SUMMARY:The hit Broadway play “Choir Boy” chronicles an African-American prep school and its star pupil, the choir boy, who happens to be gay. Written by Tarell McCraney, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, the play explores themes not often addressed publicly within the black community or outside it. Jeffrey Brown sits down with McCraney to discuss what it means to bring important voices to the stage.
SUMMARY: A new, single volume of history sets out to explore the experiment in government that is the United States. Jeffrey Brown sits down with award-winning Harvard historian Jill Lepore, author of “These Truths: A History of the United States,” to discuss how we now understand the role of women and people of color in our political heritage, and how to put today’s politics of division in proportion.
SUMMARY: Why would author Casey Gerald want people to stop highlighting success stories like his own? Gerald says he grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks” and went on to Harvard Business school. But he says celebrations of the American Dream distract from reality, letting society off the hook for failing to give all children a fair shot. Gerald offers his humble opinion on the reality of American opportunity.
SUMMARY:"Black Panther" isn't just a big-budget action movie getting rave reviews; it's a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. Unlike other movies in the Marvel [Comics] universe, it has an African superhero, a majority-black cast, and an African-American director. Jeffrey Brown reports on the many ways the movie, which debuts Friday, is generating excitement and inspiration.
In this week's fact-checking video [below], CNN's Jake Tapper reviews President Donald Trump's claim that the black unemployment rate is the lowest in recorded history “because of my policies.”
While it's true that the black unemployment rate recently reached its lowest level in decades, the rate has been in steady decline for about the last seven years.
As we wrote, the black unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, the lowest it had been in nearly 10 years, when Trump took office in January 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Under Trump, it dropped a full percentage point to 6.8 percent in December. That's the lowest rate since the bureau began regularly breaking out unemployment rates by race in 1972.
There was a similar decline during the same 11-month period in 2016, but the drop was even more pronounced in each of the three years before that. In other words, the downward trend continued under Trump, but at a slower pace than in recent years.
As the video notes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest data on Feb. 2 — several days after the President had made the claim. The black unemployment rate crept back up to 7.7 percent in January, almost exactly the rate when Trump became President.
FactCheck.org and Tapper have been collaborating on fact-checking videos since September 2015. All of the videos can be found on FactCheck.org.
SUMMARY: Documentary filmmakers Margaret Byrne and Ian Kibbe spent six years following the lives of three young African-American men in rural North Carolina. The resulting documentary, “Raising Bertie” offers an intimate look at how they navigate school and generational poverty. Jeffrey Brown speaks with the filmmakers about this coming-of-age story.
SUMMARY: As filmmaker Damon Davis tells it, being black in America comes with anxiety. To survive, he says, you're constantly walking on eggshells because the way you talk and the clothes on your back can be used as a weapon against you. Davis, co-director of the documentary “Whose Streets,” gives his Brief but Spectacular take on finding courage after the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
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.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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