ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Stacey Abrams will join the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C., the next step in her reemergence after the Democrat lost her second bid to be governor of Georgia last year to Republican Brian Kemp.
Howard, one of the nation’s top historically Black colleges, said it was appointing Abrams as the Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics beginning in September.
“Stacey Abrams has proven herself an essential voice and eager participant in protecting American democracy -– not just for certain populations, but for everyone with the fundamental right to make their voices heard,” Howard President Wayne A. I. Frederick said in a statement.
The 49-year-old political activist and lawyer won’t be a traditional full-time faculty member, the university says, but she will lecture, invite guest speakers, and host symposiums. Howard says she will work across multiple academic departments to focus on “real-world solutions” to problems facing Black people and other vulnerable groups. Abrams will still live in Atlanta.
“We are at an inflection point for American and international democracy, and I look forward to engaging Howard University’s extraordinary students in a conversation about where they can influence, shape and direct the critical public policy decisions we face,” Abrams said in a statement.
Abrams’ next steps have been closely watched since her loss. She was an international election observer in Nigeria in February, has been promoting her children’s book, “Stacey’s Remarkable Books,” and announced a tour for an adult book, “Rogue Justice” beginning in May. Last month. Abrams was named senior counsel at Rewiring America, a group promoting clean energy and electrification.
In January, Abrams left open a return to politics in an interview with Drew Barrymore, saying “I will likely run again,” and adding, “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. If it doesn’t work, you try again.”
Abrams made history in 2018 as the first Black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor of an American state. Her place in politics now is unclear, though. Georgia isn’t scheduled to have any major statewide races on the ballot until 2026. Abrams was unchallenged as leader of the state Democratic Party going into the 2022 election, with voters backing her endorsed choices for down-ballot running mates. But while she has lost twice, Georgia now has two Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
Abrams, a Mississippi native, graduated from Atlanta’s Spelman College, another top historically Black institution, and has taught there as an adjunct professor. A former Atlanta deputy city attorney, she was also the minority leader of the Georgia House, an entrepreneur who tried her hand at multiple startups and a voting rights activist. A longtime writer who has now published 15 books, Abrams earned $5 million from books and speeches in the years between her pathbreaking 2018 gubernatorial loss and her second run in 2022.
Abrams is filling a chair named for a legendary figure. Waters was a professor of political science at Howard from 1971 to 1996 and later directed the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. As a youth, he organized a lunch counter sit-in to protest segregation in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. He later advised the Congressional Black Caucus and was campaign manager for Jesse Jackson’s pioneering presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.
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NEW YORK (AP) — When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” proved a sell-out hit at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, general manager Peter Gelb wasted no time lining up the composer’s other opera for the current season.
And that set the clock ticking for Blanchard and his collaborators to adapt a relatively small-scale work to the vast resources of the nation’s premiere opera house.
“We knew we had only a year and a half, so we immediately went to work,” recalled Michael Cristofer, who wrote the libretto. “We had an opportunity to enhance and expand not just story points but also certain scenes. And you want to use all of what the Met is capable of. We were a bit like kids in a candy shop.”
“Champion,” which Blanchard calls “an opera in jazz,” premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2013. It’s based on the troubled life of prizefighter Emile Griffith, who knocked out Benny Paret in a welterweight title bout in 1962. Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later.
Griffith was haunted by guilt, his feelings complicated by the fact that Paret had humiliated him by calling him a “maricón,” (a derogatory Spanish term for homosexual) during their weigh-in. Later in Griffith’s life, he was savagely beaten after leaving a gay bar.
Blanchard, who in addition to writing operas is known as a jazz trumpeter and composer of film scores, said he was inspired by Griffith’s own words, rephrased for poetic effect in Cristofer’s libretto: “I killed a man and the world forgives me; I love a man and the world wants to kill me.’”
“To me, ‘Champion’ is about redemption and Emile forgiving himself for what happened in the ring,” Blanchard said.
The original production was directed by James Robinson, the artistic director in St. Louis, who said it was “kind of a chamber piece.” There were just 18 people in the cast plus a four-piece jazz combo that plays along with a traditional orchestra.
For the Met, Robinson devised what he calls a “supersized version” that now brings close to 80 people on stage. Besides the soloists, there are 12 dancers, 10 actors and a chorus of 46. The new production also adds choreography by Camille A. Brown, who created a sensation with her work on “Fire.”
And Blanchard made significant changes to his score, adding new material and rewriting some sections to accommodate the different voice types of his lead singers.
“I’d say maybe 15 to 20 percent has been revised, but the more I think about it, it’s probably a lot more than that,” Blanchard said. There are new chorus parts and two new arias, one for Paret and one for Griffith’s trainer, Howie Albert.
The role of Griffith’s mother, Emelda, was originally written for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. At the Met, it will be sung by soprano Latonia Moore, prompting substantial alterations, like moving her first aria, “Seven Babies in the Sun,” up by an interval of a fourth.
And Blanchard has kept making changes even during rehearsals, as Moore recounted at a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum last month:
“One day he came up to me and said, ‘I feel this scene is a bit too low for you. Mind if I take it up?’”
“I said sure, fantastic,” she added. “I thought he’d come back in a couple days. Less than 30 minutes later, he had completely rewritten the scene. Within half an hour you had new music coming from the composer! This is something I wish I could ask Verdi and Puccini to do.”
Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who stars as the young Emile, was initially skeptical when Gelb asked him to take on the role.
“I had been offered it before and when I looked at the score I thought, ‘This is a little bit too high for me,’” Green said. “I like to sing high notes occasionally, but my voice doesn’t want to sit up there.”
Gelb persuaded him, saying, “Speedo, that’s the beauty of having a living composer. Things can change.”
And change they did, often subtly, with a note here and there taken down a few tones. In one passage shortly after Emile’s first entrance, Blanchard originally called for high G’s, which now have been lowered to B’s, one step below middle C.
In one instance, however, Green went in the opposite direction. For the climax of the aria “What Makes a Man a Man,” he told Blanchard, ″Man, I really want to take it up to create more drama.” So the original D-flat has now been raised to F.
By now, Blanchard’s place as the first Black composer to have an opera performed at the Met is widely known. But with “Champion,” he’s making another kind of history: He’s the first living composer in nearly 80 years to have different operas performed at the Met in back-to-back seasons. (The last was Richard Strauss with “Salome” in 1943-44 and “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1944-45.)
“Get outa here!” Blanchard said with a laugh when a reporter informed him of that distinction. “That’s crazy.”
And he’s quick to note that his streak will soon be extended, since the Met is reviving “Fire” next season.
And what about a third opera?
“Oh we have some ideas floating about,” Blanchard said. “But we’re just kind of biding our time. Rehearsals have been going so well, that’s where our focus has been.”
Says Robinson, “I told him, ‘You can’t just write two operas.’ But with Terence, it has to be the right story.”
“Champion,” which opens April 10 for nine performances, also stars bass-baritone Eric Owens as the older Emile, tenor Paul Groves as his trainer, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen, owner of a gay bar, and baritone Eric Greene as Paret. Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the Met’s music director, conducts. The matinee on Sat., April 29, will be shown live in HD in movie theaters worldwide.
Black people are being targeted with misinformation, so ensuring the next generation can tell what’s true is “critical to freedom.”
Perhaps without even realizing it, we are inundated with information nearly everywhere in our lives.
TV, radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, text messages, notifications that someone liked a post on Instagram/TikTok/Snapchat, news alerts, emails from teachers, advertising in every social media feed, and scrolling through the hundreds of posts up on the Shade Room every day. That is the media life of a teenager (and we’re probably missing a few things.)
And, especially as AI advances, it’s getting increasingly difficult for both students and adults to sift through this information for what’s real, what’s trustworthy, and what’s important.
So, while schools around the country rightfully focus on traditional student literacy, K-12 students in New Jersey will soon learn another form: information literacy.
Regardless of the school district and its demographics, we will have to teach information literacy and provide equitable access to this information across the state.EWA DZIEDZIC-ELLIOTT, PRESIDENT OF THE NEW JERSEY ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIANS
New Jersey became the first state to mandate that K-12 students learn information literacy to help students “weigh the flood of news, opinion, and social media they are exposed to both online and off,” Republican Sen. Mike Testa said in a statement.
Part of mandating it means that it will be accessible to all students, not just students in wealthier areas.
“We are making an effort to equalize access to information literacy, as well as educational resources,” Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott, president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians, wrote in a statement to Word In Black. The association was integral in getting this New Jersey law passed.
“We are the only state in the country that is making this requirement into law,” Dziedzic-Elliott wrote. “Regardless of the school district and its demographics, we will have to teach information literacy and provide equitable access to this information across the state.”
But what is information literacy?
Information or Media Literacy
Today’s information landscape is overwhelming.
Most people aged 40 or older grew up reading a newspaper or listening to the 6 o’clock news their parents put on, says Dr. Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary Professor for Children & Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington, and co-founder and board chair of Read-a-Rama.
But now, kids are “inundated with information constantly,” Martin says. Some might be from reputable sources, but they interact regularly with misinformation and disinformation. This makes media literacy much more critical, so they know how to evaluate a source.
“It’s a different type of reading,” Martin says. In addition to decoding what’s on the page, it’s also considering the source and assessing the argument being made. “This push toward information literacy is to help kids learn how to navigate and discern what they’re looking at and what they’re taking in.”
“Everybody has access to the internet, and anybody can put out information,” says Brittney Smith, the senior manager of education partnerships (East) at News Literacy Project. “So it’s very important to know how to evaluate that information so you know what to trust and what to share with your social circles and your family.”
Plus, kids are growing up in a technological world. Whether you believe in “digital natives,” young people are often the most technologically advanced in their households, which can give an overinflated confidence regarding what they interact with on those devices.
“Just because you are a good user or navigator, training about the content is another step,” Martin says. “You see 2-year-olds who can very easily navigate an iPad. So when you grow up that way, then you think, ‘Oh, I got this.’ And you don’t necessarily got it.”
Literacy of All Kinds Is Critical to Freedom
Before her current role, Smith spent eight years working as a life science teacher, a job she was working at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She learned in real time how many of her students and colleagues didn’t have the skills to evaluate information, repeatedly coming into her classroom to ask her questions about COVID.
“That really got me thinking about how it must feel to be bombarded by information that sounds really scary and then not have the tools to seek out other resources and see if they’re all agreeing,” Smith says.
In a 2018 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, Black students had significantly lower scores for computer and information literacy than their peers. The average score for Black students was 475, compared to 540 for white students and 563 for Asian students. The national average was 519.
The survey also found a connection between test scores and students eligible for reduced-price lunch. Schools where less than 10% of the student body was eligible saw an average score of 564, and the average score dropped to 476 when more than 75% of students were eligible.
Being literate allows you to find information you need to make your life and others’ better. It’s a skill that’s really basic for a democracy, Martin says, and “has been absolutely critical to freedom.”
“Democracy was not part of the landscape for Black people during enslavement,” Martin says. “Those of us who are living now as Black people in America owe it to our ancestors, some of whom died, to be able to gain literacy that would lead to their freedom.”
Martin recalled the Frederick Douglass quote that knowledge unfits a man to be a slave, and says that’s more relevant now than ever as “politicians and government entities are trying to tell teachers and children what they should not have access to.”
“Besides making us stupid as a nation by deleting parts of the knowledge base, it’s also compromising the ability of children and young people to know the things that will lead to their freedom, whatever that freedom looks like for them,” Martin says. “That is a danger zone that we’re in now.”
Plus, Smith highlighted how the Black community is often a target of misinformation, especially during election cycles.
“As an organization, we’d like to see widespread requirements for information literacy beginning as early as kindergarten,” Smith says. “It is imperative that students are graduating from high school with the skills they need to evaluate information and to think critically about claims they are encountering.”
What Information Literacy Training Looks Like
As with all forms of literacy, kids are never too young to start learning information literacy.
At the News Literacy Project, there are free resources for students, educators, and the larger community. Plus, the students’ lessons are designed so they can take what they learned and share it with their family members. All lessons are taught by diverse subject matter experts and followed by an assessment and challenges to test their new skills.
And, as with all lessons, they will look different depending on the age group. Especially when it comes to information literacy, it depends how much independence kids have in online spaces. Schools and public libraries often have parental controls in place to keep certain sites off-limits, but those barriers might not be in place at home or on a personal device.
It’s very important to know how to evaluate that information so you know what to trust and what to share with your social circles and your family.BRITTNEY SMITH, NEWS LITERACY PROJECT SENIOR MANAGER OF EDUCATION PARTNERSHIPS (EAST)
As kids age, the training needs to become more sophisticated to help them figure out what sources are going to support their learning, Martin says. That could be accessing the online encyclopedia or finding where databases for specific fields are kept.
“It should increase as the child gets older and the sophistication of the information increases, but I don’t think it’s ever too early,” Martin says. “If you have a 2-year-old who’s using an iPad, they probably need some information there, too.”
