For people of color, there are many barriers to accessing mental health care. Valarie Cunningham’s Synergy Health Center works to overcome those.
Black Americans
WSV columnist Torrey Brown writes about a recent shopping experience that left him feeling like “less than a person.”
A.M. Darke is first person to create an open-source platform dedicated to black hair.
Black hair has long been undervalued, and poorly represented. Not only in gaming or other types of simulations, but also with toys available, non-toxic hair care products by big name companies, and television. Proper representation can help eliminate prejudice and restore a sense of cultural pride.
In this piece, WSV’s Debbie Allen digs into the feelings and emotions that inspire her work, and offers a poem she penned titled “The Brilliance of Her Art.”
The Defend Black Voters Coalition has called on Michigan-based corporations General Motors, Ford, DTE Energy, and CMS Energy to pledge to end campaign contributions to state lawmakers who are working to make it harder for Black people in Michigan to cast ballots with proposed voting restrictions.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan said on Wednesday that it has filed a federal lawsuit against the Michigan State Police (MSP) on behalf of two African Americans who said that they were racially profiled during a wrongful traffic stop.
Michigan Advance’s Jarvis DeBerry writes, “(Republican lawmakers) don’t think officially recognizing June 19, 1865, the day Black people in Texas learned of their freedom, costs them anything or that it benefits Black people enough for them to get worked up about. Acknowledging Juneteenth definitely doesn’t mean as much as police reform, voting rights, a higher minimum wage, Medicaid expansion or other policies that Black people have been demanding.”
Michigan Advance’s David Hecker writes, “Michigan can and should be a place where every child, regardless of race or ZIP code, has the opportunity to get a quality public education that will set them on a path to success. But we’re not there yet, and it is incumbent on all of us to do the work necessary to strengthen public schools for all students, and specifically to ensure our classrooms are safe, empowering spaces for Black, Indigenous and other students of color.”
Rob Schofield writes, “Here in the United States, it has taken many decades – indeed, centuries – for the tragic scope of what was done to Native Americans to slowly penetrate the consciousness of a population raised on cowboy movies and fanciful Thanksgiving stories.
“And so it is, perhaps not surprisingly, that many modern Americans continue to struggle with one of the most horrific of all episodes of oppression in human history: the forced enslavement of millions of people of African descent by white Americans. While no one denies the fact of slavery, millions still avert their eyes from its gruesome reality and, even more importantly, from its legacy.”
“Why are you talking to them?” Hank Millbourne remembers friends saying to him during the 1980s gay scene in Detroit about other gay men. “They have the package.”
Millbourne had only a passing idea of what the “package” was, but he was quickly taught the alleged telltale signs of it: darkened fingernails from using AZT, then the only approved treatment for HIV. In Black Americans, it had the odd side effect of turning some people’s fingernails dark black.
The George Washington Carver Community Center hosted a virtual event on Thursday, May 29 to discuss trauma, grief, and resilience, particularly as those issues intersect with the African American community and the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year after George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, his family returned Tuesday to Washington, D.C., where lawmakers have been attempting to craft a bipartisan bill to overhaul the nation’s policing laws. Congress failed to act by the anniversary of Floyd’s death — the deadline that President Joe Biden had urged lawmakers to meet. Instead of signing legislation named for Floyd into law on Tuesday, the president met with Floyd’s family members in a private gathering at the White House.
Members of a U.S. House panel on Monday debated whether some state elections laws disenfranchise certain voters, including people of color, and split along party lines in their conclusions.
From statehouses to Congress, Republicans have launched into a fight against the teaching of “critical race theory,” which just a year ago was a niche academic term. Experts in critical race theory say it’s about acknowledging how racial disparities are embedded in U.S history and society, and the concept is being mischaracterized by conservatives. But GOP lawmakers in the past few months have succeeded in pushing it to the top of state legislative agendas.
Jarvis DeBerry writes, “[…] in the U.S., neither a Black woman’s money, education or status serves as protection from mistreatment in labor and delivery. Financially secure Black women with Ivy League degrees have to worry just like those with less money and education if doctors or nurses will do (or not do) something that costs them their lives or their babies’ lives.”
WSV’s Aundrea Sayrie writes, “One gets weary. Not including last week, Newsweek reports that an additional 181 Black people have been murdered at the hands of police since George Floyd, and it hasn’t been a year. When Derek Chauvin’s verdict was read last week, I did not rejoice. I did not feel excitement of any sort. I was in total shock witnessing the anomaly of accountability of a police officer. This never happens.”
“Discrimination based on hairstyles has long served as a thinly-veiled excuse to discriminate based on race,” Rep. Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) said. “This form of prejudice is a real problem, one that countless men, women and children are forced to face every day.”
WSV’s Eddie Leboeuf writes about the “strength” and “incredible legacy” of Black American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.