UA researcher Rick Kittles is a national leader on health disparities and the role of genes and environment in disease. (Photo: Bob Demers/UANews) article by Nick Prevenas via uanews.arizona.edu
Ever since he can remember, Rick Kittles always wanted to know where he came from.
Born in Sylvania, Georgia, and raised near Long Island, New York, a great deal of his academic interest was sparked by the desire to trace his ancestral lineage as far back as it could go. This proved to be exceedingly difficult, for a number of reasons.
“There simply wasn’t a strong database in place or any kind of access to information on African genetics,” Kittles said. “Records were either inaccurate or nonexistent, so there were a number of hurdles in place for African-Americans to try to figure out their ancestry.”
An aptitude for biology, coupled with a deep exploration of Alex Haley’s novel, “Roots,” led Kittles on a path that eventually would help thousands of people like him clear these hurdles. He is the director of the Division of Population Genetics at the University of Arizona, which he joined in July 2014.
Developing and implementing a comprehensive African genealogy database seemed daunting at first, but during his graduate studies at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and, later, though his work at Howard University’s College of Medicine in the late 1990s, Kittles met the historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and fellow geneticists who could help turn this dream into a reality.
“I was looking at my own DNA profile, analyzing my Y-chromosome lineage, and I noticed my Nigerian lineage didn’t track with the other Y-chromosome samples from West Africa,” Kittles said.
Filming against a green screen in Illah, a village in southeast Nigeria, in November. The production is part of the Nollywood industry, which has exploded in Africa. (Credit: Glenna Gordon for The New York Times) article by Norimitsu Onishi via nytimes.com
ASABA, Nigeria — Sitting on a blue plastic stool in the sweltering heat, Ugezu J. Ugezu, one of Nigeria’s top filmmakers, was furiously rewriting his script as the cameras prepared to roll. “Cut!” he shouted after wrapping up a key scene, a confrontation between the two leading characters. Then, under his breath, he added, “Good as it gets.”
This was the seventh — and last — day of shooting in a village near here for “Beyond the Dance,” Mr. Ugezu’s story of an African prince’s choice of a bride, and the production had been conducted at a breakneck pace. “In Nollywood, you don’t waste time,” he said. “It’s not the technical depth that has made our films so popular. It’s because of the story. We tell African stories.”
A film set in Illah, a village in southeastern Nigeria, where electricity generators are a necessity for movie production crews. (Credit: Glenna Gordon for The New York Times)
The stories told by Nigeria’s booming film industry, known as Nollywood, have emerged as a cultural phenomenon across Africa, the vanguard of the country’s growing influence across the continent in music, comedy, fashion and even religion.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, overtook its rival, South Africa, as the continent’s largest economy two years ago, thanks in part to the film industry’s explosive growth. Nollywood — a term I helped coin with a 2002 article when Nigeria’s movies were just starting to gain popularity outside the country — is an expression of boundless Nigerian entrepreneurialism and the nation’s self-perception as the natural leader of Africa, the one destined to speak on the continent’s behalf.
“The Nigerian movies are very, very popular in Tanzania, and, culturally, they’ve affected a lot of people,” said Songa wa Songa, a Tanzanian journalist. “A lot of people now speak with a Nigerian accent here very well thanks to Nollywood. Nigerians have succeeded through Nollywood to export who they are, their culture, their lifestyle, everything.”
Made-for-TV film”Skinned” about skin bleaching to air on TV One (photo via newsone.com)
This weekend, TV One will premiere LisaRaye McCoy‘s directorial debut with the made-for-TV film Skinned, which tackles a very sensitive topic within the African-American community.
Skinned confronts colorism, pigmentocracy, and the outbreak of skin bleaching, as well as the use of lightening creams amongst many individuals in America and around the world.
According to Black Enterprise and the University of Cape Town, skin bleaching has ballooned into a $10 billion market and the long-term effects of bleaching one’s skin is currently unknown. Black Enterprise reports 35 percent of South African women bleach their skin, and 77 percent of Nigerian women bleach their skin. Director LisaRaye McCoy talks about “Skinned” on NewsOne Now (photo via newsone.com)
On Friday, McCoy, best known for her roles in The Players Club, All of Us, Single Ladies and the TV One reality series The Real McCoy, joined Roland Martin on NewsOne Now to discuss the notion of colorism within the Black community through the muse of Skinned’s main character, Jolie. Essence Magazine reports, “Jolie is a young woman who is uncomfortable with her complexion and begins to experiment with bleaching and lightening creams to alter her skin tone.”
When asked why she wanted to tackle the issue of colorism in her directorial debut, McCoy said Studio 11 Films asked her to direct the movie and once she read the script, the message behind it forced her to ask, “Why do they want a light-skinned woman to direct a dark-skinned project?”
McCoy explained the reason was controversy. She said, “Controversy now sells and I wanted to have all eyes on this epidemic, because not only is it happening in Africa and our Caribbean nations, but here in America too.”
During their conversation, McCoy mentioned the lightening of former MLB star Sammy Sosa and late King of Pop Michael Jackson as instances of skin bleaching’s prevalence in our society.
McCoy later added that skin bleaching “causes skin cancer, yet it is an over-the-counter drug.”
Psychologist Dr. Kevin Washington, a board member of The Association of Black Psychologists, also joined Martin to discuss the epidemic. He said people of color have been “indoctrinated into a system of European superiority.” “Anything that is associated with the dominate group becomes desirable,” said Dr. Washington. Adding, “Even in Cote d’Ivoire — just in May — they’ve banned skin bleaching for the purpose of health and racial identity.”
According to Washington, skin lightening “is not just a Black issue.” Dr. Washington said, “The idea of pigmentocracy takes over as a result of a hierarchy that is ascribed to the features associated with Whiteness in this country and globally.”
Watch Roland Martin, LisaRaye McCoy, and Dr. Kevin Washington discuss colorism, pigmentocracy, self-esteem, and Skinned, which premieres Saturday night at 8PM ET on TV One. article via newsone.com
Will Smith and Dr. Bennet Omalu at Creative Impact Awards (MICHAEL BUCKNER/VARIETY/REX SHUTTERSTOCK)
Dr. Bennet Omalu, the real-life subject of “Concussion,” praised Will Smith as he presented the actor with Variety‘s Creative Impact Award on Sunday at a brunch at the Palm Springs Film Festival.
Smith was so convincing in the role that Omalu’s 80-year-old mother was fooled into thinking it was the doctor on screen, Omalu said. “He stole my soul from me. I came away from the film thinking Will Smith was me.” Jada Pinkett-Smith and Will Smith (photo via Variety.com)
Smith visited Omalu’s home in Nigeria and several touches in the film, including a picture of his father, came from the visit. Explore the heart and soul of what drives some of the top creative minds in fashion, beauty, and style on their roads to success.
“There is a holiness to truth,” Omalu said. “In stepping up he enlightened all of us.”
While accepting his award, Smith said, “I am a football dad. So when I got that screenplay, I was concerned.” But, “Omalu just wanted to tell the truth and what we do is deliver the truth,” he went on.
Smith pointed out that he has played other real-life figures like Muhammad Ali. And while it’s great to be able to call the subject and ask questions from the set, Smith spoke of the other side of the coin: his point-of-view while Omalu watched his performance.
“You have to sit behind Dr. Omalu. For 45 minutes, nothing, then he turns around and,” Smith flashed a thumbs up to mimic the doctor’s approval. article by Shalini Dore via Variety.com
Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Mineral Survey, 2015. Marker and pencil on paper. 14 x 17 inches (paper).
In the practical world, there are myriad shades of black. For artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, this quandary doesn’t frustrate: It inspires.
In an August 2013 interview, the Nigerian-American portraitist recalled a moment of revelation: “I’m doing black on black on black, trying to make it as layered as possible in the deepness of the blackness to bring it out. I noticed the pen became this incredible tool. The black ballpoint ink on blackboard would become copper tone and I was like, ‘Wow, this isn’t even black at all!'”
Layering shades and types of black media, she realized, could bend how the colors presented in surprising ways. “The blackboard was like this balancing platform for the ink to become something else,” she said.
“Ballpoint pen ink is the reason I draw the way that I do,” Ojih Odutola told The Huffington Post via email. Though in the past decade of work she’s incorporated other media such as charcoal and marker into her repertoire, she’s continued to explore the themes of skin, blackness and perception in her portraiture.
“Growing up in America as a black individual,” said Ojih Odutola, who was born in Ife, Nigeria, and later moved to the U.S., “you can walk into any room and your skin is the first read. From this reality, I treat the skin of my subjects as an arena to expose contradictions — to expand and constrict.”
Her portraits, whether of white or black subjects, layer white on white and black on black, bringing out the texture and sheen of the skin rather than the shade or color we might typically perceive. “I build and build upon the surface various striations in layers,” said Ojih Odutola. “Some may describe them as anatomical, sinewy or aesthetically reminiscent of hair. This style is none of those things: it’s about texture, tactility and mezzanines.”
What does that say about identity, but more interestingly, what does that say about what we are accustomed to seeing when we see an image of a face or bodies? Toyin Ojih Odutola
By distorting the representation of a quality that silently governs so much of America’s social prejudices and injustices — skin color — her work pushes us to look at everything else about the subject.
“I became infatuated with this idea of filtering and transforming. Taking something concrete and very direct … and messing it up,” she explained. “It wasn’t about masking the source, but about stretching how an image can be transformed, what it can become, how it can be misleading and also revealing.”
Ojih Odutola found she wanted to question, more and more, how her work deconstructed our default views of identity, she said. She’d ask herself as she worked, “What does that say about identity, but more interestingly, what does that say about what we are accustomed to seeing when we see an image of a face or bodies?” Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Unlike classical portraits, Ojih Odutola’s may not even be recognizable to the subjects. “I never looked at portraits as indicative of the sitters in any way,” she explained. “I looked at portraits as a means for the artist to create his or her own space to invent.” As a Nigerian-American immigrant, finding a space of her own has been particularly vital. “It helps me deal with that lost, powerless feeling of wandering around as a Nigerian-American kid not feeling like the ground I was stepping on could truly be mine … I wanted to create my own terrain.”
In the landscapes she’s created of her subjects’ very skin, Ojih Odutola has succeeded at creating her own terrain; but more than that, she’s found a way to help us all, slowly and deliberately, re-envision how we can see each other’s faces and bodies, without easy categorizations. Toyin Ojih Odutola’s “Of Context and Without” will be on display from Dec. 11, 2015 through Jan. 30, 2016 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. Check out more from the show below, and find more from the artist at her website. article by Claire Fallon via huffingtonpost.com
Pinterest engineer and /dev/color founder Makinde Adeagbo (Photo: Awara Adeagbo)
SAN FRANCISCO — Makinde Adeagbo knows how isolating it can be to live and work in Silicon Valley as an African American. He says it’s even more isolating to be a software engineer here.
Adeagbo, who is an engineer at the San Francisco company Pinterest, says he can go weeks without spotting another black engineer in America’s tech hub. “It’s not only that you are the only black person in the room or in the company, often times you are the only black person you see in Palo Alto or Menlo Park,” says Adeagbo, 30.
About 1% of engineers at Facebook and Google are African American. The population of Palo Alto, Calif. is 2% African American, Menlo Park, Calif., is under 5%.
Over the summer Adeagbo founded /dev/color, a nonprofit group for African-American engineers that officially launched on Wednesday. The group brings together engineers from top companies such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb to provide support and a voice to African Americans and give them the opportunity to raise up the next generation, Adeagbo says.
Adeagbo says he hit on the idea while volunteering as a mentor to a couple of computer science students.
“These students knew they had someone who had their backs, whom they could look up to and reach out to when they needed help. I thought to myself: Every black software engineer could accomplish a lot if they had someone like this,” says Adeagbo. .
The name /dev/color is a reference to a common directory on computer systems “as well as our efforts to strengthen the community of Black software engineers, engineers of color,” he says.
Adeagbo’s /dev/color is joining Black Girls Code, Code 2040 and the Hidden Genius Project, a new and growing wave of enterprising organizations founded by African Americans aimed at addressing the scarcity of African Americans in the tech industry.
“Other black software engineers need to provide this for the black engineers coming behind them,” says Adeagbo, who is splitting his time between /dev/color and Pinterest. “We all need to work together to pull ourselves up and make sure we are accomplishing all that we can.”
The challenge is daunting: A fraction of the tech work force in Silicon Valley is African American and little progress has been made to address the problem. Only 1% of venture-capital-backed start-ups are led by African-Americans and less than 1% of general partners at major venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, the ones that back tomorrow’s Facebooks and Googles, are African American.
Will Smith in the film “Concussion” to be released December 25 (photo via tribecafilm.com)
The trailer for Will Smith’s new film about the discovery of the NFL’s concussion controversy has arrived merely a few weeks before the league’s fall season is set to begin. Peter King of Sports Illustrated-affiliated site Monday Morning Quarterbackreleased the first look atConcussion Monday morning. Directed by Peter Landesman, the film will focus on Nigerian neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu(played by Smith), who discovered Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Dr. Omalu found the disease, also known as CTE, after working on the autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster. CTE is the progressive degenerative brain disease that athletes can acquire thanks to repetitive head trauma on the field.
The book and documentary, League of Denial, already told Omalu’s story and the battle he faced in bringing CTE to the NFL’s attention. But Landesman says the film will dive into more of the story, and explore the doctor’s determination in pushing the condition to the forefront of the sports world. He also noted that the project isn’t anti-NFL. MMQB reports:
“It’s the dynamic of, ‘Respect the person or respect the truth,’” he said. “Bennett has a savant-like relationship to the dead. His obsession is to tell the story of death. As he says in the movie, I think more about the way people die and reasons they die than the way they live. He was completely focused on the science. He didn’t know football, he didn’t know who Mike Webster was; to him, Webster was just another body on a slab. He didn’t have a reverence for the game because he wasn’t brought up in this country. So in some ways, his purity and his innocence was a requirement for him to drill down into this and tell us a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth.”
Concussion will be released in theaters on Christmas Day. Check out the trailer below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6hPdC41RM&w=560&h=315] article by Desire Thompson via newsone.com
Google is attempting to make cell phones affordable for people living in six African countries. Google announced the “Hot 2″ phone, which will cost only $88, would be sold in stores in Nigeria and offered by online retailer Jumia in five other countries: Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Morocco.
Although the phones being released in Africa will be ‘bare minimum’ when it comes to technology in them, the company hopes that it will be a start pointing for getting more people online.
Google, Facebook and other Internet companies are trying to get more people online in places like Africa so they can expand their audiences and eventually sell more digital advertising.
As part of that effort, Google already has built a fiber-optic network to provide faster Internet access in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. article via clutchmagonline.com
(photo: ibtimes.com)
The ongoing clash between Nigeria‘s armed forces and the Islamist militants Boko Haram has been largely a one-sided affair with the terrorist group seemingly taking the upper hand. Earlier Thursday, the Nigerian Army announced a victory of sorts after reportedly freeing 59 women and children that were held by the heavily armed insurgents.
Nigerian publication The Sun reported from the city of Maiduguri, the largest in Borno State. The state has been a staging ground for some of Boko Haram’s most vicious attacks and the group has repelled much of the Nigerian military’s offensive maneuvers. Their most recent raid, however, yielded favorable results if reports hold true.
From The Sun:
The military has rescued another 59 hostages from Boko Haram hide-outs in Borno State during raids in what appeared like a renewed vigour to end insurgency in the northeast.
Authorities said troops raided two camps at Kashinbiri and Wallmeri, two remote communities in Konduga Local Government in the central part of the state. The area is also few kilometres to SambiSa, a major Boko Haram camp.
A Deputy Director, Army Public Relations and spokesman, 7 Division, Nigerian Army, Colonel Tukur Gusau, said the hostages include 25 children, 29 women and five elderly men.
“Troops of 151 Task Force Battalion conducted operations on Kashinbiri and Wallmeri Boko Haram terrorists camps on Wednesday. During the raids, quite a number of the terrorists were killed, a Landrover and a tipper were recovered. The troops also rescued 59 civilians that were held captive by the terrorist, they are 25 children, 29 women and five elderly men. The camps have been cleared by the troops,” he said at a news briefing in Maiduguri yesterday.
The rescue of the 59 individuals brings the army’s tally this week to 71. It was reported by the Associated Press that 12 women and girls were freed after forces stormed the city of Kilakisa, which sits 55 miles southwest of Maiduguri.
The Nigerian military said it freed hundreds back in March and seized many of the cities held by Boko Haram in the northeastern part of the country. The rebels have increased their number of attacks back at the military, yet with little in the way of considerable gain according to recent reports. article by D.L. Chandler via newsone.com
President Barack Obama and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (photo via pbs.org) President Barack Obama gave his support to Nigerian leader Muhammadu Buhari on Monday for his fight against the Islamic extremist groupBoko Haram.
According to the BBC, the two came face-to-face at the Oval Office for the first time since Buhari’s electoral win in March. Obama told reporters Buhari’s clear agenda will more than likely bring peace, security, and safety to the people of north-east Nigeria. Since 2009, the area has been plagued with violence carried out by the militant group, including last year’s kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls.
“[Buhari has] a very clear agenda in defeating Boko Haram and extremists of all sorts inside of his country,” Obama said. “And he has a very clear agenda in terms of rooting out the corruption that too often has held back the economic growth and prosperity of his country.”
First Lady Michelle Obama helped spread awareness about the tragedy with the social media initiative, #BringBackOurGirls. The U.S. also sent surveillance flights over Nigeria to help locate the girls, but conflict with former President Goodluck Jonathan caused the United States to take a step back in its efforts.
Jonathan, furious over the country’s refusal to sell government helicopter gunships to him, stalled a U.S. military training program. He was also accused of corruption and several human rights violations by the Nigerian military.
At this point, Obama hasn’t promised the new leader military assistance.
Buhari thanked Obama for his kind words and said he believes the new relationship can help reduce dissatisfaction in the country.
“Our allies can provide much-needed military training and intelligence as our soldiers take the war effort to Boko Haram,” he said.
Buhari, a former military dictator, has changed its tone. Since winning the election, he fired the entire top echelon of the military. The 72-year-old has also come with slight criticism, however, for a delay in putting together his cabinet. article by Desire Thompson via newsone.com
