I’ll be portraying Fields
A
modern man brings his slave ancestor to life, revealing America's complex story
Janell Ross, August 30, 2019, NBC News
FORT MONROE, Va. — Joseph Rogers started with his tie, unwinding the broad Balthus knot he’d wound that morning.
Then, he slipped out of his shined leather shoes, his slim-fit gray vest
and the matching trousers he’d worn for the trip to Fort Monroe, on the
Virginia coast, for a commemoration marking 400 years since the arrival
of the first Africans enslaved in what would
become America.
As Rogers stepped into a pair of mahogany cotton trousers, borrowed from
the American Civil War Museum’s replica clothing collection, this
21st-century black man — with a cloud-based calendar full of obligations
and a habit of walking double-time, chest out,
shoulders back — began to recede. Rogers was approaching character now,
ready to embody a 19th-century slave.
“I am James Apostle Fields,” Rogers said slowly, almost haltingly, to a
woman who inquired about his outfit just outside the men’s room where
he’d changed. Then Rogers shifted back to his own voice. “I’ll be
portraying Fields,” he told the woman, “my ancestor,
an enslaved man who during Reconstruction was elected to the Virginia
Legislature.”
continue
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
~Kahlil Gibran (1883 –1931), Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer.
sexism is the primal, or first, form of oppression in humanity
Sexism is a form of oppression and domination. As author Octavia Butler put it, "Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world."
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Over one in ten households in the U.S. spends more than half their
income on housing costs – a financial burden that is associated with
increased food insecurity, child poverty and a greater proportion of
people in fair or poor health – according to new research conducted by
the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
The annual collaboration,
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps,
analyzes the factors that influence health, such as structural factors,
access to and quality of health care, and personal health behaviors, as
well as health outcomes for almost every county in the nation. This
year’s analysis, which examines both location and race, has a particular
emphasis on housing.
The research reveals that in the most segregated
counties nearly one in four black households spends more than half their
income on housing, compared with one in 10 white households.
Here are some of the key findings:
On average, rates of “seve…
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