Fortitude

Author(s):  
Robert S. Kurtz

In New York City, from the 1990s to the present, covert racism is alive and well in the field of medicine and medical education. The most heavily impacted are African American and Caribbean American females and males. The inequitable treatment thus engendered has concrete results ranging from unwarranted criticism in residency education to forced changes of medical occupations and jobs, to false attributions of behavioral health issues. Combating these challenges requires fortified character armor, seeking percipient well positioned minority, white and off-whites allies, and a willingness to maintain continued vigilance. With persistence and tenacity, success is possible in terms of protecting minorities both in the educational process, and in a mature medical life.

Author(s):  
Robert S. Kurtz

In New York City, from the 1990s to the present, covert racism is alive and well in the field of medicine and medical education. This racism largely manifested itself as inequitable treatment of illness. The most heavily impacted are African American and Caribbean American females and males. These inequities engendered results such as unwarranted criticism in residency education, forced changes of medical occupations and jobs, and false attributions of behavioral health issues. Combating these challenges requires fortified character armor, seeking percipient well positioned minorities, white and off-whites allies, and a willingness to maintain continued vigilance. With persistence and tenacity, success is possible in terms of protecting minorities both in the educational process, and subsequent medical career.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.


2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Greenland

This book challenges the convenient distinction between jazz musicians and audiences by calling attention to the collaborative interactions of performers with the other “nonperforming” participants. It provides a realistic representation of jazz in New York City by taking a somewhat paradoxical and ironic approach: it examines small, specialized jazz scenes to suggest broad-based patterns of jazz participation while also deemphasizing what is happening on stage in favor of the offstage listeners—in other words, the unseen scene. This introduction provides an overview of research on the themes addressed in the book; the symbiosis and synergism that characterize New York City's jazz scene, particularly the avant-jazz scene; and the ideological debate between essentialist and universalist positions—the former emphasizing African American cultural values and the latter emphasizing multiculturalism, individual merit, and colorblindness. The book's main argument is that jazz's deeper meanings and expressions are conveyed when both artists and audiences participate in collective improvisation.


Edna Lewis (1916-2006) wrote some of America's most resonant, lyrical, and significant cookbooks, including the now classic The Taste of Country Cooking. Lewis cooked and wrote as a means to explore her memories of childhood on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a community first founded by black families freed from slavery. With such observations as "we would gather wild honey from the hollow of oak trees to go with the hot biscuits and pick wild strawberries to go with the heavy cream," she commemorated the seasonal richness of southern food. After living many years in New York City, where she became a chef and a political activist, she returned to the South and continued to write. Her reputation as a trailblazer in the revival of regional cooking and as a progenitor of the farm-to-table movement continues to grow. In this first-ever critical appreciation of Lewis's work, food-world stars gather to reveal their own encounters with Edna Lewis. Together they penetrate the mythology around Lewis and illuminate her legacy for a new generation, making a case for Lewis as a critical voice in African American foodways, and a pioneering professional woman chef, and the single most important figure in regional American food.


2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 618-645
Author(s):  
Michael Hines

Even though the black community of antebellum New York City lived in a society that marginalized them socially and economically, they were intent on pursuing the basic privileges of American citizenship. One tactic African Americans employed to this end was the tenacious pursuit of education, which leaders believed would act both as an aid in economic advancement and as a counterargument against the widely assumed social inferiority of their race. The weekly newspaper, Freedom's Journal, the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States, was an avid supporter of this strategy of social elevation through education. From 1827 to 1829, the paper's editors, John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, used their platform to advertise for a range of schools, editorialize on the importance of learning, and draw connections between the enlightenment of the individual and the progress of the race.


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