the most important point about knowing how to make a request: If the records are available on the agency’s website, don’t ask for them. It’s only going to show them you’re not doing your research.

Tip 2: Many agencies still keep their records on paper. That means requesting them is not always easy.

Some agencies only allow inspection of documents in person because the time it will take them to scan the documents is “too burdensome,” a common exemption used in FOIA. Others might tell you that since they have the data in paper records, they can’t answer a specific question about the data for you in a timely manner. For example, an agency might have to hand-enter staffing data from paper records just to be able to provide you with the total number of employees in a certain department.

Some agencies send documents only on floppy disks, CDs or flash drives. Others send a large manila envelope of documents complete with a rubber band bow for you to hand enter or scan into electronic format.

And some agencies send you the records exactly as you ask for them. Sometimes, they send it the same day or even hours after you file your request. (Thank you!)

As a data reporter, roughly 80 percent of my job is cleaning and wrangling data from inconvenient formats (like paper) into databases. When agencies send Excel spreadsheets printed and scanned in with hand-written notes, I have to spend time extracting the data using special software or hand-entering the data. So even though an agency is complying with the law and giving us the information we have asked for, it’s a given that we’ll have to do more work to even use the information and deduce any sort of finding.

Tip 3: Remember, there’s a human being behind every record and document. So play nice.

Some FOIA officers try to discourage people, especially reporters like me who pester them for records. And sometimes, you even see their complaints about your requests.

4/ It can take a lot of pestering and patience to get open records. And sometimes #FOIA officers accidentally tell you how annoying you are: http://pic.twitter.com/qJuisbAwp7

— Sandhya Kambhampati (@sandhya__k) October 19, 2017

I try to remember that there are countless other people asking for records and the agency I’m dealing with might be juggling many other requests. I like to get to know FOIA officers, understand what irritates them, how they prefer I communicate — via email or phone — and what times are most convenient to reach them. I save all this information in a spreadsheet.

Because I send so many FOIA requests, I need a game plan for tackling each department. If I make consecutive requests to the same department several days in a row, I could tick off some employees. So I keep a log of all the information I’d like to request, call the FOIA officer to see what they have on their plate, and begin negotiating. For example, for our Documenting Hate project, I’ve sent requests to police departments all over the state and asked for several years of hate crime data. Rather than ask for all 10 years of data at once, I work out a schedule that is convenient for me as well as the records departments, especially in small jurisdictions.

I also follow up on my requests at the same time and same day every week, so the FOIA officer knows I’m diligent. It also puts a bit of pressure on them, I think. Illinois FOIA officers seem to appreciate the reminders, though I can imagine some find my badgering them for records annoying.

In my experience, Illinois FOIA officers have generally been helpful in leading me to other agencies that may have records I’m seeking if their agencies don’t have them. Show that you value their time, and sometimes they’ll come through for you.

Perhaps the best tactic is to actually go the agency, meet records officers and ask them to show you how they do their work. It’s easier to understand the process when you find out the agency keeps its documents in a closet or a musty old basement filled with boxes of files. One agency I visited had lost data because a pipe burst in the records closet. Their workers were forced to enter handwritten notes and tally up information from water-damaged paper records.

These visits also let you see the programs and software an agency uses, which is especially useful when they tell you they can’t export your records because they use some obscure government computer program. Also you’ll see if they do, in fact, get 15 calls a day for records and have to go through various hoops to find the data, wrangle it and redact it.

The time you’ll spend on these visits is worth it when you get information that had been sitting on a bunch of floppy disks, just begging for someone to analyze and report on it.

Tip 4: Always FOIA the FOIA requests and know how they keep their data.

You’re probably wondering what have I asked for in my thousand-plus records requests? Well, out of all my requests, I’ve received 803, or 79 percent of them. Some of them were FOIAs on the FOIAs — so asking for what other people have asked for. If you know what records have already been granted, you can request the same records and not have to wait months for your data. So ask for the agency’s FOIA logs.

I’ve also asked for the record retention schedules for state agencies, which help me understand how and where the agencies keep their records and how often they shred them. The record retention schedules are an index, with codes for each department and each kind of document the agency keeps. When I get them, I add their shredding calendars to a master calendar. That allows me to know when they are going to purge their records, so I can request them before they disappear.

I’ve also digitized these schedules, so our reporters can search them. This is helpful when we’re requesting documents; the more specific we can be, the faster and easier it will be to get what we need.

These skills have helped me navigate the systems of Illinois, but I know there’s much more to learn.

My hope is that with each FOIA request, I can shine a light on information we can use to tell a larger story and encourage government to be more transparent.

I’ll be tracking my FOIA requests at #PPILFOIA on Twitter. That's where you can find my current tally of fulfilled, late and newly requested documents. If you have a tip or recommendation of what I should FOIA, tweet me @sandhya__k or email me [email protected].

#IFTTT #Feedly #future #hmmm #good to know #politics #TIL

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melindarowens · 8 years ago

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Weekend Reads: When in Rome . . .

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” — Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel“

Feeling somewhat wistful this week, I found myself drawn — yet again — to the opening sentences of Pico Iyer’s beautiful essay. No matter how many times I have read those lines, they remain as timeless and relevant as when I first read them. Iyer’s words remind me why it’s important not to lose one’s sense of adventure.

In a new podcast, Carl Richards, also known as the “Sketch Guy,” tells Robin Powell what drove him and his family to move from Utah to New Zealand for a year. “We as a family, we really value adventure, and by adventure I mean navigating wild landscapes, if you will, whether those are cultural, or emotional, or environmental, or physical,” he says. After Carl’s wife nearly died in a climbing accident, he wrote a column about regret: “On your deathbed, it’s too late to make wish lists,” he tells readers, before challenging them to consider, “What’s on your wish list? What might you regret if you don’t do it soon?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about travel and adventure these past few weeks as I recently returned from a two-week holiday in Italy. This trip marked a first for me in one key respect: I decided not to check work email, Twitter, or to read the news media, for the duration. It was tough at first, but I was resolute and returned with a few insights:

You’ve got to stick with your out-of-office message. If you say you’re not checking email but respond as soon as you receive one, nobody will believe what you say and you’ll be expected to reply throughout your so-called time off. And guess what? When I returned after two weeks, the building was still standing, the team was still working, and the world was still turning.

Garbage in, garbage out. In tech, this is known as GIGO and refers to the idea that a computer is “only as good as the data it receives and the instructions it is given.” For me, GIGO refers to my psychological state. The more negative news I consume, the more jaded and negative I feel. I usually say “junk in, junk out,” when applying the phrase to my mental temperament. A good example is when I’m pushing myself during a hard workout. The moment I succumb to “junk,” or negativity, my willpower shrivels and I give in. Old habits die hard. I’ve been a reporter for most of my career, so checking the news is baked into my DNA. But freeing myself from my compulsion made me feel happier and allowed me to focus on reading.

Less social media, more bibliotherapy. As Ceridwen Dovey put it in her essay, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” “Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” Reading remains one of my greatest pleasures, but over the past few years, I’ve struggled to stay focused on the page. I can barely make it through one or two pages before flicking through my smartphone to check email, Twitter, and Facebook. There is more than a hint of irony that one of the books on my nightstand — that I have yet to open — is The Distracted Mind. So when I headed to Italy, I had to make a conscious choice to rid myself of distractions. As Shane Parrish writes, “As simple as it sounds, finding time to read boils down to choices about how you allocate your time.” I’m happy to report I made it through Christopher McDougall’s best-selling tome about running, Born to Run, (no doubt distinguishing myself as close-to-the-last runner on the planet to read it), and David Grann’s fascinating true-crime narrative, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

I have a gaping hole in my education when it comes to the history of ancient Rome and want to learn more. Have any good suggestions for what I should read? Leave a comment below.

It’s the simple things in life that count: lashings of extra virgin olive oil; a Bialetti stovetop espresso maker; quality coffee beans; fresh, seasonal local produce; freshly baked bread; a fine bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano (after all, In Vino Veritas, “There is truth in wine”); rest; and books.

And now, on to some articles and multimedia I have enjoyed in recent weeks, in case you missed them:

“Adventurers are being sought for the first attempt by an all-woman team to walk to the North Pole. . . . Applications are invited from women of any age, background, and occupation, but they will have to prove fitness and commitment. They will have to put up with real pain and discomfort. They will wonder every ten steps what they are doing but they have the opportunity to take part in an epic endeavor.” So read a notice that appeared in the classified ads of The Telegraph that ultimately led to “The Amazing Story of the First All-Women North Pole Expedition.” (Smithsonian)

After spending time walking around the Colosseum and Roman Forum, I had a desire to learn more. One of the first things I found is this video simulation, “Visualizing Imperial Rome” around the year 320 AD. (Khan Academy)

When in Rome, eat amatriciana, one of the city’s staple pasta dishes. But never, ever make it with garlic. For if you do, you risk shame. According to officials in Amatrice, real amatriciana contains only six ingredients: pecorino cheese, white wine, guanciale (pork jowl), tomatoes from San Marzano, pepper, and chili. (The Guardian)

“Nowhere in Italy, where calamity comes embellished with rococo gestures and embroidered in exclamation points, is there a crisis more beautifully framed than Venice. Neither land nor water, but shimmering somewhere in between, the city lifts like a mirage from a lagoon at the head of the Adriatic. For centuries it has threatened to vanish beneath the waves of the acqua alta, relentlessly regular flooding caused by the complicity of rising tides and sinking foundations, but that is the least of its problems.” See “Vanishing Venice.” (National Geographic)

A look at Venice, Italy, during a flood and a short video about how La Serenissima, Bride of the Sea, works with its intricate web of canals, bridges, and wooden polls. (Boston Globe, Venice Backstage)

“A Brief History of the World’s Most Influential Art Exhibition” (The Atlantic)

If you are a regular reader, you will recall that I’ve included Oliver Sacks’s essay “Speak, Memory” in at least one roundup. It’s a fascinating piece about Sacks’s surreal discovery about this own memories: “I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have — especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial — were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.” Even though I’ve read about how notoriously unreliable our memories are, it was still shocking to read “Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit“: “DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. So why do some of them recall the crime so clearly?” (The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker)

In a recent blog post, Ben Carlson, CFA, outlines the reasons why he believes simple beats complex in the investment world. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

Thinking about penning a book? Jason Zweig offers “Ten Tips for Writing a Book Without Making Your Head Explode.” (Jason Zweig)

Speaking of writing, Barry Ritholtz makes an excellent point about the art of curating content: “Curate viciously,” he says. “What you choose to omit is crucial to making any list special.” (Bloomberg View)

I enjoyed Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s recent post on lessons learned from a year of podcasting. Two of those lessons apply beyond podcasts: Conversation is an underused method of learning, and “preparation and careful listening are everything.” (The Investor’s Field Guide)

“Exercise is king. Nutrition is queen. Put them together, and you have a kingdom.” Nice quote from Jack LaLanne in “How Aging Research is Changing Our Lives.” (Nautilus)

Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court gave an unconventional speech to his son’s graduating class that has been doing the rounds on social media. If you missed it, it’s worth a read. (Time)

For something completely different, a beautifully written essay: “The Fish: A Story of Love and Letting Go.” (On Being)

This week marked Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday and so it seems appropriate to close with this quote from Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (Washington Post)

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Lauren Foster

Lauren Foster is managing editor of Enterprising Investor and co-lead of CFA Institute’s Women in Investment Management initiative. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer for Barron’s and the Financial Times. Prior to her freelance work, Foster spent nearly a decade on staff at the FT as a reporter and editor based in the New York bureau. Foster holds a BA in political science from the University of Cape Town, and an MS in journalism from Columbia University.

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everettwilkinson · 8 years ago