(Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Soledad O’Brien recently discussed modern journalism, social media, and her Black In America series at Harvard’s Institute of Politics with Callie Crossley, a Boston-area journalist with WGBH and producer of the documentary series Eye On The Prize, and had some very straightforward and colorful things to say about responding to criticism of her popular series.

“It was only white people who ever said that… If only we could see beyond race,” O’Brien says at one point in the video. “OK, white person, this is a conversation you’re clearly uncomfortable with,” O’Brien continues in her hypothetical conversation. LOL.

In the video, Soledad O’Brien also discusses some of the conditions of modern journalism, such as the impact of social media, which has its pros and cons, as demonstrated in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. The discussion is part of The IOP’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. You can watch the whole one-hour conversation online here.

You’ll recall that O’Brien was named Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2013-2014 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, in part to talk about just these issues. What’s interesting — and refreshing — is the candor with which she speaks about them.

UPDATE: With that in mind, O’Brien is taking her response a step further and says that a series called “White In America” is in the works. TVNewser quotes her saying, “As a journalist, my job is to probe the uncomfortable topics to drive conversation. I’m happy to see that’s still happening as a result of ‘Black In America,’ and I look forward to continuing that conversation as we continue to tell the stories of who we are. We’re not just working on BIA, but also developing a ‘White in America.’ Stay tuned for that one.”

She also takes a jab at the blogosphere for what she says are “ taking the conversation out of context and ginning up headlines” by calling out her previous comments.

Will you watch “White In America?”

Check out the clip below.

Eunice Kindred, a creative “jill-of-all-trades”

People love to add slashes to their titles, conveying they are double and triple threats. Nowadays it can get a little gratuitous, reflecting ego more than experience. That’s not the case with Eunice Kindred. She’s a true renaissance woman bringing her love for art, music, and dance into her creative expression. She’s an artist, a DJ, a choreographer, and a dance instructor, on top of holding down a full-time position as an art director for a major advertising agency in New York City.

That may sound like a heavy load. But Kindred finds every aspect of her life enriches another. “It’s good to have all these influences because I never know what I can pull from to come up with an idea,” she says. “Being involved with so many different things gives me a richer background to pull from… Managing all of it can be a challenge, but I do what I love.”

Raising And Rebuilding An Artist

Kindred has been a multifaceted creative for as long as she can remember. Blame her father’s boom box blasting in the delivery room. When people outside of her family expressed concern that little Eunice should focus on one thing, her parents always encouraged her to pursue what she loved, whatever it was.

She found appreciation for her paintings early on, selling pieces for over $1000 as a high school student before attending Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies program. After college she pursued graphic design professionally, only recently deciding to dive back into the art world. But New York galleries weren’t so anxious to welcome her into the fold.

“They saw me as a new artist when in reality I’ve been painting for so many years,” she said. “It was kind of like starting from scratch, but it was humbling to have to know all the stuff I had to change to be successful. Finding galleries to accept my work and even the process of pitching [my work] was new to me.”

Source: Manhattaninfidel.com

Barack Obama’s position as the first black president of the United States has certainly exposed a lot about how our society truly feels about race and politics, and in an effort to make sense of it all, legal analyst, author, and professor Charles Ogletree has developed a course on “Understanding Obama” at Harvard University’s Law School. According to Mediaite, the course will go as follows:

“This reading group will focus on the way in which race, religion, and politics have impacted the development of President Obama as a leader. We will explore his views as a biracial child, his time as a student at Harvard Law School, the successes and failures of his political campaigns, and the way religion and his views on faith nearly derailed his campaign. Finally, time will be spent analyzing the challenges he faces as president of the United States in establishing both his domestic and global policies.”

Ogletree, who was a mentor to the President and First Lady during their time at Harvard Law, told The Daily Caller that the class will touch on both negative and positive aspects of Obama’s political career.

“They’ll be reading both critical and positive issues about Obama — of what’s happened in terms of the way the race and religion have been viewed during his candidacy, his presidency, and how it affects the larger country; and some other classic reading on issues of law and justice.”

Ogletree said his personal feelings about Obama will not be a part of the curriculum, but he did say,  “I’m an Obama fan, I love the president — love him and his wife. They were wonderful people to serve as a mentor when they were here in the law school at separate times in the 1980s. There’s a lot to learn.”

Perhaps this course will open student’s eyes on how having a black president has and has not made us a post-racial society. What do you think about this course idea?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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When you’re in a relationship you share a lot of experiences and emotions together, but the expressions that matter most to each gender are actually pretty different. A new study found that while men value being able to pick up on their girlfriend’s happiness, women were more satisfied when their partner understood that they were angry or upset. According to the study’s lead author, Shiri Cohen, PhD, of Harvard Medical School:

“It could be that for women, seeing that their male partner is upset reflects some degree of the man’s investment and emotional engagement in the relationship, even during difficult times. This is consistent with what is known about the dissatisfaction women often experience when their male partner becomes emotionally withdrawn and disengaged in response to conflict.”

In the study of 156 heterosexual married and non-married couples, participants were videotaped describing an incident with his or her partner over the past couple of months that was particularly frustrating and then the couples were brought together to listen to and watch each other’s statements. The couples were given 10 minutes to discuss the issue and try to come to a better understanding of what had happened while the researchers videotaped them. Following the discussions, the participants viewed the videotape and simultaneously rated their negative and positive emotions on an 11-point scale from “very negative” to “neutral” to “very positive.”

Using these ratings, the researchers selected six 30-second clips from the videotape that had the highest rated negative or positive emotions by each partner. The researchers showed the clips to the participants and had them complete questionnaires about their feelings during each segment as well as their perceptions of their partner’s feelings and effort to understand them during the discussion. They also measured the participants’ overall satisfaction with their relationships and whether each partner considered his or her partner’s efforts to be empathetic.

For men, their satisfaction in the relationship was directly related to their ability to read their female partner’s positive emotions correctly. But women were more satisfied not only when they understood that their partner was upset but also when their partner understood that they were upset, as opposed to happy. Men on the other hand, preferred that their partner pick up on their happiness rather than their bad mood, which the authors say suggests that being empathetic to a partner’s negative emotions may feel threatening to the relationship for men but not for women.

I think we’ve all been guilty of moping around with the silent treatment and wanting a man to pick up on what’s wrong and cater to our bad mood rather than having to say outright, I’m mad about this or that. We typically view that expression as a positive sign of his love and our connectedness, but this study shows we should be just as satisfied when a man picks up on our good vibes too. I’d also be more concerned with him understanding why I’m upset.

Does your man have trouble picking up on when your upset or frustrated or do you just tell him how you feel outright?

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Source: The YBF.com

We’ve known for some time now that Tyra has been somewhat out of the limelight as she pursued her education at the prestigious Harvard Business School.

Well, now she’s finished!

Tyra’s photographer mother took a picture to celebrate the occasion.

Get more info about Tyra’s accomplishment and what’s next for her at Hello Beautiful.com.

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Who would’ve guessed Tatyana Ali was a stepper in college—and at Harvard of all places—but it’s true. The young actress and Harvard grad, class of 2002, recently talked about what it’s like to be black in the Ivy Leagues, and she says it’s not at all like you’d expect.

Watch the video on TheUrbandaily.com and tell us what you think. Is her description of black life on an Ivy league campus pretty accurate from your experience?

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(AP) — Every semester, Cheryl Carpenter tries to think of new ways to introduce Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” to her college students.  An English instructor at Alabama A&M, a historically black college in Normal, Ala., Carpenter said students sometimes are confused about the setting and context of the 1937 novel about an independent black woman’s quest for identity.  But after listening to Temple University history professor Bettye Collier-Thomas talk at a Harvard University program how she dove into dusty attics and forgotten archival material to research her book on black women leaders, Carpenter said she immediately came up with ideas to recreate visual scenes through her lectures.  Carpenter and around two dozen college teachers from around the country are participating this month in a Harvard program aimed at training professors to integrate more black history into their classrooms and research projects.

Read More…

By J. Smith

As it turns out, corporate America’s elite boys club is thriving in our “post-racial” society, and it is just as exclusive now as it was before diversity programs were instituted to pacify the public and boost Wall Street’s image when it is convenient. To qualify for said club, you only need to do a few things: be white, be a man, graduate from an Ivy League school (Harvard, though. Not Brown) and play sports that “resonate with white, upper-middle-class culture,” CNN reports. Many franchise owners wouldn’t be caught dead with a basketball; lacrosse and squash is the sport of choice for those seated in the skyboxes. Basketball and football is for the people sitting on the cold, hard bleachers.

While conventional wisdom, via the “American Dream”, leads one to believe that anyone can rise to any level of accomplishment with hard work, CNN’s report wonders who, exactly, is the American Dream fooling.

Sociologist Lauren Rivera conducted the study, and she found that “elite professional service employers rely more on academic pedigree than any other factor. For recruiters, it’s prestige that counts, rather than ‘content’ like grades, courses, internships or other actual performance. That’s because if you got into a ‘super-elite’ school – which essentially means Harvard, Yale, Princeton Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) and Stanford – you must be smart.” Or, as is commonly the case, you must have well-connected parents.

The study suggests that competence not completely necessary for many of the well-paying and highly sought after careers. An Ivy League pedigree will get one much farther than being on any silly Dean’s List ever could.

The cycle continues.

By Charlotte Young

A new study of capital sentences proves what has always been suspected—there is a racial bias against minority defendants who kill whites.

According to Freakonomics, the study, conducted by Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and Universita’ Bocconi’s Eliana La Ferrara, looked at the race of defendants and victims for capital appeals in the U.S. between 1973 and 1995.

Using the key feature that all first degree capital sentences are automatically appealed in the U.S., the researchers then narrowed their observation to the original court errors and sentencing that higher courts later reversed. Alesina and La Ferrara’s findings are based on the assumption that in order to improve the lower court’s findings, they had to remove part or all of the racial bias involved in the case.

Their conclusion: sentences handed down for minority defendants who killed white victims are nine percent more likely to see that sentence reversed than in cases where a minority victim killed another minority victim.

Alesina and La Ferra’s results also varied by region; the South had the largest difference in error in cases where a minority defendant received a capital sentence that was appealed and reversed at 15.5 percent.

By Charlotte Young

Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump has a new job that he’s taking very seriously–berating President Obama.

The New York Daily News reports that Trump has moved from voicing his suspicions that Obama was not born in the states to declaring that Obama was a poor student who was unqualified to attend both Columbia and Harvard University.

The “Apprentice” host says he knows plenty of smart students that did not get into Harvard. He also makes mention of Obama’s 2008 campaign, which did not release his college transcripts, as indication that the President has something to hide. He told the Associated Press that he heard Obama was “a terrible student,” and asks, “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

Well Trump, the answer is simple: they don’t. Terrible students also don’t take on the role of president of the Harvard Law Review and they certainly don’t graduate magna cum laude.

The recent accusations may have gotten him a bit of attention, but a USA Today/Gallup survey reveals his support is dwindling. Half of Americans say they believe Trump would make a “poor” president. Sixty-four percent say they simply would not vote for him.

Looks like Trump’s presidential bid is stretching thin–just like his hair.