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A YA tale inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement should be the next book you read Mashable It may be early in the year, but the best YA novel of 2017 is likely already in stores. The Hate U Give, the debut novel of author Angie Thomas, hit shelves today and is the buzziest non-sequel to hit the YA world in some time. Inspired by the Black ... This Young Adult Novel That Tackles Black Lives Matter Is Exactly What We NeedRefinery29 all 3 news articles »

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A YA tale inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement should be the next book you read - Mashable

Small screen, big issues: Sanaa Lathan in Shots Fired, left, and Austin P McKenzie in When We Rise. Composite: Fox via Getty images/Allstar/Warner Bros

On a reputable college campus, a young undergrad comes forward and names multiple star football players as her rapists. A scandal instantly erupts, complete with media dressing down the university administration, coaches confessing to cover-ups, and the survivors name dragged through the muck. Its a regrettably familiar story, but for once, its not the latest above-the-fold headline from the daily news; its called Controversy, and it may appear on Foxs programming schedule sometime soon.

Fox ordered the pilot just last month and cast Whiplash actor Austin Stowell last week, marking the latest in a string of big four network series with concepts built around hot-button issues. This week sees the premiere of When We Rise on ABC, a well-pedigreed docudrama series about the fight for queer rights from Milk writer and LGBT advocate Dustin Lance Black, with additional star power from Guy Pearce and Whoopi Goldberg, to name just two of the ensemble. Fox tackles Black Lives Matter and the police violence epidemic next month with Shots Fired, a 10-part miniseries about a North Carolina town rocked by a racially charged shooting. ABCs Black-ish has consistently engaged with the uglier aspects of the black experience in America, and touched a nerve last year with an episode that also dealt with police brutality on black bodies. In an era of safe spaces, network TVs preparing for some difficult discussions.

Ever since HBO declared themselves separate from TV, premium cable has been the province of the bold and the envelope-pushing. Its not as if the major networks are only waking up to the notion of socially conscious writing now Norman Lear built an empire around shows willing to speak to the most pressing matters of his day, from race relations on Sanford and Son to abortion on Maude. But without the content restrictions of the major networks and their fickle advertisers, shows on HBO and Showtime could more freely explore such thorny subjects. On networks, they were usually constrained to very special episodes, where they could be handled in a contained, often overtly preachy capacity. Law and Order: SVU, for instance, has made a habit of ripping their plotlines from headlines. When they ran their Black Lives Matter episode in October 2015, however, audiences reacted negatively to the shows cursory treatment of its sensitive material.

In this era of social unrest, audiences have begun to demand art that speaks more frankly and directly to major concerns. Programs such as When We Rise and Shots Fired, as well as some shows infiltrating basic cable (Ryan Murphy recently announced that the next season of American Horror Story would detail the waking nightmare of the 2016 presidential election), foreground their issues instead of writing around them. As much as network offerings have touched upon the major crises of their time, thats been the full extent touching upon, and little more. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter about Black-ishs Black Lives Matter episode, creator Kenya Barris said: Well, my hopes are that it starts a great conversation and, at the same time, makes people laugh and think. My fear is: I dont what to piss anyone off. I dont want to politicize the show Its politically adjacent.

With a run time beyond a single episode and a firmer commitment to their causes, this upcoming wave of issue-driven series will be able to actually have the conversations that other shows aim to start. Any subject worth delving into contains far more complexity and nuance than could be conceivably squeezed into a half-hour, and these new shows can cover a wider breadth of discourse. Dustin Lance Black expressed the heightened ambition of When We Rise in a recent interview with the New York Times, saying: We did not create this series for half a nation. I believe that most Americans, including Americans who voted for Donald Trump, will fall in love with these real-life families and absolutely relate to their stories when they tune in We are in a period of backlash right now. I would give anything for this to be less topical. But this series shows [queer] history is a pendulum, not a straight line.

Partisan times call for television unafraid to make a principled stand, and the box-office success of politically charged films such as Hidden Figures suggests that there may be a little money in it too. What executives once considered too touchy for the broad platform of network TV, viewers have now declared too vital to go unremarked upon. Perhaps audiences have grown more daring, or theyre just tired of the mealy-mouthed talk-arounds filling their airwaves. Either way, network TV the most popular, readily accessible art form has doubled down on its utility as a public forum. Bring the burning questions of the day home, and they can no longer be ignored.

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From gay rights to Black Lives Matter: why network TV suddenly got serious - The Guardian

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV)

Police called to break up a bus brawl are now being condemned by activists more than a week after a video of the confrontation spread through social media.

Those with the Black Lives Matter group voiced their concerns at the Charleston County School Board meeting Monday night. They said its an issue they wont see quietly fade away.

They questioned the need for police interference when schools already have resource officers and administration.

How officers are supposed to de-escalate fights between children, we would like to know if officers are even trained to work with school-aged children, said one protester.

Any bus incident that I had been in attendance to growing up never resulted in police interference, said one woman who used to ride the school bus.

The School Board heard their voices.

Questions and answers about the roles of both the resource officers in our schools and police officers when it comes to the safety of our children, need to be addressed and its very healthy to have that dialog, said Dr. Gerrita Postlewait.

School Board Chair Kate Darby said district resource officers are trained to de-escalate and handle incidents with children. But since the school bus fight was off-campus,North Charleston police were called to the scene.

The bus driver did what the bus driver thought they needed to do to keep the safety of the children on the bus, said Darby.

Darby said the school board has no authority over this particular matter, but said they welcome the input.

What we can do is we can make recommendations on how we handle things within the schools, how we work with the school resource officers, what kind of training we want resource officers to have, Darby said.

Last week,leaders with the National Action Network came out in support of law enforcement after reviewing the bus video. Mayor Keith Summey also said he stands by the officers' actions.

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Black Lives Matter confront school board over bus brawl incident in North Charleston - ABC NEWS 4

Today, we have a naked expression of authoritarianism, hate, bigotry, and racism in the form of Donald Trump in the White House. He reiterated his law and order agenda with the appointment of the racist Jeff Sessions as attorney general heading the Department of Justice. The Trump administration is made up of millionaires and billionaires who will advance the agenda of Wall Street and racist demagoguery with such figures like Steve Bannon. Trumps rhetoric has emboldened the forces of the ultra-right-wing conservative movement, alt-right white nationalist groups, and historic white domestic terror organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

This is a major threat to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner, anti-racist activists, and people of color generally, particularly black workers and youth. The Trump administration and a segment of the ruling elite would like retribution for the protests, raised consciousness, and life-affirming power of BLM over the course of the last three years. The minor reforms passed to stem the tide of law enforcement terror in our communities have been important to increase the activism, fighting spirit, and morale of the banner, but not on the level of the reforms won by the black freedom movement in the 1950s and 1960s, during post-World War II economic upswing. BLM has spread to every corner of the world with solidarity actions everywhere from sports to the workplace.

As Spencer Woodman recently reported on TheIntercept.com, In Minnesota, Washington state, Michigan, and Iowa, Republican lawmakers have proposed an array of anti-protesting laws that center on stiffening penalties for demonstrators who block traffic; in North Dakota, conservatives are even pushing a bill that would allow motorists to run over and kill protesters so long as the collision was accidental (1/23/2017). These measures are an apparent attempt to keep BLM, social justice activists, and workers on a defensive footing, criminalizing the resistance movement against Trump and Wall Streets agenda. Trumps threat to send in federal troops allegedly to quell the gut-wrenching violence in Chicago which would mean martial law is another indication of the danger this administration poses to the black population..

In the aftermath of Trumps victory, a segment of workers, youth, and people of color are not surprisingly nostalgic for the presidency and legacy of Barack Obama. Without question, his election was a historic moment, but for the mass of workers, youth, and people of color, particularly black workers and youth, little was achieved as his policies primarily benefitted and advanced the agenda of Wall Street for eight years.

But the key question we face now is how to defeat Trump. Many BLM activists will be at the forefront of the resistance to attacks on immigrants, women, and labor. We must also turn the defensive struggle against the Trump administration into an offensive struggle for jobs, health care, education, and environmental sustainability.

Last summer, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of more than 50 organizations, released a comprehensive program, A Vision For Black Lives: Policy Demands For Black Power, Freedom, and Justice (Policy.M4BL.org), taking on the issues of economic injustice, reparations, police violence, and political power. We believe that adopting a clear set of demands is a very important step forward for the BLM banner, and Socialist Alternative broadly supports the platform. There is much that is positive in this material, but there are also significant political shortcomings, particularly the failure to point the movement toward the necessity of ending capitalism, which is the bedrock of racist oppression. The key question is how this platform will be discussed, debated, and amended by the wider movement and struggle so that it becomes a driving focus for struggle by the black working class under Trump.

Despite the very radical character and broad scope of the platform, there are some striking omissions, including the lack of a call for a $15 minimum wage. The fight for $15 has mobilized tens of thousands of black and Latino workers around the country into action, and there is mass support for the demand in the black community.

Its important to point out the limits of reform under capitalism and the urgent task to fight for a democratic socialist change of society to cement any gains and concessions wrested from the ruling elite. We must also end the abusive relationship with corporate-dominated political parties of war, racism, poverty, and environmental destruction.

In this new era of Trumpism, the Movement for Black Lives must urgently organize a new conference to take into account the new political and social situation, including democratically elected delegates from around the country, to debate the platform, amend it, and adopt it. This would be a huge step forward. But this process would need to be linked to the question of building a broader organization, rooted in black working-class communities, with democratic and accountable structures.

The rise and threat of Trumps administration presents the urgent task of uniting our developing social movements like the BLM banner alongside the labor movement, social justice organizations, and socialists. We must build a powerful, united mass movement in our schools, communities, and workplaces. As the example of the long, historical black freedom movement showed, only a bold, determined, centralized, and grassroots struggle with clear demands can beat back the agenda of Wall Street and racism that is etched in the DNA of U.S. capitalism and democracy.

Black Lives MatterBLMDonald TrumpendorsementsMovement for Black LivesTrump

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Trump, Black Lives Matter, and the Struggle Against Racism - Socialist Alternative

Internetgiant Google has pledged to donate $11.5 million in grants to four organizations combating racial disparities in the criminal justice system. While Google would not phrase their grants in this way, one of the recipients has praised the Black Lives Matter movement as "civil rights demonstrations," andthe cause of these organizations does overlap with the Black Lives Matter movement.

"There is significant ambiguity regarding the extent of racial bias in policing and criminal sentencing," Justin Steele, principal with Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, told USA Today. "We must find ways to improve the accessibility and usefulness of information."

Steele presented the grants as a way to quantify the racial disparity in the justice system. It is hard to know the full extent to which black people are treated differently than white people. Even South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott has sharedpersonal stories of "frustration" with cops, in the nation's capital!

"It's hard to measure justice," Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president at the Center for Policing Equity (which will receive $5 million, the largest share of Google's grants), told USA Today. "In policing, data are so sparse and they are not shared broadly. The National Justice Database is an attempt to measure justice so that people who want to do the right thing can use that metric to lay out a GPS for getting where we are trying to go. That's really what we see Google as being a key partner in helping us do."

Naturally, USA Today had to report that Google "is trying to address the racial imbalance in the demographics of its workforce. Hispanics make up 3% of Google employees and African Americans 2%." USA Today likely omitted the number of whites (61 percent), because the number of Asians (30 percent) is so high, according to a 2014 PBS report.

But rather than confirming a racial bias against minorities, the fact that Google, a majority-white company, is nevertheless heavily subsidizing efforts to quantifyracial disparities in criminal justice should be heartening, especially to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Indeed, one of the groups Google is supporting, the Equal Justice Initiative, explicitly endorsed Black Lives Matter in one of its videos, calling the group "civil rights demonstrators." That video linked slavery to mass incarceration, lamenting that "many states celebrate the era of slavery with Confederate holidays and by honoring the defenders and architects of slavery, while ignoring the history of enslavement."

This is a horrifying insult to all those who commemorate the Civil War and view the battle as a fight over states' rights. While I consider their viewpoints incorrect, I do not dismiss as racist those who commemoratethe Confederacy, and neither should the Equal Justice Initiative.

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Google Pledges $11.5 Million to Make Sure Black Lives Matter - PJ Media