AND DO YOU BELONG? I DO | saintheron.com
Solange Knowles gives a heartbreaking account of a humiliating racist experience she and her family suffered at the Kraftwerk concert and her carefully crafted response…“You get there about 10 minutes late, but lucky for you, as soon as you walk to your box seats, the song that you just played for your son in the car is on! It’s a song his uncle sampled, ” The Hall of Mirrors.” You haven’t even sat down yet because you just walked to your seat and you’re so excited to dance to this DANCE MUSIC SONG. Simultaneously, a much older black venue attendant comes over to your son and his friend and yells “No electronic cigarettes allowed, you need to stop doing that now!” You are too into the groove and let your husband handle it and tell the attendant that the children are 11 years old, and it’s actually the two grown white men in front of you guys who were smoking them. You are annoyed and feel it’s extremely problematic that someone would challenge their innocence, but determined to stay positive and your husband has handled this accordingly. About 20 seconds later, you hear women yell aggressively, “Sit down now, you need to sit down right now” from the box behind you. You want to be considerate, however, they were not at all considerate with their tone, their choice of words, or the fact that you just walked in and seem to be enjoying yourself. You are also confused as to what show you went to. This is a band that were pioneers of electronic and dance music. Surely the audience is going to expect you to dance at some point. You were planning on sitting down after this song, as long as it wasn’t one of the four songs that you really connect with and plan on getting down to. You feel something heavy hit you on the back of your shoulder, but consider that you are imagining things because well….certainly a stranger would not have the audacity. Moments later, you feel something again, this time smaller, less heavy, and your son and his friend tell you those ladies just hit you with a lime.”
TREVOR NOAH ON BEING MIXED-RACE IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: “I WAS JUST LIVING THIS LIFE OF BEING A PHYSICAL CRIME” | salon.com
Trevor Noah talks about the process of writing his memoir and learning why he was never allowed to go outdoors as a child…“For instance, I always thought I was an indoor child. Turns out I wasn’t allowed to leave the house because if I was seen in … the area I lived in, the police would see me and go like, ‘Oh, that kid, he’s a crime, you can see that.’ And then they’d take me away and send me off to an orphanage because my mom wasn’t allowed to have me and my dad wasn’t allowed to have made me.”
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND INTELLIGENCE | nytimes.com
And the hope to develop a more rational society…“There is also now evidence that rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through training. In a pair of studies published last year in Policy Insights From the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the psychologist Carey Morewedge and colleagues had subjects (more than 200 in each study) complete a test to assess their susceptibility to various decision-making biases. Then, some of the subjects watched a video about decision-making bias, while others played an interactive computer game designed to decrease bias via simulations of real-world decision making…Professor Morewedge and colleagues found that the computer training led to statistically large and enduring decreases in decision-making bias. In other words, the subjects were considerably less biased after training, even after two months.”
SHAWN CARTER: THE WAR ON DRUGS IS AN EPIC FAIL
MY DAUGHTER, PALMER ANN | modern-eve.com
Three weeks after her daughter’s birth and receiving the news that her daughter has Down syndrome, a mother writes a raw account of her overwhelming desire to protect her daughter from the feelings of being damaged, rejected, or unwanted by a society that sees her daughter’s life as less than…“When the obstetrician gave us the news a few minutes following Palmer’s birth, immediately I was consumed by an overwhelming desire to protect my daughter. But it wasn’t physical injuries or the fear of medical dangers that I would come to worry about in later days that I wanted to safeguard her from. I wanted to shield her from emotional wounds – from pity, from rejection. I never want anyone to ever think, even just for a second, that she is defective, damaged, a mistake, or unwanted. Because if they believe that, she might question it herself, too.”
For NYC families looking to dodge the sticky heat, check out Edgar Degas’s lesser known printmaking career at the MoMA or MADreads at the Museum of Art & Design. Also, for children’s theatre, the New Vic Theater has some incredible shows coming this fall, starting with a fresh production of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.
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