On research in Black and Brown communities
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As more and more issues affecting communities of color, like police violence, and incarceration are highlighted in the media, due in part to the protests generated by groups like #Blacklivesmatter and the Dream Defenders, we are also inundated with research data and statistics. A lot of that data is generated by academic researchers who are not part of the communities they study, and those under study are “subjects” of the research and have little or no say or participating in or framing the studies.
Though I often reference research data in what I write about, I have rarely discussed “research methods” and my own thoughts about the best theoretical approaches to doing sociological and anthropological research in our neighborhoods. I am a staunch proponent of what is called “Participatory Action Research (PAR) which engages researchers and community members as equal members of a process involving both study and taking action. Rather than cite a long list of studies, I want to introduce you to an ongoing project led by Dr. Yasser Arafat Payne, in Wilmington Delaware.
Yasser Arafat Payne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware. Dr. Payne completed his doctoral work at the Graduate Center-City University of New York where he was trained as a social-personality psychologist. Also, Dr. Payne completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIH-NIDA) whereby he worked on a re-entry and intervention based research project in New York City's largest jail, Rikers Island—a project designed to reduce: (1) recidivism, (2) drug use, and (3) other risky behavior leading to HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Payne has organized a street ethnographic research program centered on exploring notions of resilience and resiliency with the streets of Black and Brown America using an unconventional methodological framework entitled: Street Participatory Action Research (Street PAR)—the process of involving street-identified persons or members of this population in the process of activist-based research. Street identified populations are typically framed in a monolithic way and Dr. Payne through his research has found great emotional, psychological and developmental variation. His work seeks to break through stereotypical barriers and images of Black and Brown people in the criminal justice system, so that transition back in the community and opportunities for upward mobility are successful.
His work was highlighted in a feature article at Delaware Today:
Trained as social psychologist at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Payne, an associate professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, is, foremost, a street ethnographer, but of a different kind. Most street ethnographers come from outside the populations they study. They develop a theory or determine questions they want to answer, then design a program of study or experimentation.
Payne and members of the Wilmington Street PAR family—and he very much considers them family—are the people they study. They have an insider’s view of poor, black, urban neighborhoods, so they know what questions to ask. More important, the people they survey and interview respond candidly because they face researchers who are like themselves, community members who understand their experiences. When it comes to understanding how people deal with poverty and why they commit crime—how they cope with structural violence—this is important. Participatory research can mean the difference between conjecture, speculation or unsupported theories—there are many when it comes to race and class—and real knowledge.
Meet Dr. Payne in this TedTalk as he explains Street PAR.
Challenging the dominant arguments in the literature, Dr. Payne asserts that all of the streets of Black and Brown America are resilient. He aims to break down stereotypical barriers and images of black and brown people in the criminal justice system, so that transition back in the community and opportunities for upward mobility are successful. Dr. Payne’s work is centered on humanizing those in the criminal justice system and getting undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty, service providers and/or everyday residents to work more closely with those in the criminal justice system.
The People's Report: Trailer [Participatory Action Research]
Visit The People's Report in full to explore the results and action items. You can read the Executive Summary which includes 17 recommendations to address: (1) Physical Violence; (2) Structural Opportunity; (3) Law Enforcement/Criminal Justice System; and (4) Street Outreach and Continued Community-Centered Research and Activism
I have seen the positive results of PAR in my own work on projects exploring infant mortality in Harlem, and working with medical anthropologists dealing with both HIV/AIDS harm reduction and drug use.
Kudos to Dr. Payne and his community team.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The world of book publishing is overwhelmingly White but one brother is, bit by bit, shining a light on a plethora of multicultural books. And with the new appointment of Chris Jackson as the Vice President, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of new-old Random House imprint One World, even more multiculti books of import are sure to enter your local bookstore or online retailer.
Jackson is a rare bird because of his background and understanding of how to take Black stories and turn them into something that the entire market should – and could – appreciate. He worked with Beyonce and Jay-Z on “Decoded,” and he also brought Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Between the World and Me” to life and to sell. Jackson comes to re-launch One World after having overseen publishing at Speigal and Grau, a publisher of high end, art house books.
Literary folk know that Jackson knows how to pick 'em. From Edwidge Danticat to Aaron McGruder to Victor LaValle, the editor has an eye for great stories and how said stories will be accepted by the larger book-buying population.
One World has published Bebe Moore Campbell, Colin Channer and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. You might also know the imprint if you bought a reprint of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The publisher will continue its history of working with black cultured texts. He tells Publishers Weekly that the imprint will "explore ideas that help us re-imagine our politics, culture, and interior lives, without the filter of the dominant culture.” He continued: “That kind of vision remains a radical and vital one today. I’m thrilled we’ll be reanimating that idea and expanding its possibilities to capture the world in its fullness for this moment.”
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In growing his patio-installation company, Duane Draughon erased all clues to the public that he, a black man, owned the business.
That meant no photos of him or his family on his website; giving potential customers the impression the business was part of a franchise and that he was a project manager, not the owner; and recruiting a white insurance company representative to conduct job interviews in assembling his white sales team.
The covert tactics helped him to bill more than $6 million over nine years to a white clientele he perceived as racist, as he often encountered potential customers who slammed doors in his face or refused to allow him in their homes, he said.
"I never said I wasn't the owner. If asked, I would admit it. But I always said I was either the project manager or a designer," he said.
Draughon is among entrepreneurs who feel compelled to conceal the fact that their businesses are black-owned for fear they will lose patronage — either to misperceptions that the products or services are only for blacks, or to racial biases on the part of potential users.
Some entrepreneurs leave their photos out of websites and marketing materials. Others give the impression that their white employees actually own the operations.
Draughon closed his construction business and moved to Naperville to start VizX Design Studios landscaping design firm in 2014.
After about a year, he became comfortable enough to reveal himself as the owner.
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IN TOMALI, a village in Malawi’s Chikwawa district, a village elder born in the 1930s says she cannot recall a drier year. Esther Manganjala points to the desolate field where she has planted her maize and cotton. By lifting her hands above her head she indicates how tall her crop should be at this time of year. The seeds have barely sprouted.
The drought has scorched Chikwawa. A year ago, this traditional bread basket of Malawi was suffering from severe flooding. The effect of two poor harvests in a row is more than Chikwawa, or indeed Malawi, can bear. On April 12th its president declared a state of national disaster; Zimbabwe and parts of South Africa have done the same. In February the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) made an urgent appeal for $38m in international aid. Combined with other countries in the region, southern Africa’s appeal for emergency aid stands at $1.6 billion. That is in addition to east Africa’s $2.7 billion appeal, which has received the lion’s share of media coverage and donations. (Ethiopia gets the most attention.)
The WFP has been operating in Tomali for years. Long-standing programmes help farmers to develop new businesses and aim to wean them off more vulnerable plants. But sensible planning goes only so far. Schemes such as one that encourages people to make and sell efficient clay stoves are useful only if there are customers with money to buy them, or food to cook on them. At a nearby market, bags of maize, the staple, are getting too costly.
In lean years Malawi looks to South Africa and Zambia to supply maize, but the scale of southern Africa’s drought means that they have problems of their own. In South Africa the government reckons that the maize harvest will be 27% lower than last year. It has relaxed restrictions on genetically modified crops, and will import at least 3.8m of the roughly 14m tons of maize needed to feed its people this year.
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Morris Brown College, founded in 1881 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, is a rare historically black college and university established by blacks. For more than 100 years, its Atlanta campus proudly produced writers, civil rights leaders, and business leaders, among other notable alumni. Things took a bad turn in 2002, however, when financial mismanagement caused the school to lose accreditation and federal funding. Hundreds of students left, and faculty and staff lost their jobs. As part of its 2012 bankruptcy filing, the school sold many of its buildings in order to avoid closing altogether.
Photographer Andrew Feiler, a fifth-generation Georgian, knew a number of alumni and faculty at the college and was already familiar with the institution’s HBCU legacy when he learned of the school’s bankruptcy filing. Right away, he knew he wanted to photograph the campus.
“It felt like an important story along multiple dimensions: race, class, social justice, economic opportunity, religion, history. I wasn’t sure where it would lead, but it was a story I wanted to explore,” Feiler said.
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African Americans are routinely under-treated for their pain compared with whites, according to research. A study released Monday sheds some disturbing light on why that might be the case.
Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times "fantastical" differences about the two races -- for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people's blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true.
Moreover, those who held false beliefs often rated black patients' pain as lower than that of white patients and made less appropriate recommendations about how they should be treated.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help illuminate one of the most vexing problems in pain treatment today: That whites are more likely than blacks to be prescribed strong pain medications for equivalent ailments.
Percentage of white participants endorsing beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. (Courtesy of PNAS/Hoffman et al)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
James Baldwin knew few boundaries. Black, gay, expatriate author of such still-read books as Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time, Baldwin sought to break free of the strictures imposed by society, by history, or even by craft. Baldwin wrote not just novels, but also essays, plays, poetry; and even a children’s book.
Introduced to the eminent American modernist painter, Beauford Delaney when Baldwin was fourteen, Delaney was the first self-supporting artist he had ever met, and like Baldwin, Delaney was black and homosexual. Delaney then became a mentor to Baldwin, who often spoke of him as a ‘spiritual father,' and it was Delaney who introduced Baldwin to the French artist, Yoran Cazac in Paris.
Baldwin's poem, "Munich, Winter 1973 (for Y.S.), was originally titled simply, "For Yoran" and describes the deeply complex, at times dangerous, connections between brotherly, friendly and erotic energy, with the sexual, emotional, social and political dimensions of experience. Baldwin saw these dimensions of experience as reciprocal and finally, as inextricable. In Baldwin's mind, his connection with Cazac caused him to confront and understand the depth of this necessity in a new way.
Baldwin became godfather to Cazac’s third child, and Cazac became the man who gave artistic life to Baldwin’s vision of childhood itself in, "Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood."
In a strange house, a strange bed in a strange town, a very strange me is waiting for you.
Now it is very early in the morning. The silence is loud.
The baby is walking about
with his foaming bottle,
making strange sounds and deciding, after all, to be my friend.
You arrive tonight.
How dull time is! How empty—and yet, since I am sitting here,
lying here,
walking up and down here,
waiting,
I see
that time's cruel ability to make one wait is time's reality.
I see your hair which I call red. I lie here in this bed.
Someone teased me once, a friend of ours— saying that I saw your hair red because I was not thinking of the hair on your head.
Someone also told me, a long time ago: my father said to me,
It is a terrible thing,
son,
to fall into the hands of the living God.
Now,
I know what he was saying.
I could not have seen red
before finding myself
in this strange, this waiting bed.
Nor had my naked eye suggested
that colour was created
by the light falling, now,
on me,
in this strange bed, waiting where no one has ever rested!
The streets, I observe, are wintry. It feels like snow.
Starlings circle in the sky,
conspiring,
together, and alone, unspeakable journeys into and out of the light.
I know I will see you tonight. And snow
may fall
enough to freeze our tongues and scald our eyes. We may never be found again!
Just as the birds above our heads circling are singing,
knowing
that, in what lies before them,
the always unknown passage,
wind, water, air,
the failing light
the failing night
the blinding sun
they must get the journey done.
Listen.
They have wings and voices
are making choices
are using what they have.
They are aware
that, on long journeys,
each bears the other,
whirring,
stirring love occuring in the middle of the terrifying air.
James Baldwin
"Munich, Winter 1973 (for Y.S.)"
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH