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By Scott Neuman, Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images, National Public Radio (NPR), February 1, 2023 February marks Black History Month, a tradition that got its start in the Jim Crow era and was officially recognized in 1976 as part of the nation's bicentennial celebrations. It aims to honor the contributions that African Americans have made and to recognize their sacrifices. Here are three things to know about Black History Month: It was Negro History Week before it was Black History...

By Association for the Study of African American Life and History, February 2023 African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms, and police killings since our arrival upon these shores. These efforts have been to advocate for a dignified self-determined life in a just democratic society in the United States and beyond the United States political jurisdiction. The 1950s and 1970s in the United States...

By Jens Manuel Krogstad and Kiana Cox, Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images, Pew Research Center, January 20, 2023 Black History Month originated in 1926 as Negro History Week. Created by Carter G. Woodson, a Black historian and journalist, the week celebrated the achievements of Black Americans following their emancipation from slavery. Since 1928, the organization that Woodson founded, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, has selected an annual theme...

By Cassandra Lane, Image: Orion Pictures, Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2023 The murder of Tyre Nichols and the individual and collective reckoning we have all encountered — whether or not to witness the brutal images of his final moments — sent me back to an issue that I’ve been wrestling with for two decades. In the fall of 2001, I started writing the seeds of a book project with the intention of examining the multigenerational reverberations of my great-grandfather’s lynching. I started...

By Cathy Rogers, Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images, WagingNonviolence, January 31, 2023 Anyone who has come across “ Why Civil Resistance Works ” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan will be familiar with the idea that size matters for social movements. Their highly cited “3.5 percent rule” says that once movements actively involve at least 3.5 percent of the population they will inevitably succeed. The idea that this is a cast iron rule has been contested — including by Chenoweth — on the...

By Michael DePeau-Wilson, MedPageToday, February 1, 2023 Gray matter volume in key brain regions was lower in Black children compared with white children, likely due to disparities in childhood adversity, according to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ( ABCD ) study. Among children ages 9 to 10 years, white kids showed greater gray matter volumes compared with Black kids in the amygdala, hippocampus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, rostral anterior cingulate, pars...

By Charles M. Blow, Photo: Andrew Nelles, The New York Times, February 1, 2023 When RowVaughn Wells arrived at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church on an icy, gray Wednesday in Memphis, she was there to say goodbye to her son Tyre Nichols. He was dead. Killed. Beaten to death by local police officers while he screamed for her less than 100 yards from her house. There was a phalanx of television crews across the street from the front of the church, and the Secret Service manned the doors.

By Jie Xi, Photo: Associated Press, Voice of America (VOA), January 31, 2023 Two mass shootings in California in one week have highlighted the complex mental health issues faced by older Asian Americans who may have been traumatized in their homelands and who — after building new lives in the United States — now find themselves facing additional challenges as they age. Some first-generation Asian immigrants, especially those who emigrated from conflict zones, arrive with trauma issues that...

By The HOPE Team, 2/2/2023. https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Last week, Tufts Medicine joined members of various Asian ethnic communities (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese) in celebrating the Lunar New Year. Cultural celebrations, like the many Lunar New Year festivities hosted by our Chinatown community, provide opportunities for children to engage and interact with their culture and heritage, and create lasting memories through interacting with other children,...

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, NARM Creator Dr. Laurence Heller is joined by long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, for an evocative conversation about trauma and spirituality. Both Diane and Larry have been students, practitioners and teachers of various psychological approaches for over 40 years, and they have also both studied various spiritual models over this time. Their spiritual work has positively impacted not only their personal lives, but also informed...

By Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images, The Nation, September 2, 2022 F ollowing the November 2020 elections, Democratic leadership called former president Barack Obama out from retirement to quell growing public support for shrinking police department budgets and investing in community needs. In an interview on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America,” Obama admonished protesters and activists: “If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform...

By Sylvia A. Harvey, Illustration: Christine Ongjoco, The Imprint, January 30, 2023 On a typical day in 1990, Cordell Miller, then 16, would play basketball, dominoes, or hang out with his friends in his Brooklyn neighborhood . When night came and others went to their respective New York City homes, Miller made his rounds in search of a place to sleep: the hallway, steps and sometimes the roof of a building he could easily sneak into. An abandoned car. At times, he’d ride the subway all...