I’m a black actor. Here’s how inequality works when you’re not famous.
by Bear Bellinger on February 12, 2016
I walk into the theater; the director, his assistant, and an intern are seated behind a table. The music director is set up on my left to accompany me on piano. I say a pleasant hello, gather myself, check to make sure the music director knows my tempo, and began to sing:
"I'm a colored spade, a Negro, a black nigger..."
I'm auditioning for Hair, the groundbreaking rock musical on hippie culture, race, and sexuality during the late '60s. I'm asked to prepare Hud's song "Colored Spade," which is basically a list of every imaginable slur for black people. As I finish up, content with the line I had just walked between anger and pain, I look up at the four white faces staring back at me. The director stands up, smiling broadly, walks over to me, and says:
"Great, great job, Bear. I'd like for you to do it again. This time I want you to imagine if you were a black man and someone was saying all of these things to you."
I look down at my skin to reaffirm what I already know: Yup, I am still a black man. Here I am, yet again, the only black man in a sea of white faces, being asked by people with no reference point to have a "blacker" reaction, to respond more "authentically." I sang the song again. I won the role.
Another day in the life of a blacktor.
I have been a working actor in the Chicagoland area for seven years now. That includes time auditioning for, and performing in, anything from musicals to plays to variety shows to TV to movies. The one common denominator, in all this time, is that I am a black man constantly having to conform my blackness to what white people, mainly men, on the other side of the table believe to be true. These men have no ill intent in their ideas about or depictions of blackness; they also have no lived experience. And mine, as the only actual black person in the room, is almost never valued or understood.
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10958356/working-black-actor
Friday, February 12, 2016
Who Marries Who?
Fascinating chart.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202/12/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202/12/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Quote
"He’s better than anybody realized," says David Axelrod, who served as Obama's chief strategist in 2008. "There is a rumpled authenticity to Bernie Sanders that really resonates, particularly with young people who have finely tuned bullshit meters."
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/11/10967374/obama-staffers-bernie-sanders
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Best Yearbook Prank
From The Huffington Post -
When it comes to microaggressions, Asian-Americans have heard it all. "How come you guys all look the same?" "Where are you really from?" And the classic, "Are you all related?"
Four Vietnamese high school students who've probably heard that last one too many times served a rejoinder in a hilarious, coordinated yearbook stunt.
The students, all of whom have the common Vietnamese surname "Nguyen," added text below their photos (where an inspirational quote usually goes) that add up to the sentence: WE ARE NOT RELATED.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-vietnamese-students-yearbook-prank_us_56b4d556e4b04f9b57d956d9
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Math Whiz Kids
From The Atlantic -
The Math Revolution
The number of American teens who excel at advanced math has surged. Why?
On a sultry evening last July, a tall, soft-spoken 17-year-old named David Stoner and nearly 600 other math whizzes from all over the world sat huddled in small groups around wicker bistro tables, talking in low voices and obsessively refreshing the browsers on their laptops. The air in the cavernous lobby of the Lotus Hotel Pang Suan Kaew in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was humid, recalls Stoner, whose light South Carolina accent warms his carefully chosen words. The tension in the room made it seem especially heavy, like the atmosphere at a high-stakes poker tournament.
Stoner and five teammates were representing the United States in the 56th International Mathematical Olympiad. They figured they’d done pretty well over the two days of competition. God knows, they’d trained hard. Stoner, like his teammates, had endured a grueling regime for more than a year—practicing tricky problems over breakfast before school and taking on more problems late into the evening after he completed the homework for his college-level math classes. Sometimes, he sketched out proofs on the large dry-erase board his dad had installed in his bedroom. Most nights, he put himself to sleep reading books like New Problems in Euclidean Geometry and An Introduction to Diophantine Equations.
Still, it was hard to know how his team had stacked up against those from the perennial powers China, Russia, and South Korea. “I mean, the gold? Did we do well enough to get the gold?” he said. “At that moment, it was hard to say.” Suddenly, there was a shout from a team across the lobby, then a collective intake of breath as the Olympians surged closer to their laptops. As Stoner tried to absorb what he saw on his own computer screen, the noise level in the lobby grew from a buzz to a cheer. Then one of his team members gave a whoop that ended in the chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” and the smattering of applause from the other Olympians grew more robust, and finally thunderous. Beaming, one of Stoner’s teammates pulled a small American flag out of his backpack and began waving it. Stoner was grinning. For the first time in 21 years, the United States team had won first place. Speaking last fall from his dorm at Harvard, where he is now a freshman, Stoner recalled his team’s triumph with quiet satisfaction. “It was a really great moment. Really great. Especially if you love math.”
It also wasn’t an aberration. You wouldn’t see it in most classrooms, you wouldn’t know it by looking at slumping national test-score averages, but a cadre of American teenagers are reaching world-class heights in math—more of them, more regularly, than ever before. The phenomenon extends well beyond the handful of hopefuls for the Math Olympiad. The students are being produced by a new pedagogical ecosystem—almost entirely extracurricular—that has developed online and in the country’s rich coastal cities and tech meccas. In these places, accelerated students are learning more and learning faster than they were 10 years ago—tackling more-complex material than many people in the advanced-math community had thought possible. “The bench of American teens who can do world-class math,” says Po-Shen Loh, the head coach of the U.S. team, “is significantly wider and stronger than it used to be.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855/?utm_source=atl-daily-newsletter
Nailed It!
Here's a personality test based on my favorite Girl Scout Cookie
8. Caramel deLites
Heeral Chhibber for LittleThings
Also known as Samoas, these are one of the most beloved Scout cookies on record!
Introduced in the mid-’70s, these round caramel-covered cookies are known for their unique donut shape, as well as their signature fudge stripes and coating of toasted coconut.
If this is your favorite cookie, you may be an adventurous type who doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “less is more.”
Why settle for one good thing when you could have a snack covered in caramel, coconut, and chocolate? You’re warm and charismatic with a big personality.
http://www.littlethings.com/girl-scout-cookie-guide/?utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange
Fascinating!
From Atlas Obscura -
WHAT NATIONALITY IS A BABY BORN MID-FLIGHT?
What is the nationality of a baby born on a plane? (Photo: mliu92/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
Imagine that you are a pregnant lady. (Perhaps you actually are, but if you are not, then do your best to imagine.) You are in your third trimester, and you get on a plane because you weren't paying attention during your last doctor's visit, where she advised you against traveling. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, your water breaks.
In some miracle there is a gynecologist on board, a few aisles down from you, and therefore your labor goes as smoothly as it could possibly go in those circumstances. And then, while you are still over the Atlantic Ocean, your baby is born. You arrive at United States customs, clutching your newborn baby, who obviously does not have a passport. Where do you say your baby is from?
The answer is quite complicated, and contested. Countries have different laws governing the citizenship of babies born on their soil–either jus soli or jus sanguinis; Latin for right of the soil versus right of blood, respectively. Most countries follow jus sanguinis, which dictates that the baby can only assume citizenship via one or both parents. However, the U.S. and some of its neighbors observe the more generous jus soli, which grants automatic citizenship to babies born on their soil.
Babies born in-flight are sometimes considered citizens of the country where the airline is registered, but this is not the case for US aircraft. (Photo: Claude Covo-Farchi/Wikipedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)
Things get a little shadier on ships and aircraft. Is an airplane considered to be the soil of the country which owns the airline? According to the United Nations, a baby born on a flight is a citizen of the country where the airline is registered. However, this is not always the case. Weirdly enough, despite its general adherence to jus soli, the United States will not recognize a baby birthed on a U.S. vessel unless it is docked at a U.S. port or flying within the country's airspace.
There are plenty of stories about real life "sky babies." There was the woman who boarded a plane in May 2015 not knowing she was pregnant, and left the flight having delivered a surprise child. There was a Taiwanese woman in October 2015 who gave birth on her flight to the United States, and was accused of attempting "birth tourism"—in which pregnant women travel to countries in the hopes of gaining citizenship via jus soli.
There is at least one perk to being a citizen of the sky, which could make up for any identity crises resulting from being born in the air: airlines have been known to grant free air travel to babies born on their planes.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-nationality-is-a-baby-born-midflight?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=b3c490021d-Newsletter_2_9_20162_8_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-b3c490021d-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_2_9_20162_8_2016)&mc_cid=b3c490021d&mc_eid=866176a63f
Kudos to Target
One of the things I miss the most . . . shopping at Target.
They introduced a new cart that is lauded far and wide.
They introduced a new cart that is lauded far and wide.
It's called Caroline's Cart and it's designed for children and adults with disabilities.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Helping to Explain It
From The Root -
Father Pens Book to Explain Protest to Kids in the Time of Black Lives Matter
When Kenneth Braswell, the founder of Fathers Incorporated, realized that he could not explain protesting to his then-6-year-old son in the face of the Baltimore protests for Freddie Gray, he came up with a solution that would also help other parents of young children facilitate the conversation.
 | ||
| Kenneth Braswell reading Daddy, There’s a Noise Outside |
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/02/father_pens_book_to_explain_protest_to_kids_in_the_time_of_black_lives_matter.html
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