A Matter of Life & Death – “Leading Edge” segment on PBS News Hour

Leading Edge PBS News Hour

“Leading Edge” segment on PBS News Hour. Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

PBS News Hour
April 18, 2018
Judy Woodruff and Amna Nawaz, PBS News Hour
Linda Villarosa, contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine
Monica Simpson, executive director of Sistersong
Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier

Why are black mothers and infants far more likely to die in U.S. from pregnancy-related causes?

Judy Woodruff:

The United States has a problem with maternal mortality, and it’s one that’s been getting worse.

The U.S. is one of only 13 countries where the death rate is worse now than it was 25 years ago, and among the worst of wealthiest countries in the world. Between 700 and 900 American women die each year from problems related to pregnancy, childbirth or complications up to a year later.

There are as many as 50,000 cases annually where women face dangerous and even life-threatening situations.

As part of our ongoing series Race Matters, Amna Nawaz looks at why it is dramatically worse among African-American women.

It’s the focus of this week’s segment the Leading Edge.

Amna Nawaz:

And the statistics are stunning. Black infants are more than twice as likely to die than white infants, a racial disparity that is wider today than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery. And black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

For a closer look at what’s behind those numbers, we turn to Linda Villarosa. Her in-depth report on the subject ran in “The New York Times Magazine.” And Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, the country’s largest organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color. In 2014, she testified before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Linda and Monica, welcome to the “NewsHour.”

Watch the segment or read the full transcript

Courtesy of: PBS News Hour

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis

LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times.

Kingston weighed in at a healthy 6 pounds 13 ounces. Credit: LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times

The New York Times
April 9, 2018
by Linda Villarosa

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

In 1850, when the death of a baby was simply a fact of life, and babies died so often that parents avoided naming their children before their first birthdays, the United States began keeping records of infant mortality by race. That year, the reported black infant-mortality rate was 340 per 1,000; the white rate was 217 per 1,000. This black-white divide in infant mortality has been a source of both concern and debate for over a century. In his 1899 book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” the first sociological case study of black Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois pointed to the tragedy of black infant death and persistent racial disparities. He also shared his own “sorrow song,” the death of his baby son, Burghardt, in his 1903 masterwork, “The Souls of Black Folk.”

From 1915 through the 1990s, amid vast improvements in hygiene, nutrition, living conditions and health care, the number of babies of all races who died in the first year of life dropped by over 90 percent — a decrease unparalleled by reductions in other causes of death. But that national decline in infant mortality has since slowed. In 1960, the United States was ranked 12th among developed countries in infant mortality. Since then, with its rate largely driven by the deaths of black babies, the United States has fallen behind and now ranks 32nd out of the 35 wealthiest nations. Low birth weight is a key factor in infant death, and a new report released in March by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin suggests that the number of low-birth-weight babies born in the United States — also driven by the data for black babies — has inched up for the first time in a decade.

Read more…

Courtesy of: The New York Times

LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise New York

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A mother and her son speaking to a news-reporter outside North Western High School (est. 1964) awaiting the arrival of President Barack Obama, May 4th 2016 Flint MI 2016, 2016/17, gelatin silver print, 20 by 24 inches; at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

Art in America Magazine
April 1, 2018
by David Markus

The hallmark of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic work has been its blend of the political and the everyday. Often cited as an heir to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, she uses her artistic practice to advocate for racial and economic justice, particularly on the part of communities blighted by deindustrialization. Frazier began photographing her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, when she was still a teenager, producing a series of photographs that would help earn her a 2015 MacArthur fellowship. Over the years her photography has brought her as far afield as Belgium, where she created a series centered on a former coal-mining community in the Borinage region. For her recent survey exhibition, she covered the exterior of Gavin Brown’s four-story gallery in Harlem with a forty-by-twenty-foot vinyl print of three vertically arranged photographs, each depicting a single word spelled out in water bottles inserted into a chain-link fence alongside a commercial thruway in Flint, Michigan. Together, the words read, WATER IS LIFE. It’s an SOS from the Midwestern town that has become an emblem of gross municipal negligence in this era of extreme inequality.

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Courtesy of: Art in America Magazine

The Atlantic Explores King’s Legacy Through a Contemporary Lens

with Contributions From LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kara Walker

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER’s aerial photographs of Memphis, Chicago, and Baltimore, are featured in a six-page photo essay exploring how the cities have fared through five decades of oppression since King’s assassination.

Culture Type
March 24, 2018
by Victoria Valentine

The year 2018 coincides with many historic milestones. It’s been a half century since the Studio Museum in Harlem was founded, the Chicago artist collective AFRICOBRA was formed, Olympic track athletes raised their fists at the Mexico City games in a stand for racial justice, and the Kerner Commission was released and declared the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” All of these occurrences spoke to the times and state of American culture.

This year also marks another clarion call: The 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was killed April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

A special issue  published by The Atlantic marks the anniversary. The magazine, whose early contributors included Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B Du Bois, considers the legacy of King through a contemporary lens. The project was envisioned by two African American staffers—writer Vann R. Newkirk II and managing editor Adrienne Green.

[…]

MLK Special Issue from The Atlantic

 

Contributors also include National Book Award-winning author Jesymn Ward; Pulitzer Prizie-winner Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”; filmmaker and activist Bree Newsome; and artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kara Walker, among others.

Integrating the work of Walker and Frazier with the contributions of journalists, scholars, historians, and authors, demonstrates how contemporary artists are interrogating socioeconomic issues with the same rigor as their counterparts and playing a valuable role in the discourse on the history of racial ills in America and the future of democracy.

In her practice, Frazier uses social documentary photography, video, and performance to shine a light racial justice and human rights issues. She is recognized for her images of Braddock, Pa., where she was born and raised. The town’s economic fortunes rose and fell with the steel industry, which also left the community, including her own family, reeling with health issues. More recently, she has documented how people in Flint, Mich., are coping with the city’s water crisis.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Culture Type

What a Picture From the Sky Reveals About Oppression

Special Issue from The Atlantic

Fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., The Atlantic commemorates his life and work—and reflects on the reality of today’s America through the prism of his vision.

The Atlantic’s new special issue takes the reader from King’s development as a young activist to the building of his campaign against what he called the “three major evils” of society: racism, poverty, and militarism.

The Geography of Oppression

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Mem­phis, Tennessee, but his death reverberated across the United States. To this day, the 1968 Holy Week Up­rising influences the human geography of some cities, shaping how poverty and dysfunction concentrate in black neighborhoods.

Memphis did not feel the full flames of riots in April 1968, in part because of King’s nonviolent orga­nizing apparatus. But his spirit was not enough to hold back the tide of despair and violence that brought mil­lions of dollars of damage to other major metropolises, including Baltimore and Chicago. Still, King’s assassi­nation has influenced how these cities are physically structured, from the gutting of urban neighborhoods to the memorializing of the civil­ rights leader in monu­ments, streets, and schools.

Using a helicopter and aerial­ photography tech­niques available in 1968, LaToya Ruby Frazier revisited Memphis, Baltimore, and Chicago to explore how they have responded to five more decades of oppression.

Contributors include:

Dr. King’s youngest child, Bernice King, who wrote the issue’s introduction
Jesse Williams and John Legend on the intersection between art and activism
MacArthur fellows Matt Desmond, Jesmyn Ward, and LaToya Ruby Frazier
Representative John Lewis, who marched with King in Selma
Historian Jeanne Theoharis on Coretta Scott King and the hidden women of the movement
Voices from The Atlantic’s archives, including Stokely Carmichael, Jonathan Kozol, and Archibald MacLeish

Available for purchase from The Atlantic

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Documenting the American Family

NYR Daily
February 12, 2018
by Prudence Peiffer

In her first solo show, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, LaToya Ruby Frazier uses the gallery’s grand, multistory Harlem building to great effect, staging her own grand, multistory portrait of the contemporary United States. The show begins on the ground floor with Frazier’s documentation of the Flint water crisis, and ends on the top floor with blazing scenes from the Californian desert. Along the way, three discrete series of gelatin silver prints, each on its own floor, demonstrate the endemic racism and hazardous decay of post-industrial America, the bond and burden of home for families caught amid these crises, and the redemptive potential of art to tell these stories. Like the camera’s technical process of exposure, Frazier brings things to light that would otherwise remain obscured. “I create visibility through images and storytelling,” she says in the show’s materials, in order “to expose the violation of… human rights.” Her black-and-white photographs are unsentimental witnesses to the furloughed American dream.

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Courtesy of: NYR Daily