Everybody, let’s talk about it: 🧵 I saw something at the trampoline park on Wednesday and I still don’t know if I handled it right. I wasn’t even entirely sure if the woman with them was the mom or the nanny. She was Black, the kids looked white? or maybe not related to her by blood at all, and something about how she was dressed made me lean toward nanny, but I couldn’t say for certain. She just seemed more like a helper. She just didn’t give me the impression that she was their mom. Maybe it was the way she was dressed, maybe it was how she carried herself, I don’t know. I just assumed she was probably there to take care of them. I actually kept looking around for another adult who looked like they belonged with the kids, but nobody came over. The kids were dressed really nicely, too, so I assumed they probably came from a pretty well-off family. I wondered if maybe she was just having a bad day at work, but then I thought, if someone is paying you to watch their children, shouldn’t you at least be watching them? She was on her phone the entire time, completely checked out from the two kids with her. The only real interaction I saw was when the little boy dropped some of his snack and she snapped, “Stop, stop,” at him. No comfort, no help, just irritation, then straight back to her phone. That’s what broke my heart the most. I kept thinking about how I would never leave my kids with somebody who acted like that, and how somebody needed to tell her that wasn’t okay. I kept thinking, if those were my children, somebody would absolutely say something to me if I was sitting there ignoring them. I probably would have felt differently if she had looked more engaged with them. I don’t know. She just seemed so detached. The little girl eventually started playing with my child, so I tried to ask her if she was okay. She just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I tried again, and she still didn’t really respond. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t understand what I was saying, if she didn’t speak much English, or if she just didn’t want to talk to me. I remember thinking that if something was wrong, surely she would tell me. The fact that she seemed much more interested in playing with my child than going back over to the woman made me feel even more uncomfortable.

Psychosis of Whiteness sheds light on society's perceptions of race + racism by exploring cinematic representations of the slave trade. Black History Studies presents the screening of 'The Psychosis of Whiteness' A flim by Eugene Nulman and Kehinde Andrews. Join us for the screening of The Psychosis of Whiteness, directed by Eugene Nulman and based on the paper of the same title by Kehinde Andrews. The Psychosis of Whiteness sheds light on society's perceptions of race and racism by exploring cinematic representations of the slave trade. This documentary takes an in-depth look at big budget films that focus on the transatlantic slave trade and, using a wealth of sources and interviews, it argues that these depictions are metaphoric hallucinations about race. Rather than blaming the powerful institutions that are responsible for slavery, these films rewrite history by praising those same institutions for abolishing the slave trade. Read the article that inspired the film in the BCU Open access repository http://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/5774/1/Andrews%20%282016%29%20Psychosis%20of%20Whiteness-%20Green%20access.pdf https://youtu.be/tGSVtfhfcRc?is=g2zBRV5tF_4saKpC

The Globality of Antiblackness Made in China Journal https://share.google/sqwT7WHG2KVuoMZR7

Everybody, let’s talk about it: 🧵 Hi Chamieka, Last week I read your post about children whose hair goes uncared for by their caregivers. It felt like a gut punch, and I've been sitting with it since. But I also know it doesn’t fully apply to me. Our situation is a little different. My foster children are fully Black and we've been fostering them for a few years. We also have three of our own. We're in the process of moving towards adoption but they still have visits with their bio “mom”. At this point the case can get either way which has me scared, but that’s another story. I think she's a great person but not a good parent. However, we’ve have tried to maintain a respectful relationship for the kids. “Mom” shows up to visits regularly and the kids have a great relationship with her. They get excited on visit days and she really does attempt to make the best out of the three hours she has them. The issue I'm having is that she often does the girls hair when she's visiting them. I have two issues with it- one is that I don’t feel it's not a good use of a very short amount of visitation time and two the girls complain about it being tight. It breaks my heart and I just end up taking it down. I've watched a lot of tutorials and bought all the right products, so I feel like I also know what their hair needs. It’s not rocket science. Now we're in the back and forth with the case manager who says that mom does have the right to do their hair and use her visitation time the way she sees fit. She told her the more often they get it done, the more they'll get used to it. But that seems abusive. Secondly, she doesn't live with them full time and doesn't have to deal with the tears after visits. They don't like the braids or beads. I'd honestly rather she just play with them. I'm starting to consider bringing it up in court, as well as some other concerning things. A perfect example of this issue is on Tuesday they had wacky hair day at school. My bio kids were able to fully participate but my foster kids weren’t. We couldn’t figure out how to make braids “wacky”. My only realistic option was to take it down. But because of the social worker and “mom” they were left out and very sad and upset about it.

We talk about implicit bias in class a lot. Being that a new brain-imaging study from researchers at Columbia University suggests that at least part of the problem is that racist stereotypes can infiltrate the brain’s visual system, causing cops and people who call cops to see guns where guns don’t exist when a Black suspect is involved. From the article: These stereotypes transiently distort how the brain quite literally sees a harmless object. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and cutting-edge neural decoding techniques, the researchers found that when participants saw everyday graspable objects like a wrench or drill after briefly viewing a Black man’s face, object-processing regions in the brain shifted their neural representation to more closely resemble that of a weapon. Participants were also asked to sort images, identifying them as either weapons or tools. They consistently showed milliseconds of delay in categorizing tools as tools rather than as weapons when the image was immediately followed by a Black man’s face, indicating an initial unconscious tendency to perceive them as weapons. The researchers then specifically linked this weapon identification bias to the shifts in the brain’s visual system they observed: The more that test subjects’ brains shifted toward a weapon reaction when they saw a tool followed by a Black man’s face, the longer the delay they experienced before successfully resolving the tool as a tool, not a weapon. “Our findings demonstrate that the stereotypes we hold can alter the brain’s visual representation of an object, distorting what we see to fit our biased expectations,” said Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia who led the study and published it in the journal Nature Communications. SOURCE: NEWSONE https://newsone.com/6446701/why-unarmed-black-people-get-shot-by-police-columbia-university/