Why Building Emotional Resilience Is So Critical for African Americans

An African-American woman worries about her brother, husband, or son being stopped by the police. Or, for the millionth time, she is asked to explain her hairdo, while discouraging someone from touching her hair. Another story about racism goes viral. An African-American man, woman, or child is confronted with yet another stereotype they feel they have to dispel.

Life is stressful — everything from the mundane banality of your daily work routine, the demands of family life, balancing your budget, finding time to exercise or run errands, or have time face-to-face with friends can add pressure. And if you belong to a group that experiences discrimination, oppression, or marginalization, the mundane daily stressors of life can be exacerbated by the micro- and macro-aggressions that can come with that experience….

Who is ‘looting’ and who is ‘finding food’? How image gatekeepers shape the news

In August 2005, Alysia Burton Steele was just two months into her job as a photo editor on The Dallas Morning News when she decided to dispatch the photographer Irwin Thompson to New Orleans to document the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Her newspaper’s bold journalistic work went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2006. In this short interview, Burton Steele describes how her team approached their coverage of the storm and its aftermath, and discusses the telling disparity between how news outlets presented African Americans and white people affected by the tragedy. This video is part of Topic’s Frame by Frame series, in which ‘celebrated photojournalists explore images of the people and events that helped shape the American experience, and discuss how working with photographs impacts them personally’…