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Insight News
June 6 6,, 2022 - June 12, 2022
Vol. 49 No. 23• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
Black, Latino, and Native American organizations form consortium to address alcohol-related harm in the U.S. The Multicultural Consortium for Responsible Drinking (MCRD), a working group focused on increasing awareness on the risks of alcohol-related harm and providing education in diverse communities across the country, launched with the support of Diageo North America and leading Black, Latino, and Native American organizations. In its initial phase, members of the MCRD met in Washington, DC, to establish a framework aimed at developing a national public awareness program to reduce the impact of alcohol misuse in communities of color. Educating people on the effects of alcohol and the impact of impaired driving –including the debunking of myths and misconceptions across these communities– is a key priority for this unique group. The MCRD will combine knowledge and expertise of member organizations, along with Diageo North America’s educational resources, including: Wrong Side of the Road, an interactive digital experience featuring real stories of impaired drivers who share their consequences (https:// drinkdriving.drinkiq.com/); and DRINKiQ.com (also available in Spanish language at DRINKiQ.com/espanol), a platform that helps people understand the effects of alcohol and empowers them to make responsible choices around alcohol. “The Black Church has always been at the forefront
of important social issues that impact people of African heritage. Alcohol misuse is a fundamental problem that requires sustainable collaboration and immediate action,” said Reverend Anthony Evans, President, National Black Church Initiative (NBCI). “NBCI is proud to be a member of the MCRD to help stamp out this problem in communities of color and create new strategies to impart this difficult problem,” continued Evans. “I am thankful for the collaboration with Diageo within our communities of color, especially with the company’s educational platforms, to help raise public awareness and prevent misuse,” said civil rights icon, Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr, President and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) representing over 230 Black-owned community newspapers. “We welcome the opportunity to be a part of the MCRD and use Latino platforms to educate the Latino community about responsible drinking,” said Alvaro Gurdian, President and CEO, National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP) reaching over 23 million people of Hispanic heritage in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. “Essentially, every culture shares the joy of music, food, and celebrating responsibly with families and loved ones.”, said Luis Belen, Chief Executive
Photo Credit: Elijah Sanchez/MCRD.
Leaders meet to discuss Responsible Drinking in Washington D.C. — Lorenzo Lopez, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Diageo North America, Alvaro Gurdián, President & CEO, National Association of Hispanic Publications, Inc. (NAHP, Inc.), Sam Tatum, VP, Integrated Market and Partnership, Radio One, Ricardo Hurtado, National Association of Hispanic Publications, Inc. (NAHP, Inc.), Debra Crew, President, Diageo North America, Stephanie Childs, Executive Vice President, Corporate Relations, Diageo North America, Jean Wells, Editor, The Positive Community Magazine, Ron Burke, National Marketing and Constituency Development Director, National Newspaper Publishers Association, Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., President & CEO, National Newspaper Publishers Association, and Adrian Council, Sr., Publisher, Positive Community Magazine. Officer of the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved. “As a Latino, I have seen our communities struggle throughout the COVID19 pandemic with mental health challenges and substance misuse. ‘Now’ is always the best time to take action, and NHIT is deeply honored to help launch this consortium. We hope the NHIT Data Fusion Center will provide the foundation for the consortium’s data-driven approach. Through
the data, we seek to understand the social circumstances of our communities better and use that knowledge to guide our educational content and outreach strategies. At the same time, we work purposefully and collaboratively toward meaningful change,” stated Belen. Diageo North America has a longstanding record of working to change the way the world drinks for the better by encouraging moderation and
continuing to address alcoholrelated harm, expanding its programs that tackle impaired driving and binge drinking. The MCRD initiative furthers Diageo’s commitment in this space as part of its Society 2030 action plan to promote a positive drinking agenda. “Providing educational tools and information about alcohol will help communities make informed decisions and prevent misuse,” said Stephanie Childs, Executive
Vice President, Corporate Relations, Diageo North America. “We are honored to join forces with such distinguished leaders representing diverse communities to reach even more people.” In addition to the founding members of the MCRD, the group aspires to grow in representation and reach across Black, Latino, and Native American law enforcement, community, faith-based and media organizations.
Dr. Irma McClauin South African lecture: Resistance and radical re-imagination By Bonke Sonjani Bonke Sonjani is currently pursuing an MA in Heritage Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also an archivist intern at the GALA Queer Archives where he is interested in queering student protests in South Africa. Dr Irma McClaurin recently presented a guest lecture with the University of the Witwatersrand Centre for Diversity Studies in which she talked about her renowned Black Feminist Archive established for the conservation and dissemination of black women’s history and heritage. The Black Feminist Archive is one of a kind– it is the first archive in the world that acts as a catalyst for the collection, protection and dissemination of the voices of Black African/ American women that have been inherently ostracized from official histories. Dr McClaurin initially developed the archive as a memory of her own life and lived experiences in the various institutions she has worked for. In recognizing the power relations embedded in the cisgender, male-dominant field of study- Anthropology in which she has obtained a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, McClaurin acts as a vector for both resistance and radical re-imagination. The Black Feminist Archive provides a training ground for Black women archivists to counter the heteropatriarchal profession of archiving. McClaurin says she believes that everyone is an archive filled with a rich family and professional and social history. According to her, “Our stories are a necessary (and sometimes secret) ingredient in a recipe of impactful social change in America” ( McClaurin 2021). As such, she encouraged everyone in the lecture to start documenting their emails, letters, notes and lived
Dr. McClaurin (center) with students at University of the| Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. experiences, positing that these serve as archives of thoughts, methodologies and events. McClaurin’s positionality on the Black Feminist Archive is inspirational. She does not approach the project from the ‘institutionalized’ practice of archiving which has a discursive history of eradicating queer, Black and women’s bodies from the recognized narratives of history. Moreover, through what I would coin as a ‘bottom-up’ methodology, McClaurin lifts Black women—to celebrate and preserve their experiences and narratives that reflect “whole lives” of activism, resistance, creativity, and intellectual production. Through such methodologies, their lives and diverse forms of input (artistic, social, political, scientific, etc.) are recognized as having played a major role in the development of a fuller American story (McClaurin 2021). McClaurin’s artistic practices both as an activist bio-cultural anthropologist and as an archivist are inspiring to me as a young scholar. As a previous recipient of the Andrew W Mellon award under the History department with the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western
Bonke Sonjani (he/him) Cape, and as an aspiring curator, archivist and heritage practitioner, McClaurin’s work has provided a blueprint for my artistic practices. As a previous history scholar from a historically Black university that does not have an art school, McClaurin has inspired my positionality within my artistic research interests. What sets McClaurin apart from other scholars and artists is her aura– during the lecture, one could not help but feel so empowered and inspired to start the projects that they have been postponing. This was the same case for me as well, I have been struggling to locate myself within my research interests. I have been consulting my lecturers and
various other people who could potentially inform my curatorial practices on the ‘how to’ curate and initiate the projects I have conceived in mind. McClaurin’s sense of assertion on the Black Feminist Archive has thus inspired me beyond these various engagements I have had with other scholars and artists. I have learnt that following the institutionalized ‘how to’ curate cannons only reiterates the gendered, heteropatriarchal terrains of artistic practices. And so countering these cannons as McClaurin has would provide what Alberta Whittle coins “ a way-ward strategy of curating” in which she asserts that ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ (referring to official institutions) is necessary
to the destruction and harmful patterns of contemporary arts (Whittle 2019). This notion of ‘biting the hand the hand feeds you’ as posited by Whittle involves engaging with communities and ordinary citizens in order to infiltrate and counter the cis-gender, white spaces in contemporary arts. McClaurin has in practice utilized this way-ward strategy of curating the Black Feminist Archive by preserving the material of Black women like miss Archie Henderson Jones, who will be 97 years old this year. According to McClaurin, miss Archie is an anthropologist whose work remains unpublished on academic journals and websites such as google scholar, academia and JSTOR because of her defiant approach to anthropology which deemed Black people as not worthy of research. By engaging with her material, the Black Feminist Archive aims
to bring to the fore her material on Black people whilst giving her agency and recognition at the same time. As a feminist scholar interested in recovering the ostracized narratives of queer folk from student protests such as the Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall Movements, I have been inspired by the Black Feminist Archive to ‘bite the hand’ by demonstrating agency for the queer student community through writing an arts-based research project that illustrates the contribution of queer folk on the movements. Reference list Whittle, A. 2019. Biting the Hand That Feeds You: A Strategy of Wayward Curating, Critical Arts, 33;6, 110-123 McClaurin, I. 2021. Black Women: Visible and Heard. Founding the Black Feminist Archive at UMass. The University of Massachusetts Amherst.