SUMMARY: Graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang wrestled with his identity growing up, but he's made the Chinese-American experience one of the main subjects of his critically acclaimed work. One of this year's MacArthur Fellowship winners and the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Yang sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss his childhood, his love of coding and the feeling of being an outsider.
GENE LUEN YANG, Ambassador for Young People's Literature (at lecture): I'm super excited to be here with you. My name is Gene.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Gene Luen Yang can seem like one of the kids himself.
GENE LUEN YANG This is what I look like in real life. That is what I look like as a cartoon and this morning, what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you about two things that I love.
JEFFREY BROWN: Sharing things he loves is now part of his official job description, as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, an honor given him by the Library of Congress earlier this year.
And the two things he loves? Comic books and coding. We spoke recently as he visited Stonewall Middle School in Manassas, Virginia.
GENE LUEN YANG: I think they're so related. Coding and writing stories, I really feel like I use the same parts of my brain to do both, right?
When you're making a comic what you do if you take a fairly complex storyline, and you have to break it up into individual panels. And coding is very much the same way. You take a complex concept and you break it up into individual lines. So, it's all about taking the complex and breaking it into simple, understandable pieces.
JEFFREY BROWN: I don't think everybody thinks of it that way, thinks of the connection between writing and coding.
GENE LUEN YANG: I think there is a tendency in modern American culture to separate the sciences from the arts, and to me it just feels like such a false dichotomy. You know, there are so many people who are interested in both. There are so many people pursuing both and who want to become good at both.
SUMMARY: Braddock, Pennsylvania, was once a thriving steel town before the town’s industry collapsed. It's where LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up, like her mother and grandmother before her, and it's where the visual artist and 2015 MacArthur fellow has returned to document the change her community has endured. Jeffrey Brown talks with Frazier about her art and activism.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally, a look at a photographer’s more-than-decade-long project documenting hope and despair in her hometown.
Jeffrey Brown has that story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Braddock, Pennsylvania, about nine miles outside of Pittsburgh, a once thriving steel town of some 20,000, now down to one-tenth of that, and captured through the very personal lens of LaToya Ruby Frazier, the 32-year-old winner of one of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, Photographer: I see myself as an artist and a citizen that’s documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that’s happening, because it has to be documented.
JEFFREY BROWN: These days, Frazier teaches and lives in Chicago, where we talked to her, but her true home, her childhood home, is the one found in her work.
It’s a project titled “The Notion of Family” that she began more than a decade ago, documenting three generations of African-American women in a particular time and place.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER:My grandmother, who grew up there in the ’30s, when Braddock was prosperous and a city itself that everyone came to, to my mother growing up there in the ’60s during segregation and white flight and the beginning of the collapse of the steel industry, to myself growing up there in the ’80s and ’90s, when the factories were already dismantled and the war on drugs kind of hit its peak.
JEFFREY BROWN: Educator and photographer Lewis Hine used his camera for social reform. Photographers from the Farm Security Administration documented the poverty of the Depression, the pioneering work of Gordon Parks in the 1940s and ’50s.
Frazier sees herself working in this tradition, first and foremost, though, as a visual artist.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER: The art comes in with how it’s crafted, how it’s made, the material, me understanding the history, because the images, they’re not purely documents.
If you look at them, first and foremost, the fact that I appear on the other side of the camera lets you know that this is contemporary art, because now I’m performing and doing gestures in front of the camera to create…
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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