【Native Speaker每日训练计划】No.2851文史哲

verapancake

内容：Inge Zhou 编辑: Vera Pan

Wechat ID: NativeStudy  / Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

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Part I: Speaker

How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time
Baratunde Thurston, April 2019

Baratunde Thurston explores the phenomenon of white Americans calling the police on black Americans who have committed the crimes of ... eating, walking or generally "living while black." In this profound, thought-provoking and often hilarious talk, he reveals the power of language to change stories of trauma into stories of healing -- while challenging us all to level up.

Source: TED
https://www.ted.com/talks/baratunde_thurston_how_to_deconstruct_racism_one_headline_at_a_time
[Rephrase 16:50]

Part II: Speed

The ADA Was a Monumental Achievement 30 Years Ago, but the Fight for Equal Rights Continues
- A look back at the fight for disability rights comes with the reckoning of the challenges left unsolved
Nora McGreevy, July 24th 2020

[Time 2]
For disability rights leader Judy Heumann, the tumult of 2020—first the COVID-19 pandemic, then a reignited movement against racial injustice—underscores just how much work remains to be done.

“Everything’s kind of being thrown into the pot right now, right?” she says.

Heumann has been at the forefront of the fight for equality for disabled Americans. She relishes the hard-won successes but has no misconceptions about how looking back at 30 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed on July 26, 1990, much progress still has to be made.

That day, the United States became the first country to pass comprehensive protections for the basic civil rights of people with disabilities, outlawing discrimination against individuals with disabilities in schools, employment, transportation and other key parts of public life. The ADA would also remake the physical environment of the country by mandating accessibility in public spaces—entry ramps, Braille on signs, automatic doors, curb cuts and lifts on city buses and other measures that make it easier for the more than 61 million Americans living with disabilities to participate fully in society.

Heumann, who contracted polio as a baby and has used a wheelchair most of her life, grew up in Brooklyn, where the local public school refused to let her attend because of her disability. Protections for the civil rights of people with disabilities in those days were limited—neither the 1964 Civil Rights Act nor the 1965 Voting Rights Act had included people with disabilities as a protected class.
[254 words]

[Time 3]
Her first foray into activism came in 1970, when Heumann sued the Board of Education of the City of New York to become the city’s first teacher who uses a wheelchair. She later moved to Berkeley, California, where she worked alongside activist Ed Roberts at the Center for Independent Living, a pioneering home for people with disabilities founded on the principles of community and self-empowerment.

A handwritten sign with black letters on white background, which reads "Sign 504 Now!" The "O" is a person sitting in a wheelchair, holding a smaller sign that says "Now!"
Protester Ken Stein made this poster during the historic 504 sit-in at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare offices in San Francisco. The sit-in lasted more than 25 days. (Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

In 1977, she, fellow activists Kitty Cone, Brad Lomax and others led a grueling sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco to demand that the government enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which stated that federally funded organizations could not discriminate against people with disabilities. (The new Netflix documentary Crip Camp, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, includes inspiring documentary footage of the protest.)
[197 words]

[Time 4]
The 504 sit-in united Americans with different kinds of disabilities—people who were hearing or visually impared, or who used wheelchairs or had mental disabilities—in an unprecedented way, Heumann says. “It empowered us,” she recalls. “Simply put, we were slowly moving from being a rag-tag, unorganized group of disabled people … to a cross-disability movement. We were really recognizing that it was possible for us to envision a day when barriers of discrimination could be torn down… Without the voices of disabled individuals, we would not have gotten 504, the way it ultimately came out, nor would we have been able to get the ADA.”

When President George H.W. Bush finally signed the ADA in 1990, he was flanked by some of the key people who helped its passage, including Justin Dart Jr., the vice chair of the National Council on Disability, who had embarked on an epic nationwide tour to advocate for the legislation just years earlier.

On a sunny day on the White House south lawn, President George Bush sits at a table and signs the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act into law. On his right sits Evan Kemp, who uses a wheelchair. To his left, Justin Dart Jr., who wears a cowboy hat.

“When it was passed and signed, there was a huge ceremony because it was seen as this amazing national moment, even though the law was imperfect,” says Katherine Ott, the curator in the division of science and medicine at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “At the moment, it was one of the happiest days in the 20th century for people with disabilities.”

In the three decades that followed, a new generation of Americans with disabilities, known as the “ADA generation,” grew up in a world where their basic rights were protected by the law. But the ADA has its limits.
[309 words]

[Time 5]
Thirty years later, experts say that many of the ADA’s promises of universal accessibility have not come to pass—in part because laws like Section 504 and the ADA are predicated on someone litigating, explains Beth Ziebarth, who directs Access Smithsonian, the branch of the Smithsonian Institution that works to make its museums, zoo and research centers accessible to all.

“The mechanism for actually implementing the ADA, in many respects, is the process of somebody with a disability filing a complaint about the lack of accessibility,” Ziebarth says. “That leads to spotty compliance across the country.”

For instance, Heumann notes that air travel—an industry not covered by the ADA—has become “worse and worse” for people with disabilities over the years, particularly when it comes to getting motorized wheelchairs in and out of cargo pits. Technology companies, too, often lag behind in providing accessibility measures for users with disabilities—contributing to what’s known as the “digital divide,” she says.

“The ADA is a very important piece of legislation. But even if it were being implemented as effectively as possible, it still doesn’t address other issues that disabled people are facing,” Heumann says.

A white button with black text that reads, "I [red heart symbol] the ADA."
"I love the ADA" button, circa 1990s (Smithsonian National Museum of American History)
Issues of representation for all people with disabilities—and particularly people of color—are now more a part of the conversation than ever. When protests against racial injustice erupted across the country in May after the killing of George Floyd, many disability activists were quick to point out how issues of disability rights and civil rights for African Americans are interconnected, and sometimes overlooked. Studies estimate that one-third to one-half of black Americans killed by the police are experiencing episodes of mental illness or have a disability, although no national database exists to track those statistics, as reporter Abigail Abrams reported for Time last month.
[325 words]

[Time 6]
In June, South Carolina-based disability rights activist Vilissa Thompson watched snapshots of the Black Disabled Lives Matter marches in Washington D.C. flood her timeline. “It was really incredible to see,” Thompson says.

At 34 years old, Thompson, who is black and uses a wheelchair, feels lucky to have grown up with the ADA. But the disability movement must also reckon with racism, inclusivity and an intersectional understanding of race and disability, she says.

“If you’re going to talk about black liberation or freedom, disability rights have to be involved in the story, and vice versa,” Thompson says.

On her website, Ramp Your Voice, Thompson has written extensively about black leaders in the Disability Rights Movement whose stories are often left out of the historical narrative, activists like Brad Lomax, who played a pivotal role in the 504 Sit-In by connecting activists with the Black Panther Party, which provided hot meals to the people stuck in the federal building.

In 2016, Thompson started the hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite to draw attention to media stories that center white disabled people, which continues to be used to this day: “We have to understand that black disabled folks have always been a part of both movements, the disability rights movement and the civil rights movement, whether they get acknowledgement or not,” she says.

Apart from the noteworthy anniversary, the ADA made news over a conflation of who and what the ADA specifically protects. A fake badge appropriating the ADA as an excuse to avoid wearing face masks—a claim that the Department of Justice disavowed—has blossomed on Facebook and Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Inappropriate use of the ADA is not uncommon,” Thompson says. “It’s upsetting that people are using the ADA in this way to avoid responsibility and what they can do during this time. It’s a grotesque misuse of the mandate.”

Individuals with disabilities who also have underlying chronic illness are likely at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19, and those living in nursing homes or institutions face higher risks of transmission, Heumann points out. Workers with disabilities have also been disproportionately affected by the financial fallout of the national shutdown, according to initial studies.

The pandemic also brought deep-rooted disparities in medical care against people with disabilities to the fore: in March, for instance, disability rights groups in Washington and Alabama filed complaints against state ventilator rationing plans, as Minyvonne Burke reported for NBC News at the time. These plans suggested that medical professionals could chose to not use ventilators on patients with disabilities in the case of a shortage.

“It was shades of the eugenics issue all over again,” Ziebarth says, referring to the long history of forced sterilization and euthanasia that Americans with disabilities endured, particularly in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. “That’s kind of a scary reality: we’re not far away from everything going back to where it was in the early 1900s.”

For Ziebarth, it reveals how fragile hard-won progress can be. “We realize that it’s really important for the younger generations to understand that your rights can be taken away from you,” Ziebarth says. “We need to be vigilant. Otherwise we can lose everything that people fought so hard for.”
[537 words]

Source: Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-30-years-since-signing-americans-disabilities-act-180975409/

Part III: Obstacle

5 Takeaways From Taylor Swift’s New Album, folklore

Sam Sodomsky, July 24th 2020

[Paraphrase 7]
The way Taylor Swift tells it, folklore arrived in a rush of inspiration. “It started with imagery,” she wrote on Instagram. “Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.” Less than a year after 2019’s Lover, it marks a departure from the sharp, radio-friendly pop music that Swift spent the past decade-and-a-half building toward. It is a quiet, personal, and moody record that ranks among her most striking and affecting work. And if it sounds like a surprise, that’s because it was.

The 16-song album was announced with little fanfare just a day before its release. “Most of the things I had planned for the summer didn’t happen,” she wrote in a statement, “but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.” Created in (relative) isolation, the credits include familiar names like Jack Antonoff and recording engineer Laura Sisk. But Swift also brings in new voices, with a focus on the indie world. Among her new collaborators are three members of The National: drummer Bryan Devendorf and multi-instrumentalists Bryce and Aaron Dessner, with the latter co-writing or producing 11 songs. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver also appears, co-writing and lending vocals to the ballad “exile.” The result is meditative, unlike anything Swift has done while highlighting her defining characteristics as a writer. Here are a few things that stand out.

Are We Out of the ’80s?
Before the release of 2014’s 1989, Taylor Swift mentioned that she was revisiting the pop music of her birth year for inspiration. This represented a few major shifts from her acoustic, country-leaning early work: a turn away from those intimate narratives toward more universal themes accompanied by glittery, arena-ready arrangements. These fascinations carried over into 2017’s reputation and 2019’s Lover, but folklore is subtle and intricately orchestrated, full of lyrics that feel newly refined. In “seven,” she sings about memories passed down “like a folk song,” and the comparison makes sense. Her tone is sparse and direct but untethered to what we’ve come to expect from Taylor’s quiet side.

Miss Americana
While folklore feels like a left turn from Swift, both in its haunted sound and its complete dismissal of her previous album rollouts (no polarizing first single! no brand partnerships!), it also feels like a continuation of one side of her songwriting. From the slow-build ballads of Speak Now to last year’s Golden Globe-nominated Cats song “Beautiful Ghosts,” Swift has always been interested in capturing the explosive realizations from the heat of the moment as much as the lingering discomfort that arises in the aftermath. The music here is threadbare and nuanced, following her thoughts to these lonely corners and adding new depth: In “mirrorball,” a winding pop melody is paired with a pitter-pattering drumbeat, so hushed in the mix it sounds like a secret.

Teardrops on My Piano
Folklore is a long album—16 songs in just over an hour—but it is also deeply focused. Many of the songs are sung at the piano, with deep silences between each note. The instrument is occasionally played by the National’s Aaron Dessner, and the mood suggests that Swift is a fan of the band’s somber “Pink Rabbits” ballads more than their “Mr. November” singalongs. And while her previous piano ballad highlights—like, say, her performance of “All Too Well” at the 2014 Grammys—used the instrument for grand climaxes, she’s less interested in catharsis than mood here. In “peace,” which features one of her best-ever vocal performances, she sings over subtle ribbons of guitar and twinkling keys, asking for the “silence that comes when two people understand each other.” A similar sense of intuition guides these songs.

Sad, Beautiful, Tragic Love Affairs
While Reputation hinged on a healthy relationship that saved Taylor Swift from a public backlash, and Lover explored the comforts of long-term commitment, folklore is less specific in its portraits of couples. Songs arrive from multiple points of view, from the righteous anger at an ex and his new partner in “mad woman” (“Every time you call me crazy/I get more crazy”) to the secret, and likely doomed, lovers in “illicit affairs.” “It’s born from just one single glance,” she sings, “but it dies and it dies and it dies a million little times.” She has even mentioned a trilogy of songs on the record that explore the same story from each person’s perspective; she referred to it as the “Teenage Love Triangle,” a common theme of her early work, but her treatment of it now feels like a clear evolution.

The Stories of Taylor
“When I was young I knew everything,” Swift sings in the album’s first single “cardigan.” In some ways, her lyrics on folklore recall the narrator of early releases like Fearless and Speak Now. Back then, the objects of affection (and otherwise) were given names and backstories: your Dear Johns and Hey Stephens. The apparently autobiographical homeowner’s narrative of “the last great American dynasty” and the childhood retrospection of “betty” both feel cut from this cloth. In “invisible string,” she reflects on all the men who broke her heart and inspired songs: “Now I send their babies presents,” she laughs. “I created character arcs and recurring themes that map out who is singing about who,” Swift told her fans, and the album will likely rank among the most analyzed in her deep, self-referential, and constantly evolving songbook.

Lyrical Folklore:
“I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere/Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here” — “this is me trying”
“Does a scorpion sting when fighting back?/They strike to kill/And you know I will” — “mad woman”
“Leaving like a father/Running like water/When you are young they assume you don’t know anything” — “cardigan”
“Bold was the waitress on our three-year trip/Getting lunch down by the Lakes/She said I looked like an American singer”— “invisible string”
[975 words]

Source: Pitchfork
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/5-takeaways-from-taylor-swifts-new-album-folklore/

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