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Tag: Black people

  • As Big Retailers Pull Back on D.E.I, What Happens to Emerging Black Sellers?

    As Big Retailers Pull Back on D.E.I, What Happens to Emerging Black Sellers?


    Pernell Cezar’s coffee company, BLK & Bold, was operating out of the back of a brewery with three employees when he got his big break: an audience with a buyer at a Target Black History Month expo. By January 2020, bags of his Rise & GRND roast were on Target shelves.

    That was five months before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis incited nationwide protests for racial justice that reverberated throughout corporate America. Suddenly, big retailers were creating programs to help small businesses — and especially Black-owned businesses — get their foot in the door.

    In 2021, Amazon started its Black Business Accelerator. Sephora, which had an existing program, refocused it on Black, Indigenous and other founders of color. Target, which is based in Minneapolis, started Forward Founders, and Mr. Cezar helped the retailer develop a curriculum to educate emerging brands about how to get into major retailers.

    So Mr. Cezar was disappointed when, on Jan. 24, Target announced that it was concluding its three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals. Its Supplier Diversity team would be renamed Supplier Engagement. A new banner on the web page for Forward Founders says the program “is evolving.”

    Mr. Cezar, who sells his coffee at 1,500 Target locations, said the retailer did not alert suppliers like him before the announcement and had not communicated what the changes might or might not mean for his company. (Reached for comment, Target said there would be no immediate impact on current supplier relationships.)

    “It definitely leaves us in a ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” Mr. Cezar said. “Trust isn’t built overnight.”

    With its announcement, Target joined a rapidly growing list of companies that are rolling back their D.E.I. efforts, including Amazon, Walmart and Meta. This corporate retreat started after the Supreme Court barred race-conscious preferences in college admissions in 2023, accelerated with conservative social media and legal attacks and went into overdrive with the election of President Trump. Within a week of taking the oath of office, Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to investigate private-sector entities for what he called illegal D.E.I. programs, intensifying the legal threat for companies and signaling a shift in civil rights law enforcement.

    The language of those corporate rollbacks can be vague, often replacing the term “D.E.I.” with “belonging” or other language, and it’s unclear exactly what the changes will mean in practice. But they have caught Black entrepreneurs, like Mr. Cezar, off guard and put them in an awkward spot: Should they raise their voices or not?

    The announcement from Target, just a week before the start of Black History Month, hit Black entrepreneurs particularly hard. The company had created an infrastructure that helped Black-owned start-ups even before the 2020 protests, Mr. Cezar said, and then set a goal of featuring about 500 Black-owned brands in its stores by the end of this year.

    In Minnesota, organizations including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, the Racial Justice Network and the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for a national boycott against the retailer. “We are urging everyone to buy directly from Black companies through their websites, rather than stepping foot in Target stores,” Monique Cullars-Doty, a founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said in a statement.

    But Black entrepreneurs weren’t united about the wisdom of a boycott.

    Tabitha Brown, whose namesake brand sells a variety of home goods including mugs and organic popcorn within Target, made a video on social media explaining that a boycott could hurt Black-owned brands. “If we all decide to boycott and be like, ‘No, we’re not spending no money at these organizations,’ listen, I get it,” she said. “But so many of us will be affected, and our sales will drop and our businesses will be hurt.” She raised the idea that customers could shop at Target but buy only brands that align with their values. (Ms. Brown and her representative did not respond to emails seeking comment.)

    Danielle Coke Balfour, the founder of Oh Happy Dani, which makes greeting cards, is taking a different approach. In a post on Instagram last week, she said she had begun the process of removing her products from Target shelves.

    “This decision wasn’t made lightly, especially since so many of you first discovered Oh Happy Dani in Target aisles,” the company posted on its Instagram page. “However, our brand has always been built on the very principles that have recently been rolled back by this company.” Ms. Balfour was heartened and surprised to find that sales on her online store spiked after her decision to leave Target.

    Kristen Jones Miller, a founder of Mented, a beauty brand, participated in one of Target’s accelerator programs for emerging brands and sold her products in its stores for a while. She emphasized that Black-owned brands were not given special treatment; they had to meet expectations for business performance just like any other supplier.

    Ms. Miller called Target’s decision “shortsighted.” She and other entrepreneurs benefited from the relationship with Target, she said, but added that “Target benefited from all of the brands like ours who were able to send their very excited customers to shop us in-store for the first time.”

    Over the last several years, conservatives have grown louder in pressing their case against corporate D.E.I. An online activist, Robby Starbuck, has threatened boycotts against companies like Lowe’s and Tractor Supply for their “woke” policies. America First Legal, founded by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, has sued corporations over diversity policies that it says violate race and sex discrimination laws. The National Center for Public Policy Research has offered shareholder proposals demanding that corporations evaluate the legal risks of engaging in D.E.I. Costco’s shareholders voted down one in January.

    The center took a similar proposal to Target shareholders. It argued that Target’s partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit that tracks corporate L.G.B.T.Q. policies, had led the retailer to “disastrously” engage in activism by stocking apparel for Pride Month in 2023 — an event that led to a consumer revolt and a drop in sales. The shareholders rejected the proposal in June.

    Seven months later, Target said that it would no longer share data with the Human Rights Campaign and that it would further evaluate its corporate partnerships.

    Stefan Padfield, the executive director of the Free Enterprise Project, a division of the National Center for Public Policy Research, called Target’s announcement and what it promised to do “pretty significant.” He said his group viewed D.E.I. goals as “nothing short of straight-up illegal discrimination on the basis of race and sex.”

    He called supplier diversity goals “extremely problematic.” Those goals, he added, “are going to go away very quickly because, I think, it’s just putting a target on companies to get sued.”

    In fact, on Friday, a police pension fund in Riviera Beach, Fla., that owns shares in Target sued the company, claiming that it had concealed the risks of its diversity initiatives and that shareholders like the fund had suffered losses as a result. Target did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Jonathan Butcher, a policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation who last year wrote a paper called “Restoring Equality in Employment: Sinking the D.E.I. Ship,” said Target was taking a “good step” by rolling back its D.E.I. program. What remains to be seen, he said, is whether the changes are carried out “or if they’re going to try to find a way to go around and still act with some sort of D.E.I. intent.”

    There is still space for programs that provide access to small businesses, Mr. Butcher said.

    “I think that it is entirely appropriate for a corporation to create programs that would help small businesses of all shapes and sizes,” he said.

    When Target started its Forward Founders program in 2021, it said the purpose was to “equip historically under-resourced founders to become the next wave of generational wealth building companies.” Participants were given access to Target’s buyers and marketing team and an opportunity to pitch their business for placement in stores.

    “It is very much the wild, wild West of the haves and the have-nots if you don’t have institutional knowledge,” Mr. Cezar said.

    A majority of Black-owned businesses are small, and Black entrepreneurs often have less money to capitalize their businesses. They also invest money at a slower rate over the years than white-owned businesses, a study published in 2017 by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found.

    Patrice Chappelle, who started a skin care brand in 2023, is wondering how the corporate retreat from D.E.I. will affect her and what she does next.

    Ms. Chappelle, who is Black, founded her company, MelanBrand Skin, because she was dissatisfied with the products available in Walmart and Target for her young son’s dry skin. She set up a website, brainstormed a business name and started packing orders from her living room.

    To figure out how to expand her nascent operation, Ms. Chappelle applied for programs that would teach her the ins and outs of retailing. She has taken part in a few and is currently enrolled in one run by TJX, the company that owns T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. Its focus is on female founders, she said.

    She had been hoping to eventually get on shelves in Target and Walmart.

    “Being an emerging brand and just stepping into this space, I would say that it is concerning,” Ms. Chappelle said. “I’m watching my fellow founders, some of which I do know personally, that have brands in Target and other stores like Walmart.” She added, “They’re in a tight space.”





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  • Only 3 Black Women Have Won the Grammys’ Top Award. Is Beyoncé Next?

    Only 3 Black Women Have Won the Grammys’ Top Award. Is Beyoncé Next?


    Since the year 2000, more and more Black women have been nominees for album of the year: India.Arie, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Janelle Monáe, Cardi B, H.E.R., Lizzo, Doja Cat, SZA and Mary J. Blige. But it’s Beyoncé’s appearances in this category — beginning with “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (2010) — that have garnered the most headlines. The tension between the evolving, colossal ambition and innovation of her nominated releases, their critical acclaim and their global popularity, set against the Grammy voters’ repeated unwillingness to reward these efforts, has amounted to the greatest ongoing Grammy drama: “Will she or won’t she win this year?”

    Beyoncé’s self-titled album was a cultural sensation, replete with unexpected forays into alternative R&B. Its out-of-nowhere arrival inaugurated the era of the “surprise” album drop. It was released with videos for each song, introducing the modern visual album. And it included the sampled speech of a feminist intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, expounding on gender equality. At the 2013 Grammys, it lost to “Morning Phase,” a moody album from the alt-rock shape-shifter Beck.

    The defeat did nothing to lessen her experimental boundary pushing. The 2016 magnum opus “Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s second visual album, turned a personal tale of domestic strife and wounded intimacies into a reckoning with slavery’s legacies, the fracturing of families and communities, the lingering effects of Black grief and mourning and the specifically acute ordeals facing Black women in American culture. It encompassed spoken-word poetry, archival voices, provocative samples and a visual vocabulary that yoked together allusions to iconic Black feminist art — the cinema of Dash, the photography of Weems — as well as scenes shot on former plantation sites and visions of post-Katrina New Orleans.

    “Lemonade” took the idea of the concept album and stretched it to its multi-formalistic limits, absorbing the tradition of Black women’s epics and becoming a sonic “vehicle,” as Griffin said in an interview, for “Black women’s epics” from multiple genres, “not just music but literary and visual ones as well.” The album was such a phenomenon that it spawned scholarly articles as well as a critical anthology, and it remains a staple on Black cultural studies syllabuses. Grammy voters were less bowled over, awarding album of the year to a visibly shocked Adele.



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  • Barry Michael Cooper, ‘New Jack City’ Screenwriter, Dies at 66

    Barry Michael Cooper, ‘New Jack City’ Screenwriter, Dies at 66


    Barry Michael Cooper, who was one of the first journalists to explore the crack epidemic of the 1980s before turning to Hollywood, where he made his mark with screenplays for gritty films like “New Jack City,” died on Jan. 21 in Baltimore. He was 66.

    His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Matthew Cooper, who did not cite a cause.

    As a screenwriter, Mr. Cooper, who was raised in Harlem, was perhaps best known for the three films often called his Harlem Trilogy. The first, “New Jack City” (1991), about a ruthless uptown drug lord (Wesley Snipes), presaged a wave of films from Black directors and screenwriters that touched on gang life in the 1990s.

    The trilogy also included two films from 1994: “Sugar Hill,” another drug-hustling drama starring Mr. Snipes, and “Above the Rim,” a basketball drama starring Tupac Shakur as a dealer, which Mr. Cooper wrote with Benny Medina and the film’s director, Jeff Pollack.

    Whatever the medium, Mr. Cooper blended a rich literary sensibility with a deep knowledge of the language and status symbols of the ghetto. “He was very aware of everything from Hemingway to Dostoyevsky,” the author, critic and filmmaker Nelson George, who worked with Mr. Cooper at The Village Voice, said in an interview. “At the same time, he was very, very connected to the slang of the streets.”

    Mr. Cooper captured the glitter as well as the bloodshed of a new generation of 1980s and ’90s hustlers who flashed thick gold ropes and hockey-puck-sized rolls of cash while upending communities in pursuit of overnight fortune.

    “I wanted to detail their voices — the way the hustlers talked,” Mr. Cooper said in a 2007 interview with Stop Smiling, an arts and culture magazine. “I wanted to put it in a literary context like ‘The Great Gatsby.’”

    His goal, he added, was to “take Harlem and the Renaissance and put it in a modern context.”

    In 1986, he published an early in-depth examination of the crack boom for Spin, the music and culture magazine. “Sinewy arms folded across their chests laden with gold medallions,” he wrote in the article, “a silent roar creasing their lips in the guise of a sneer, the young lions usher their prey in and out of video parlors and misty hallways.”

    A year later, he won the award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists for his Spin article “In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders,” about the eruption of gun violence among teenagers.

    His 1987 Village Voice cover article “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young” chronicled the exploding drug trade in Detroit, including the young street-level dealers who “were making like $2,000 a day,” Mr. Cooper said in a 1991 interview with Terry Gross of the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

    “These were new examples of the privileged underclass, so to speak,” he said. “The ones who carried beepers and cellular phones, and drove Jeeps and went out to the malls in Michigan and spent $10,000 at a drop at Gucci’s and Fendi’s. I had never seen that before.”

    The article was a showcase for a street term — “new jack” — that Mr. Cooper made his own, albeit with a twist. “My brother used the term a lot,” he told Stop Smiling. “He used to say, ‘Yeah, that kid is a new jack,’” meaning “someone who’s new to the game and frontin.’ It’s almost a derogatory term — almost like a rookie.”

    He added: “Then I heard a song by Grandmaster Caz, and he used a line about this guy who was ‘a new jack clown.’ I took the phrase and wanted to flip it. It rang strong, new jack.”

    Mr. Cooper again invoked the term in 1988 with “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing,” an article in The Voice in which he gave a name to the blend of hip-hop, dance-pop and R&B pioneered by Mr. Riley, a prominent record producer and songwriter, as epitomized by artists like Keith Sweat and Bobby Brown.

    By that point, “Kids Killing Kids” had already opened the door to Hollywood. Two weeks after the article was published, Mr. Cooper said in a 2007 interview with The Voice, “I was on a first-class flight to Hollywood to meet with Quincy Jones. My head was huge.”

    Mr. Cooper was hired to retool a script by the screenwriter Thomas Lee Wright based on the story of Nicky Barnes, the heroin lord of Harlem in the 1960s and ’70s. He updated it for the crack era, focusing on a fictional kingpin, Nino Brown, in what became “New Jack City.”

    Directed by Mario Van Peebles, the film featured breakout performances by Chris Rock and the rapper-turned-actor Ice-T. It eventually earned nearly $50 million and was released at “a pivotal time,” Sha Be Allah wrote in an appraisal for The Source magazine last year.

    In 1991, he wrote, “the blaxploitation film genre had been defunct for over a decade, leaving a gaping hole in ‘Black Hollywood.’ ‘New Jack City’ was a harbinger of the resurgence of Black actors, writers and filmmakers in Hollywood, as well as the crystallization of Hip Hop’s synergistic capabilities.”

    Barry Michael Cooper was born on June 12, 1958, in Harlem, the elder of two sons of Lafayette and Josephine Cooper. He spent his formative years in Esplanade Gardens, a cooperative high-rise complex. “You had all levels of society in there,” he later said, “from millionaires to people on welfare.”

    He recalled spending Saturdays at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, reading Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. After high school, he spent a year at North Carolina Central University, in Durham, N.C., before transferring to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Along the way, he fell in love with the narrative nonfiction of Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and others associated with the New Journalism movement.

    In 1980, Mr. Cooper embarked on a journalism career of his own with a piece for The Voice, “The Gospel According to Parliament,” about the funk titan George Clinton’s celebrated ensemble. His career as a reporter thrived in the 1980s, but he largely abandoned print for Hollywood after “New Jack City” became a hit.

    Success, he admitted, went to his head. “I got so high on myself that I turned down jobs,” he told The Voice in 2007.

    He eventually found himself in a tangled relationship with a woman that resulted in his arrest on charges of assault in 1997, according to The Voice. The terms of his plea deal required him to leave Los Angeles for a year; when he returned, he found that opportunities had evaporated.

    Mr. Cooper tried to jump-start his career in 2005 with a semiautobiographical web series, “Blood on the Wall$,” about a television producer who attempts to pull out of a tailspin by working as an investigative reporter. He was a producer of the 2017-19 Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It,” based on Spike Lee’s 1986 breakout film, and wrote three episodes.

    Mr. Cooper’s son is his only immediate survivor. Another son, Timothy Michael Cooper, died in 2020; his wife, Charmaine (Lynn) Cooper, died in 2022. He lived in Baltimore.

    Although his run in the film business was brief, Mr. Cooper was proud of his legacy.

    “If there was no ‘New Jack,’ there would be no ‘Boyz ‘n the Hood,’” he told Stop Smiling. “There would be no ‘Menace II Society,’ because it let the public know, and more importantly let the suits in the studios know, that these movies make money.”



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  • Online Therapy Boom Has Mainly Benefited Privileged Groups, Studies Find

    Online Therapy Boom Has Mainly Benefited Privileged Groups, Studies Find


    The number of Americans receiving psychotherapy increased by 30 percent during the pandemic, as virtual sessions replaced in-person appointments — but new research dampens the hope that technology will make mental health care more available to the neediest populations.

    In fact, the researchers found, the shift to teletherapy has exacerbated existing disparities.

    The increase in psychotherapy has occurred among groups that already enjoyed more access: people in higher-income brackets, living in cities, with steady employment and more education, researchers found in a series of studies, the most recent of which was, published Wednesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

    Among those who have not benefited from the boom, the team found, are children from low-income families, Black children and adolescents, and adults with “serious psychological distress.”

    “I think that the whole system of care — and maybe the internet delivery is a piece of this — appears to be pivoting away from those in greatest need,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the lead author of the studies on access to care.

    “We’re seeing that those with the greatest distress are losing ground, in terms of their likelihood of being treated, and that to me is a very important and disconcerting trend,” he added.

    It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the 1990s, teletherapy was championed as a way to reach disadvantaged patients living in remote locations where there were few psychiatrists. A decade later, it was presented as a more accessible alternative to face-to-face sessions, one that could radically lower barriers to care.

    “Telehealth did not live up to the hype,” said C. Vaile Wright, senior director of the office of health care innovation at the American Psychological Association. The reasons, she added, are no surprise: Many Americans lack access to reliable broadband, and insurers do not adequately reimburse providers, who, in turn, choose to treat privately paying clients.

    “If you can’t afford it, no matter the modality, you just can’t afford it,” Dr. Wright said. It may be, she added, that weekly therapy sessions are simply not scalable to a broad population, and the field should explore light-touch alternatives, like single-session interventions and digital therapeutics.

    As telehealth platforms grow, they may be attracting clinicians from community settings with the promise of flexible hours and better conditions, said Dr. Jane M. Zhu, an associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University who studies the accessibility of mental health services.

    Selecting from a large patient pool, they may opt to treat patients with milder conditions and more ability to pay. “It’s certainly something we should know,” Dr. Zhu said. “There should be light around this. Who are these companies serving? And what does this mean for patients who are most in need?”

    The percentage of Americans receiving psychotherapy remained relatively steady, at 3 to 4 percent, for decades before beginning a gradual rise, said Dr. Olfson.

    Then two factors — the pandemic and the explosion of teletherapy — contributed to a sharp increase, with the number of adults receiving psychotherapy rising to 8.5 percent in 2021 from 6.5 percent in 2018. (By comparison, the annual percentage of adults taking psychotropic medication remained stable, at around 17.5 percent.)

    Dr. Olfson said he was surprised by the magnitude of the increase. “We haven’t had something like Covid before, and we haven’t had this technology before,” Dr. Olfson said. “There was a lot of social isolation, a lot of loneliness. And those are things that psychotherapy is designed to address, in a way that medication can’t.”

    The findings are based on the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which is conducted by the federal government and measures how American civilians use and pay for health care. The survey does not include those in the military, incarcerated or in nursing homes, hospitals or homeless shelters.

    Previous studies, based on insurance data, showed that Americans’ mental health spending increased by 54 percent from 2020 to 2022, amid a tenfold increase in the use of teletherapy.

    The new studies flesh out which Americans are receiving the care. An analysis of 89,619 adults published in JAMA Psychiatry last month found psychotherapy use grew most among the youngest respondents, among the most educated and among those in the highest two income brackets.

    An analysis of the use of telehealth by children and adolescents from 2,445 households reached similar conclusions. The study, published today, found that children from wealthier families, using private insurance, were far more likely to use teletherapy. Children in urban areas were nearly three times as likely to use it as their rural counterparts.

    During the years of the pandemic, the use of mental health services by Black children and adolescents decreased, falling to 4 percent in 2021 from 9.2 percent in 2019. In the same period, the use of mental health care among white children rose, to 18.4 percent from 15.1 percent, the team found in another study.

    “What we find is that it does appear to be just exacerbating existing disparities,” Dr. Olfson said. “I think there’s a real need to try to address that.”



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  • Why ‘Show Boat’ Is America’s Most Enduring, Unstable Musical

    Why ‘Show Boat’ Is America’s Most Enduring, Unstable Musical


    The musical brought out some of the finest work from both: wit, bite and heartbreak in the libretto, and infectious melodies, cinematic underscoring and operatic sophistication in the score. Each decade of the story is indicated through musical signposts like spirituals and parlor songs in the 19th century, and an interpolation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1920s.

    Because music is so central to the plot, Kern and Hammerstein also wrote crucial diegetic songs. In the first act Julie, the show boat’s prima donna, sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which Queenie, the Black cook, interrupts by saying, “How come y’all know that song?” She has only heard “colored people” sing it before, she says, a revelation that presages Julie being unmasked as mixed race.

    In Act II, years later, Magnolia, who is white and like a little sister to Julie, auditions with “Can’t Help” at a theater in Chicago. It turns out Julie is the star there, and she abruptly quits to make room for Magnolia. Magnolia then becomes a star, as if to embody the idea of Black culture being taken up (or taken over) by white entertainers, which is what happened with popular music in the early 20th century and continues to this day.

    Kern signified the seriousness of this subject matter with a grand, dramatic A-minor chord in the Overture. Even more of a jolt, in the original Broadway run, was Hammerstein’s lyric for the opening chorus, in which audiences heard Black singers identify themselves with the most severe racial epithet. (In revivals, that word was changed to “darkies,” “colored folk” and, benignly, “we all.”)

    Although there are offensive tropes in “Show Boat,” Hammerstein’s attitude was more nuanced, and progressive. The musical also contains advocacy on behalf of Queenie, for example, who is given a scene in which she is made to suffer, with seasoned cool, the indignity of a white man questioning where she got a brooch that Julie gave to her. And the musical’s biggest hit, “Ol’ Man River,” is reserved for Joe, the other principal Black character.



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  • Racist gunman kills three black people in US – SUCH TV

    Racist gunman kills three black people in US – SUCH TV



    A masked white man has shot dead three Black people in a shop in Florida, in the southern United States, in a racially-motivated attack.

    According to international media reports, the sheriff’s office in Jacksonville, the man, who was in his 20s but has not yet been named, was wearing body armour when he entered the Dollar General outlet armed with an assault-style rifle and a handgun.

    He shot dead three Black customers – two men and one woman. After a standoff with police, he shot himself.

    “This shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T K Waters told a press conference on Saturday.

    Waters said authorities believed the attacker acted alone and that before the attack, he had authored “several manifestos” for media, his parents and law enforcement detailing his “disgusting ideology of hate”.

    He said the attacker was spotted at a local historically Black college, Edward Waters University, where he put on his vest and a mask before going to the local branch of Dollar General, a discount chain with stores across the US.

    The victims of the attack have not been named.

     



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