Substance, sprinkled with nonsense

Correction. Dr. Chadwick Boseman. 🙌🏿

Boseman, who is originally from South Carolina, went to Howard before attending the British American Dramatic Academy at Oxford.

You must be fucking kidding me.

Anyways, if you’re not Palestinian/Arab and want to wear a keffiyeh in solidarity during a protest or something, then please do so by ordering an actual authentic keffiyehs made by Hirbawi, the last original Palestinian keffiyeh factory in Palestine. 

Their beautiful keffiyehs come in so many colors/pattern and all of them are under 19 Euros (I ordered one and I can tell you that they’re very high quality and soft)

Home site: http://hirbawi.ps 

Europe: http://MADEinPALESTINE.de 

US: http://hirbawiusa.com 

Worldwide: https://www.kufiya.org/

I’m glad someone said this, because till this day if you type “what do terrorist wear on their head” the first result will be the Palestinian keffiyeh (and not the LV version)

“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

X

The murder of Palestinian children and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities is being supported by the US. Americans' taxes are funding these atrocities.

Please include Palestinians in your activism 🇵🇸❤️

I’ve been collecting these screenshots for months to prove my point, this is an actual thing they’re doing and I feel that by now I have enough proof to be making this post. If you see someone calling themselves hygienic in their blog description, that’s what they mean. They mean they’re openly transphobic. And a fucking weirdo who assumes trans people don’t bathe for some reason.

Fowler served as Maryland’s chief medical examiner from 2002 to 2019. He was in the spotlight as a defense witness in the trial of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted on murder and manslaughter charges this week in the death of George Floyd.

Fowler testified that he believed Floyd had died of a sudden cardiac event due to his underlying heart disease while being restrained by police, citing multiple possible contributing factors such as drugs in his system and potential exposure to carbon monoxide from vehicle exhaust. While the Hennepin County medical examiner concluded that Floyd’s death was a homicide, Fowler argued the manner of death should be classified as “undetermined.”

That testimony alarmed Washington, D.C.’s former chief medical examiner Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr., who wrote an open letter calling for investigations into Fowler’s medical license, as well as a review of the Maryland medical examiner’s office under Fowler’s leadership. At least 458 physicians have signed the letter, Mitchell tells NPR.

Signatories of the open letter criticized Fowler’s testimony about Floyd’s cause of death — and especially the suggestion that carbon monoxide exposure may have contributed to it — as “baseless, revealed obvious bias, and raised malpractice concerns.”

Fowler’s opinion that Floyd’s death during police restraint should be classified as “undetermined” was outside the standard conventions for investigating and certifying in-custody deaths, the letter says, adding that it raises concerns about his previous handling of such cases.

“Our disagreement with Dr. Fowler is not a matter of opinion. Our disagreement with Dr. Fowler is a matter of ethics,” it reads.

Mitchell tells NPR the need for a review is “about the citizens of Maryland. This is about the individuals in this country that die while in custody while in contact with the criminal justice system.”

The office of Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said it agrees with the need for an independent review and has offered to coordinate it.

Gov. Larry Hogan’s office says it will work to identify experts to serve in the workgroup.

Bruce Goldfarb with the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said in a statement that it is “committed to transparency and will cooperate with any inquiry.”

When no one is around to boop his snoot, he boops it himself. 

“In a podcast that same week, Portnoy went on a rant while Katz egged him on, calling Ponder a “fucking slut” who should “sex it up and be slutty” instead of talking about being a working mother.”

Clarence Muse and Rex Ingram by Susan King Thirty years ago, the legendary Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier reflected on the Black performers who paved the way for him in the Los Angeles Times: “The guys who were forerunners to me, like Canada Lee, Rex Ingram, Clarence Muse and women like Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers and Juanita Moore, they were terribly boxed in. They were maids and stable people and butlers, principally. But they, in some way, prepared the ground for me.”

Poitier prepared the ground for such contemporary Black actors and directors currently in competition during the 2021 awards season such as Regina King and Leslie Odom Jr. (One Night in Miami), Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods), the late Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) and Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah).

But it is imperative to remember the veterans from the 1930s-1960s who tried to break out of stereotypes and maintain dignity at a time when Hollywood wanted to “box” them in.

Clarence Muse 

Muse appeared in countless Hollywood films often uncredited. And as Donald Bogle points out in his book Hollywood Black, Muse spoke his mind to directors if he felt he was being pushed around or when his characters were stereotypes. Bogle stated, “At another time when Muse questioned the actions of his character in director King Vidor’s 1935 Old South feature SO RED THE ROSE, Vidor recalled that Muse was quite vocal in expressing his concerns. A change was made. Vidor could not recall exactly what the issue was, but he never forgot Muse’s objection.”

The 1932 pre-Code crime drama Night World screened at the 2019 TCM Classic Film Festival to a standing-room only crowd. The film stars Lew Ayres, Boris Karloff and Muse as the doorman at a club owned by Karloff. The audience was surprised that such a stereotypical role was anything but thanks to Muse’s poignant performance. Instead of being forced to be the comic relief, Muse’s Washington is a man worried about his wife’s surgery at a local hospital. Though his boss doesn’t treat him as an equal—after all it is 1932—Karloff’s Happy shows general concern toward Washington.

Muse, said Bogle, “also worked in race movies, where he realized there was still a real chance for significant roles and narratives.” One such was BROKEN STRINGS (’40), which he also co-wrote. It’s certainly not a great film, but Muse gives a solid turn as a famed Black violinist who wants his young son to follow in his footsteps. But the son wants to play swing with his violin.

Muse, who was a graduate of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, also co-wrote the Louis Armstrong standard “Sleepy Time Down South.” In the 1920s, he worked at two Harlem theater companies, Lincoln Players and Lafayette Players, and 23 years later he became the first African American Broadway director with Run Little Chillun. He continued to act, appearing in Poitier’s directorial debut BUCK AND THE PREACHER (’72), CAR WASH (’76) and THE BLACK STALLION (’79) and was elected to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1973. He died one day before his 90th birthday in 1979.

Rex Ingram 

Tall and imposing, Ingram had a great presence on the big screen and a rich melliferous voice. No wonder his best-known role was as the gigantic Genie in the bottle in Alexander Korda’s lavish production of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (’40). Born in 1895, he began his film career in movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (’23). Ingram also has the distinction of playing God in THE GREEN PASTURES (’36) and Lucifer Jr. both on Broadway in 1940 and in the 1943 film adaptation of the musical CABIN IN THE SKY.

Ingram also brought a real humanity to his role as the slave Jim in MGM’s disappointing THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (’39), starring a miscast Mickey Rooney, who was way too old at 19 to play the part. Ingram, though, breaks your heart when he talks to Huck about how his dream is to earn enough money to buy his freedom so he could join his wife and child living in a free state. And when he runs away, Ingram explains to Huck why he had to flee the widow Douglas: “If one of them slave traders got me, I never would get to that free state. I would never see my wife, or little Joey.”

He also is superb in Frank Borzage’s noir MOONRISE (’48) as Mose Johnson, the friend of the murderer’s son Danny (Dane Clark), who lives in a shack in the wilderness with his coonhounds. Noble and thoughtful, Mose is the film’s conscience and helps guide Danny to do the right thing after he kills a bully (Lloyd Bridges) in self-defense.

Ingram was one of the busiest Black actors at the time and at one point even served on the Board of the Screen Actors Guild. But the same year MOONRISE was released, he was arrested and pleaded guilty for transporting an underage girl from Kansas to New York. He served a prison sentence and for a long time his career was derailed. He even lost his home. Though his film career was never the same upon his release, he worked in TV and on the Broadway stage, appearing in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and died in 1969 at 73 shortly after doing a guest shot on NBC’s The Bill Cosby Show.

Ernest Anderson 

Anderson never achieved the notoriety of Muse and Ingram, but the actor gave an extraordinary performance in the Bette Davis-Olivia de Havilland melodrama IN THIS OUR LIFE (’42) directed by John Huston. Born in 1915, Anderson earned his BA at Northwestern University in drama and speech. He was recommended for his role in the movie by Davis, who saw the young man working at the commissary on the Warner Bros.’ lot.

Anderson plays Parry, the son of the Davis-de Havilland family’s maid who aspires to be a lawyer. Davis’ spoiled rotten Stanley Timberlake gets drunk, and while driving she kills someone in a hit-and-run accident. Stanley throws Parry under the bus telling authorities he was the one driving the car.

Initially, the script depicted Parry in much more stereotypical terms, but Anderson went to Huston and discussed why he wanted to play the character with dignity and intelligence. Huston agreed. And for 1942, it’s rather shocking to see a studio film look at racism as in the scene where Parry tells de Havilland’s Roy why he wants to be an attorney:

“Well, you see, it’s like this, Miss Roy: a white boy, he can take most any kind of job and improve himself. Well, like in this store! Maybe he can get to be a clerk or a manager. But a colored boy, he can’t do that. He can keep a job, or he can lose a job. But he can’t get any higher up. So, he’s got a figure out something he can do that no one can take away. And that’s why I want to be a lawyer.”