Kordale, Kaleb, and Nikon.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
The recent advertising campaign, launched by Nikon, "I Am Generation Image," has attracted a huge amount of media buzz, specifically because two of their featured subjects are a black gay male couple and their kids.
librarisingnsf had a diary about them last week. The Instagram photo they uploaded doing their girl's hair in the morning, set off a firestorm - some supportive, and some very hateful, but it got them noticed by Nikon.
Kordale & Kaleb: Dads
"Last year, we were surprised when a picture of us doing our daughters’ hair went viral. To us, that’s just part of our morning routine. With our images, we want to share our family’s life — and maybe reveal how much our family is like yours."
In their press release Nikon talks about the advertising impetus behind the campaign, but not the controversy.
“I AM Generation Image” reminds us that we are all part of this generation, and Nikon will enable our stories to ring loud, true and authentic. The campaign will help to define this generation as the first to overwhelmingly express themselves through images en masse and on a global scale. The successful “I AM” international campaign has acted as a worldwide catalyst for millions of fans to self-identify with the Nikon brand. The new campaign builds upon the “I AM” architecture to make imaging a personal experience for North America.
It made me think about who buys Nikons? Though I love photography as a journalistic art form, and have for years, I would never be able to afford a fancy Nikon. Nor would I need one. But those people dedicated to the field as a craft and a calling do buy Nikons. They are probably one of the least likely groups to embrace bigotry. I started thinking—could I even name a famous right-wing photographer? I couldn't.
The professional photographers I knew, met or admired growing up were Gordon Parks, Cartier Bresson, Ansel Adams, Pierre Verger, and Dorothea Lange. My dad collected some of the work of photographers who haunted the jazz scene, capturing the artistry of so many of our favorite musicians.
Is there something about viewing the world through a lens that gives the photographer a different way of seeing? Photojournalism for me, seems to be a form of visual anthropology— ethnography via images.
How many of us have had our lives changed, or the way we think changed by a photo?
I'd like to thank the powers that be at Nikon, for doing this. Here's hoping that more companies will use images that move the hearts and emotions of the viewers to empathize and identify.
I thought about the right wing pout-rage against Coca-Cola for their multicultural American the Beautiful Super Bowl ad last year, and went back to look at it again. Guess it doesn't match their vision of America, but it is one I embrace.
I don't usually muse like this here. Bear with me.
We all know the power of advertising and we are often highly critical of ads and the corporations behind them.
Some times they get it right.
We should let them know when they do.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, spoke out Friday amid the uproar over the paucity of color among award nominees this year. The Root: Oscars President Answers Hollywood Diversity Criticism.
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The first black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday denied that Hollywood has a diversity problem, describing the dearth of color among nominees as happenstance, the Associated Press reports.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, responding for the first time to the controversy, told the news outlet that the all-white acting slate inspires her to push the academy to become more inclusive. She also indicated that she hopes the film industry as a whole will continue to strive for greater diversity.
“In the last two years, we've made greater strides than we ever have in the past toward becoming a more diverse and inclusive organization through admitting new members and more inclusive classes of members,” Boone Isaacs told the AP. “And, personally, I would love to see and look forward to see a greater cultural diversity among all our nominees in all of our categories.”
The declaration comes after an uproar over the non-nomination of Selma director Ava DuVernay or lead actor David Oyelowo. Oscar nominations were announced this week.
Actor Chris Hemsworth and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Cheryl Boone Isaacs speak at the 86th Academy Awards nominations announcement Jan. 16, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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The striking photos Life Magazine commissioned but never ran. Slate: Life Never Ran These Striking Images of What It Was Like to Be Black in 1950s America.
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Gordon Parks hadn’t been to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, in more than 20 years when he returned there in 1950 as a photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine. Growing up as the youngest of 15 children, Parks attended the Plaza School, an all-black grade school in the heavily segregated town. Now, as the first black man hired full-time by the magazine, Parks wanted to find and photograph all 11 of his classmates from grade school as a way of measuring the impact of school segregation. The photo essay he created, which was never published, is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the exhibition, “Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott,” beginning Jan. 17.
In the years since Parks lived in Fort Scott, segregation had remained. But the black population, which had been at a high of 20 percent when he was child, had dwindled to around 6 percent, as a deficit of agricultural work caused blacks to move to nearby cities in search of jobs.
“What was fascinating to me and surprising to Parks was that, when he came back, he learned that all but one of his friends had moved away,” said Karen Haas, the Lane Curator of Photographs at MFA Boston. “It was intended as a story about school segregation and the impact of segregated education, but it turned into a sort of a great migration story.”
Untitled, St. Louis, 1950.
Photograph by Gordon Parks, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Gordon Parks Foundation
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Racial Mismatch: Will White Seniors Support Today’s Youth of Color? Pew: Racial Generation Gap Looms Large for States.
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Nearly 80 percent of seniors in the U.S. are white—while nearly half of people younger than 18 are black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern or multiracial.
What happens to state policy when the “racial generation gap” is so large?
Whatever their race or ethnicity, young people and older people often have different interests in the political arena. Young people (and their parents) care about schools and job training, while older people tend to care more about property taxes and roads. Voting patterns show that 70 percent of young adults are in favor of more government programs, compared to only 40 percent of seniors. Older people are more likely to vote and to vote Republican, while younger people turn out in smaller numbers and are more likely to vote Democratic —one reason why there has been such a fight over some states’ efforts to institute stricter registration rules.
A racial mismatch between the older population and the younger population can exacerbate those generational tensions, as can income differences between wealthier whites and poorer people of color.
As states continue to recover from the budget shortfalls of the past few years, this racial generational divide is likely to influence policy making on a wide range of issues.
Since the late 1990s, researchers have found that when faced with a young population that looks markedly different from their own, Americans are more likely to vote “no” on local tax referendums to finance public school education and are more likely to support spending cuts. This is particularly true when the older population is predominantly white and the school-age population is not, according to a 2012 working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“When you think about how it is impermissible to talk about touching Social Security or Medicare, but it’s okay to talk about shredding spending for education, that’s generational warfare,” said Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor and director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at the University of Southern California. Pastor added that states with the largest gaps also spend less on mass transit and are more likely to pass restrictive immigration laws.
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More stand your ground madness. MiamiHerald: Miami judge finds fists a potentially lethal threat in Stand Your Ground ruling.
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Tyrone Smith knew how to use his fists. Around his Miami Gardens neighborhood, the 19-year-old was known as the “Karate Kid” because he taught local children self defense and how to stand up to bullies.
But when Smith felt insulted and began shouting at neighbor Jason Kinsey, the confrontation did not end in fisticuffs. Instead, Kinsey, 20, fatally shot the unarmed teen — claiming he was defending himself against the martial arts expert.
A judge agreed. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge William Thomas last month ruled Kinsey indeed acted in self-defense, saying prosecutors are “discounting the enormity of Smith’s rage and the level of physical skill that Smith possessed as compared to Kinsey.”
The legal fight, however, is far from over. The State Attorney’s Office is now appealing the judge’s decision to dismiss the second-degree murder charge.
For prosecutors and Smith’s family, the case encapsulates all that is wrong with Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law: the teen was unarmed, challenging Kinsey to an “old-school” fistfight only after being repeatedly provoked.
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How an insect held back a continent. Economist: In the ointment.
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Economic historians have long supposed that Africa’s historically low population density shaped its development. Rulers struggled to exercise control over scattered populations, the theory goes. Malfunctioning states inhibited growth because property rights were insecure and infrastructure was worse.
But why was it that land in precolonial Africa was so abundant, and people were so scarce? A new paper* by Marcella Alsan of Stanford University blames the tsetse fly. The pest, much like the mosquito, lives off the blood of people and animals and in the process transmits disease, in this case a parasite that causes sleeping sickness. To domesticated animals, on which it likes to feed, its bite is fatal. Its prevalence, the paper argues, made it considerably harder for Africans to develop agriculture.
Using historical data on climate, Ms Alsan constructs a “tsetse-suitability index” (TSI) to measure the extent to which the insect must have thrived in different places. She compares the TSI with anthropological records of precolonial African farming.
She finds that a one standard-deviation increase in the TSI is associated with a 23 percentage-point decline in the likelihood that the local people kept domesticated livestock. That, in turn, made it harder to farm: a one standard-deviation increase in the TSI is associated with a six percentage-point reduction in the use of ploughs.
The tsetse fly is found only in Africa, so Ms Alsan tested her results in areas outside Africa with similar climates; she did not find the same pattern. That suggests that it was the fly itself that was holding back agriculture. Without the help of animals, farming becomes much less productive and is viable in fewer places. Those Africans surviving by foraging, meanwhile, would have had to spread out over large areas in order to feed themselves. Doing so may also have lowered the risk of infection. No wonder, then, a higher TSI is correlated with a lower precolonial population density.
Taking a bite out of progress
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador starting around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I was in bed before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening; and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my Father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.
Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?" It is a question that resonates still.
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
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