Category: Critical Joy/Ecstatic Reasoning

Dr. Melissa Barber – (of Melissa’s Thanks) organizes Coronavirus (COVID 19) response in her community

One of the biggest ideas that came from the Cuban Revolution was that everyone, as a human right, should have access to healthcare and should have access to education. So Cuba has prided itself in making sure that these are very much pillars of its revolution, and that their people would always have access to that.

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Dr. Melissa Barber, author of Melissa’s Thanks, continues her GREAT work! Read more here.

“In the South Bronx, Dr. Melissa Barber is putting into practice lessons she learned more than a decade ago from her training as a medical student in Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine, or ELAM as it’s known by its Spanish initials. For Barber, healthcare doesn’t start with an ambulance ride to the hospital but with community organizing and a deep familiarity with the needs of one’s neighbors. Barber is also the coordinator for the U.S.-Cuba scholarship program that provides free medical school training in Cuba for aspiring doctors who commit to return and serve in their communities.”

The Work of Joy

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With the current state of our world, it is easy to lose sight of personal and community health and well-being. While acknowledging the problematics of the holiday season (a list too numerous), I hope we all find places/spaces to engage in the life saving practice of collective Joy. The below article was published more than 2 years ago in the Harvard Gazette , offers a scientific perspective on the role of joy to human health and wellbeing-being.

Good genes are nice, but joy is better

“Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier, said Waldinger, and the loners often died earlier. “Loneliness kills,” he said. “It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”

According to the study, those who lived longer and enjoyed sound health avoided smoking and alcohol in excess. Researchers also found that those with strong social support experienced less mental deterioration as they aged.

For Colored Girls

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“In Ntozake Shange’s celebrated feminist choreopoem, through Dec. 8 at the Public, seven women of color, named after and dressed in different hues of the rainbow, explore trauma and resilience through movement and text. Ms. Wailes’s performance is captivating for the ease in which she weaves Camille A. Brown’s choreography with American Sign Language.”

Time sensitive: Can you help this student? Read her story.

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Meet Bri, she aspires to transform the world by working at the intersection of chemistry and computer science.   Click on her picture or the go-fund-me link below to read Bri’s story and contribute.

Brihttps://www.gofundme.com/help-bri-go-to-nyu?utm_medium=social&utm_source=whatsapp&utm_campaign=p_na+share-sheet&pc_code=wa_co_dashboard_a&rcid=f960f0734ee04d77bbdca135349b805a

Caster Semenya, Defiant After Race Win, Says She Won’t Take Hormone Reducing Drugs — TIME

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Caster Semenya honors humanity with her determination to live, love, run, and delight in her body as her own self – maintaining and celebrating her body’s integrity !!! 

Caster Semenya was defiant in every way at what very well could be her last 800 meter race. Her raised fist at the start. Her unstoppable victory. And with her reply Friday to the big question of whether she will now submit to new testosterone regulations in track and field and take hormone-reducing medication. “Hell…

via Caster Semenya, Defiant After Race Win, Says She Won’t Take Hormone Reducing Drugs — TIME

I love this woman and her dynamic spirit in a time that tries to unhindered her from who she knows herself to be in this world

“I am a woman and I am fast”: what Caster Semenya’s story says about gender and race in sports

 

 

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/5/3/18526723/caster-semenya-800-gender-race-intersex-athletes

Book Release Party – Kenrya Rankin +Akiba Solomon

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Information on this page source from Colorlines Magazine, published by RaceForward

Fight WS

“The fact is, White supremacy defines our current reality. It is not merely a belief that to be White is to be better. It is a political, cultural and economic system premised on the subjugation of people who are not White. That subjugation takes on an infinite number of forms and is enforced with varying degrees of physical violence, mental abuse and robbery. White supremacy is the voice in our collective heads that says it makes civilized sense that one group of people gets to annihilate, enslave, incarcerate, brainwash, torture, sterilize, breed and terrorize other people. White supremacy establishes, upholds and normalizes hierarchy based on the premise that the less Black you are the closer you are to God.”

“[T]his is a book about freedom dreams. We’re well aware of the problems we’re buried beneath. We can feel the weight of them on our limbs, the heft of them in our abdomens as our second brains gnaw on the indignity of it all. But what does it look like for Black people to claw our way to fresh air? What does freedom feel like? How does it taste on the tongue? For some folks in this book, it feels like raising kids who gleefully take up space for themselves. For others, it looks like providing the tools we need to triumph over race-based trauma. There’s the pastor who envisions a day when following his radical, dark-skinned Jesus who always sides with the dispossessed will lift us out of this hole, and the organizer who can almost smell the sharp aroma of reforming the nation’s political system. And we can’t forget the professor who dreams of the day when we can bring our full selves to every table.”

Excerpted from “How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance” by Kenrya Rankin and Akiba Solomon, available now. 

Afrobeat Radio: Tribute to Ntozake Shange, with Halifu Osumare.

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Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute

My first meeting of Ntozake Shange was the morning of May 17, 2018 when she arrived at the west 57 street recording studio in New York City.   As part of Afrobeat Radio’s media hosting of Halifu Osumare’s Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir book tour, Shange and Osumare were scheduled for an interview with Afrobeat Radio host, Wuyi Jacobs.  Shange, a lifelong friend of Osumare, feature prominently in Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir and was determined to contribute her name and presence in whatever way she could to the successful launch of Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir.

While I was aware that in recent years Shange had been ill, battling to recover more fully from a stroke she had a decade earlier, I was nonetheless surprised with her presence: at once vibrant, bubbling and tenacious, and unabashedly delicate, vulnerable, and uncomfortably revealed.

Like many, I fell in love with Shange’s work during my adolescent years, and as a young adult she gave voice to my confusions and questions and outright frustrations and anger about the world around me.  In her work,  Shange’s work gave me permission, not that I needed permission but it was nice to have it nonetheless, to belong to myself in this world and be fully present in navigating the various paradoxes of the particularly spaces/places which I inhabit and encounter.

On that May 17 morning, I was invited in to a day of paradoxes deliciously laid out on the altar of love for a good friend.  On October 27, 2018, less than six-month later, Shange joined the realm of the ancestor. And, her death, made having witnessed May 17th an even greater honor and a deeper reminder of the role love and true friendship in living meaningful lives.

I invite you to take a listen to Afrobeat Radio’s  Ntozake Shange, Tribute.