Category: Trending

A rapper named Dela Wesst, who has over half a million TikTok followers, has accused Cardi B of stealing lyrics from her (for Offset’s “Clout” and Blueface’s “Thotiana (Remix)”). Cardi was having none of that.

Yesterday, Wesst shared a video in which she accuses Cardi of plagiarizing lyrics, avoiding the subject, and needlessly bringing her child into the conversation. Cardi decided to offer a lengthy response in the form of multiple tweets, starting with, “First of all you weird ass b*tch u been trying me for hot minute .You really cross the line when u stalkin my fans page and put this sh*t on a pic of me & my kid .SO YES THATS I’m bringing my kid.” The tweet included a screenshot of a post in which Wesst criticized Cardi and used a photo of her and Kulture.

Cardi then went on to outline the timeline of when she wrote her lyrics, saying they came before Wesst’s.

After making her points, Cardi said, “Sooooo stop WITH YOUR SH*T .Never Hurd about you b4 you started using my name for tic too .Stop chasing clout and chase a bag and a dentist like I DID SIS !”

Wesst responded, “Starting a record in January does not mean you finished that record in January. I clearly wrote this the day before you debuted it the internet. I didn’t hear the section of the song THAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT. I am also not hearing by any ‘CLOUTS’ in the verse.” Cardi fired back, “jUsT cAUsE yOu sTArTED the song iN jAnUARy don’t mean you finished it THEN WTF IS THIS THEN B*TCH ! Sit down you weirdo clown .Talkin about you coulda dm me BITCH did you dm b4 you did like ten videos of me poppin sh*t? Or them 30 tweets about me talkin sh*t?”

When a Cardi fan pointed out that Wesst gained more followers during their exchange, Cardi noted, “Only people that follows her is people that hate me .You could me a murderer a KKK if you HATE CARDI B they will be on b*tches page like YOU SO AMAZING ,Queen ,talent,you so smart Same sh*t different person.”

Wesst answered, “You clearly were LISTENING TO RESPOND & not LISTENING TO COMPREHEND. The lyrics from CLOUT are almost IDENTICAL to my lyrics in Thotiana. So, you genuinely proved nothing to me.” Cardi responded, “You posted your lyrics on the other post it said February 6 my lyrics are from January 9th ..Goodbye sweety your DISTURB.Clout chase from somebody else.CLOWN now go do a video about THAT!”

Cardi then closed the proceedings, “That was fun! …I’m getting off the internet for a couple days see ya when I see yaaa …..BYEEEETAAAAAAAA.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Much like Samuel L. Jackson, Will Ferrell has delivered many instantly-quotable lines over the years, including “It’s so damn hot, milk was a bad choice” from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, “So many activities!” from Step Brothers, and “You sit on a throne of lies!” from Elf (not to mention dozens of classic SNL sketches, including arguably the show’s most famous sketch). But the line he hears the most, shouted by the same strangers who tell SLJ to hold onto his butt, comes from a movie he’s barely in.

When asked about his appearance in Wedding Crashers (directed by David Dobkin, the same guy who did Netflix’s goofy, glorious Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga), specifically the line where he screams for his “Ma” to get him some meatloaf, Ferrell told CinemaBlend, “Who would have known that a one-day cameo would have led to one of the lines that has consistently been shouted at me more than any other line?” Just wait until he starts hearing “play Ja Ja Ding Dong!!!!!!!!!” wherever he goes.

Ferrell was also questioned about his involvement in Wedding Crashers 2, which has been in development since 2016. “It’s Wedding Crashers 2: Divorce Court. It’s going to be a drama, it’s going to be a courtroom drama,” he joked. Make room on our top-10 list!

(Via CinemaBlend)

The album art for Pop Smoke’s posthumous album was revealed yesterday. However, it didn’t take long for Smoke’s label to reconsider it and promise to make a change following widespread backlash.

Steven Victor, head of Victor Victor Worldwide, shared the cover on Instagram and wrote, “you were always shootings for the stars and aiming for the moon. everything we talked about is happening, the only thing is you’re not here in the flesh to see it all come together. you wanted Virgil to design your album cover and lead creative.. Virgil designed the album cover and led creative.. we love you and miss you more and more each day.”

Shortly after the cover was posted, it was widely ridiculed. The reactions on social media were not kind, and a petition to have the art changed currently has over 18,000 signatures. The petition, titled “Change Pop Smokes Album Artwork,” reads simply, “Virgil deadass was wild lazy with Pop Smokes Album cover and he needs to fix it.”

Victor caught wind of the backlash and promised the art would be changed, writing in a series of tweets, “H E A R D YOU. B R B. MAKING A CHANGE. POP WOULD LISTEN TO HIS FANS!”

For now, it remains to be seen what Abloh will come up with next, or if the new art will perhaps be made by somebody else.

Unsolved Mysteries ran for 14 years after launching (with pilot host Raymond Burr and Robert Stack following as full-time host and the face of the series) in 1987. In the process, the show danced from NBC to CBS, Lifetime, and Spike TV, and much of it now sits on streaming platforms (including the Stack episodes on Amazon Prime and a season over on Hulu) for the nostalgic taking. Those cold cases chilled and thrilled, depending upon context and whether a taste of the paranormal (as with segments like “Queen Mary Ghost Ship”) was involved, but the series consistently captivated the true crime-buff audience. Netflix is reviving the show, which should be an interesting experiment, given that their audience has recently inhaled true-crime fare like Making a Murderer, Mindhunter, and multiple Ted Bundy-focused entries.

Clearly, Netflix has the audience for slightly heady, fully digestible crime fare, so it feels like a no-brainer to churn out some new Unsolved Mysteries, although there’s always a risk involved when one fiddles with nostalgia. To start, the streamer’s dropping a six-episode batch (with more to come) that’s landing on July 1, and the good news is that this update should satisfy fans of the original and newcomers alike.

That last group feels necessary to mention but maybe a little bit absurd. Do any viewers exist who are predisposed to enjoy this revival but who have never seen an episode of the original series? Well, probably not. What’s important, though, is that the show feels familiar but refreshed, given that not only the original creators (Cosgrove/Meurer Productions) are onboard but also the Stranger Things production company (21 Laps Entertainment). You might think that the latter credit would up the ante on the supernatural references, but that’s not the case. So far, this revival is maintaining a healthy variety of cases with at least one heel grinding into reality most of the time.

Then there’s the formula of the original series to consider. As always, the franchise is dealing with mysteries that remain, by their very definition, unsolved. And again, the show heavily focuses upon stories of missing loved ones and/or strange paranormal encounters, all explained by family members, detectives, and journalists. Yet some structural differences exist, which may or may not go too well with viewers:

(1) Each hour-ish-long episode deep-dives into one mystery rather than a breezy treatment of four (give or take one) of them.

(2) No hosts shall be found, which is a bit of a bummer; admittedly, one can’t imagine replacing Stack without inevitable criticism in the aftermath, so that gig may have been a hot potato for worthy candidates.

(3) Updated and polished production values mean that the revival looks better.

I didn’t mind the differences. Especially with the lack of a host, that shift doesn’t feel strange; it’s as if Robert Stack’s ghost is already looming over the revival. The opening titles even end with a silhouette of Stack, who’s practically lurking in the shadows.

Crucially as well, the show pointedly sticks with expressing the wish — at the end of each episode — that anyone with knowledge of these cases reaches out at Unsolved.com. Keeping that signature touch might prove even more useful in 2020 than it did in the 1990s. The original series featured updates on past episodes where tips led to solving crimes, so maybe we’ll see more of that happening now. At least, I am hoping that the interconnectedness of 2020 will make a difference because some of these mysteries have boggled minds for nearly a decade. And they’re all google-able, should anyone wish to go more in-depth, beyond what’s shown onscreen.

The six episodes being released this week should prove encouraging for anyone who doubts that a revival’s possible. There’s everything from a UFO-focused episode to a case where a husband flees from his home and disappears, with subsequent clues maybe suggesting the involvement of a certain secret fraternal organization in the U.S. There’s also — and this is the crown jewel of the debut — an installment that crosses the pond to explore the gruesome Dupont de Ligonnès murders, for which a French count (and prime suspect) remains on the run. Other episodes explore cases where a victim’s employer or various family members may have committed heinous crimes. Let’s just say that the show’s committed to providing something to satisfy every true-crime buff, even if most of these episodes revolve around murder.

As with the original, Unsolved Mysteries can be a heavy viewing experience at times. That could have presented a tough roadblock when Netflix’s primary objective is often to provide a binge-worthy product. It’s a tricky balance, to keep episodes “consumable” while doing long-ish dives into research, respecting victims’ families, and compelling an audience. Clues, testimonials, and pleas all enter the mix; all parties are frustrated at their lack of closure. It gets a wee bit sensational at times, which strikes a different tone than the revolutionary I’ll Be Gone In The Dark on HBO, but the target audience is the same. These stories will stick around in one’s mind, come bedtime, and they are addictive. Netflix’s objective is to keep people streaming into the next episode, and with the revived Unsolved Mysteries, they nailed that goal.

Netflix’s ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ revival will premiere six episodes on July 1.

As the NBA’s Orlando bubble approaches, discussion persists on how COVID-19 might impact the proceedings. For the Brooklyn Nets, the endeavor was already a bit strange given the team’s (extreme) unlikelihood to make a real run in the NBA Playoffs, especially with both Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant unable to play for injury-related reasons. From there, the Nets will be without Wilson Chandler as they head to Florida and, on Monday, ace guard Spencer Dinwiddie announced that he is symptomatic after a positive COVID-19 test and his status for the restart remains uncertain.

On Monday evening, things became even more perilous for the Nets from a basketball standpoint, with veteran center DeAndre Jordan announcing that he will not be going to Orlando after a positive test.

Even without a positive test, it is impossible to blame any player for not wanting to participate in Orlando. That is particularly the case for players on teams that have no realistic chance to compete for championship glory, and the Nets now have endured a handful of positive tests, dating all the way back to Durant and others in March. In one frank tweet, Jordan announced that the Nets will be even more short-handed when the team takes the floor in the bubble.

Brooklyn does have Jarrett Allen to deploy as a starting center but, with Jordan and Chandler out, the team’s depth in the frontcourt is compromised. The Nets do have a cushion when pursuing a spot in the playoffs and there is at least some equity in making the postseason but, other than that, there isn’t a lot for Brooklyn to play for and Jordan is perhaps making the prudent decision as a result.

Sacha Baron Cohen pulled his latest prank over the weekend when he infiltrated a Three Percenters rally and made attendees happily sing racist lyrics about the coronavirus and other hot topics, even apparently duping organizers into letting him take care of security and other expenses to make it happen. But the prank wasn’t, as some assumed, a content-gathering mission for his Who Is America? series on Showtime; it was apparently just to make a viral point.

Baron Cohen made headlines on Sunday when video of his performance at a far-right rally surfaced. The event, held in Olympia, Washington and called ‘March for Our Rights 3,’ saw the comedian take the stage to perform a racist sing-a-long in which the audience seemed to gladly take part. A video of organizers explaining that someone apparently representing a political action committee — Baron Cohen — approached the group and donated funds to supply security forces that then prevented the group from taking the stage to stop Baron Cohen or turn his microphone off as he played.

There was speculation that the stunt was to provide ammunition for Season 2 of Who Is America? which caused a sir in 2018 when he duped O.J. Simpson, the NRA, Dick Cheney and others into speaking to him for his series lampooning the right. But as The Wrap reported Monday, that there aren’t any official plans to bring Who Is America? back for a second season.

A person familiar with “Who Is America?” production told TheWrap there are still no plans for a second season of the series, which aired in 2018. Baron Cohen has previously said he was not going to do another season of the satirical series, though Showtime had previously said it would more than a welcome one if he ever changed his mind.

It’s unclear if Baron Cohen had a film crew recording footage of the event to do just that, or if he just wanted to prove a point and had the resources to do so. But right now it’s clear, at least officially, that we won’t see the events of last weekend playing on Showtime anytime soon.

We plan to spend a lot of time outside this summer. Like a lot. It will be socially distanced and often with masks, but damn if we don’t need to get out of doors. Probably way more than any other summer of our collective adulthood thus far.

We’re not coming in at dark, either. That’s when we’ll sit around a campfire pretending that we actually know how to play the guitar (not having an audience during the quarantine makes this easier). And while we strum, we’re going to enjoy the great outdoors with a glass of whiskey in hand. Not just any whiskey. Floral notes and easy sippers. Exciting expressions that don’t conjure any winter vibes.

To pick the right expressions for the season, we asked a handful of our favorite bartenders to tell us the best whiskeys to drink outside this summer.

Ghost Coast Honey Flavored Whiskey

Bill Myers, bartender at Kimpton Brice Hotel in Savannah, Georgia

Ghost Coast honey flavored whiskey is a delicious bourbon blended with honey from the Savannah Bee Company that is perfect to sip by the water this summer. A gold medal winner from the 2018 SIP Awards, this product doesn’t have the artificially sweet taste that some other flavored whiskeys have. It is the perfect daytime sipper this season.

Pinhook Rye Whiskey

Sondre Kasin, principal bartender at Cote in New York City

Pinhook is a fairly new whiskey/bourbon producer that makes really cool products. If I were to sit by the lake or pool and enjoy a whiskey I would definitely go for a lighter and fresher style of whiskey. Pinhook Rye is definitely that! The rye has classic notes as black pepper, vanilla and caramel. However it also has this minty /green herb freshness, which for me is a perfect summer flavor. Also try it in cocktails, it works great in a mint julep.

Skrewball Whiskey

Sammy Norris, bartender at EVO Entertainment in Schertz, Texas

Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey. It is the perfect American infused whiskey. It’s great on the rocks or neat. I am a huge fan of the flavor profile.

Jim Beam Black

Jennifer Jackson-Keating, co-owner of Island Culture Tiki Bar in Pensacola, Florida

Jim Beam Kentucky straight bourbon is a great sipping whiskey for any occasion. The combination of new flavors including Madagascar bourbon vanilla bean, apple, peach and maple make for crowd pleasing options whether you’re drinking it straight or mixing it up. Our faves: Jim Beam Black Extra Aged and the new Jim Beam Peach which is sure to become a southern staple when mixed with iced tea.

Maker’s Mark Bourbon

Eva Al-Gharaballi, bartender for the Datz Restaurant Group in Tampa, Florida

For a sip of something after you take a dip in the pool or a lake this summer I would reach for Maker’s Mark. Maker’s has a very smooth finish that could easily be mixed with peach puree and some iced tea to cool you off after a swim.

Jameson Irish Whiskey

Dean Powers, restaurant and bar manager at Shore Lodge and Whitetail Club in McCall, Idaho

Personally, I like to drink something a little lighter and approachable during the summer months. Since I am a bartender at heart, Jameson is my anytime go to. It’s a little sweeter and goes down without a bite.

Old Hamer Straight Rye

Jacob Cantu, tasting room manager at West Fork Whiskey Co. in Indianapolis, Indiana

Old Hamer Straight Rye is perfect for hot summer days out on the lake. This historic whiskey recently resurrected by West Fork Whiskey Co. showcases a 45% corn, 51% rye, and 1% malted barley mash bill. Crafted in #4 char new American Oak barrels and aged approximately three years, this easy-drinking bourbon features hints of butterscotch with a pleasant finish.

Angels’ Envy Bourbon

Hayden Miller, head bartender at Bodega Taqueria y Tequila in Miami

Angel’s Envy has a nice smooth, almost sweet feel thanks to the port cask finish. Pairs well with the crisp air at water’s edge on a warm, summer day.

Writer’s Picks:

Elijah Craig Barrel Proof Bourbon

Summer evenings are perfect for Elijah Craig Barrel Proof. Once the sun goes down and a sweatshirt gets pulled over your tank top, you’ll be happy to have this warming, uncut, 12-year old slow sipping bourbon.

Ardbeg Wee Beastie

Campfires deserve to be paired with a smoky whisky. There are few better at making peat smoked Scotch whiskies than Ardbeg. One of the Islay distillery’s newest offerings is the sweet and smoky Wee Beastie. It’s matured in ex-bourbon casks and Oloroso sherry butts, it’s full of caramel sweetness, subtly briny salt, and pleasing peat smoke.

This one has the smoke but it’s not so overpowering as to overwhelm the senses.

I started Purpose Accelerator 2 days after I quit my job, 2 months after my mom died and 2 years after I graduated college.

Then, two weeks into the program I fell asleep on the subway and missed my stop. I ugly cried my entire walk back to the Airbnb as the gravity of everything that just changed settled in. They say you never become a true New Yorker until you’ve cried on the subway. I passed that rite of passage on the second week.

Everyone’s journey is different and I’ll explain why mine was so filled with tears. Hopefully you aren’t scared off by my emotional ride, but understand that the Purpose Accelerator program is just as much a personal exploration as it is professional. And like any journey, if you fall asleep, you might miss your stop.

When my mom died, I felt untethered. I was my mom’s main support for the last few years and for the last six years my life revolved around being there for her. Staying at home during college, I found work afterward in the city. I had plans to travel the world, work in China, go to law school, you name it, but my first priority was to be there for my mom. It was easier in a sense because I had narrowed all my potential stops to Portland’s geographic parameter.

Now, even the London tube was an option.

SO, COMPLETELY OUT OF THE BLUE, I CONTACTED JEFF, THE CO-FOUNDER OF PROJECT X.

I came across the Project X email newsletter and Jeff graciously responded to my unsolicited outreach. After our conversation, and with absolutely no original intent to do so, I quit my job and looked up New York’s subway system.

Coming to New York was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I needed time to process losing my mom and my sense of purpose and to bring some direction to my newly expanded map. The program gave me the space and the supportive community to explore those deeper questions of fulfillment, purpose, and living life with intention.

PEELING THE LAYERS

Jeff led activities that peeled back the layers of our ‘wants’ and ‘shoulds’ down to what truly matters to us. Then, we learned specific guidelines on how to better navigate those distilled needs.

Instead of 5- or 10-year plans, we learned that forecasting in three-month increments allows us to be more responsive to our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world. And a way to experiment with this world is via the MVPs (Minimally Viable Products). It’s the terrifying technique of simply throwing out our imperfect ideas into the world to see what happens.

Since VUCA and MVPs are basically different acronyms for anxiety, having a supportive community to navigate it all with was both disarming and empowering. The people I met and the community we created together became the most valuable aspect of this program to me. I developed new life-long friendships, partly because I got to know my cohort more intimately than some of my old friends. Hard not to, when you tell everyone your story on the second day.

Speaking of stories, the mentors that shared theirs and worked with us are FAB (fascinating, admirable, and bold). I made that one up. Their experiences challenged my thinking and inspired me to pursue life with greater ambition. I met with two mentors outside the program, and I have pages full of notes and insights from their stories and our conversations that I still reference regularly.

“Choices are in life’s moments. If you miss the moment, you miss your opportunity to make a choice.”

Now back in Portland, Oregon, I am still the quintessential millennial sitting in a coffee shop scouring the web for opportunities. But this time, I have guiding notes accompanying a wider but clearer map. My three-month plan has a starting point and I’ve decided not to add the Beijing Subway just yet.

Vibha Chokhani, a Purpose Accelerator mentor said to me, “Choices are in life’s moments. If you miss the moment, you miss your opportunity to make a choice.”

It all begins with awareness.

WE NEED TO BE AWARE IN THE PRESENT SO WE DON’T MISS OUR CHANCE TO CHOOSE THE LIFE WE WANT.

If we fall asleep, we might miss our stop.

Interested in learning more about upcoming Purpose Accelerator programs in New York and other cities? Leave your information below.

Three officers were fired this week from the Wilmington, North Carolina police department after dash cam footage revealed horrifically racist conversations between them.

But before we delve into that, let’s look at a brief timeline of select white supremacist incidents in police departments across the U.S.—and the FBI warning that came in the middle of them—to add some context to this story.

In 1991, a group of Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were discovered to be part of a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” known as The Vikings—membership that department officials knew about and did nothing to address.

In 1999, an unknown number of officers in three different Cleveland, Ohio police districts were found to have scrawled racist or Nazi graffiti throughout police quarters, including restrooms and locker rooms.

In 2001, two officers in Williamson County, Texas were fired after they were discovered to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2006, the FBI detailed the specific threat of white supremacists purposefully infiltrating police departments. Though largely (and frustratingly) redacted, an intelligence bulletin describes how white nationalists and skinheads try to blend into police departments by hiding their true beliefs (a practice known as “ghost skinning”) with the purpose of disrupting investigations into supremacist groups and recruiting other white supremacists.

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Moving right along, in 2014, a Florida deputy police chief and another officer were fired after an FBI informant outed them as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2015, a ProPublica article describing copious racist messages in a New York cop blog also pointed to other racist incidents around the same time in various U.S. cities’ police departments.

And now, here we are in 2020, watching three Wilmington, North Carolina officers lose their jobs after accidentally recording their blatantly racist and violent conversations.

This is by no means a full list, and North Carolina incident is by no means any less egregious than those that preceded it. In a routine review of dash cam footage, former officer Kevin Piner was heard talking to another officer about the protests for racial justice. He said the police department was only concerned with “kneeling down with the black folks.” He called a Black officer in his department “bad news” and a “piece of shit,” saying, “Let’s see how his boys take care of him when shit gets rough, see if they don’t put a bullet in his head.”

In a conversation with another officer later in the day, Piner called a woman he arrested the day before a “negro” and “n—-r.” He referred to a Black magistrate judge as “fucking negro magistrate,” saying, “She needed a bullet in her head right then and move on. Let’s move the body out of the way and keep going.”

As if that weren’t bad enough, the two officers talked about the possibility of a “civil war” coming, with Piner saying he was going to buy an assault rifle. “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fucking ni—–. I can’t wait. God, I can’t wait,” he said, followed by saying that such a war was needed to “wipe ’em off the fucking map. That’ll put ’em back about four or five generations.”

The full report of what was recorded can be found here.

And a news conference with the city council and the new Wilmington police chief, Donny Williams, who had to deal with this mess on his first day on the job:

There’s a lot of talk about implicit racial bias—racial prejudices that we don’t even know we have—in policing. While that’s an important consideration, we can’t overlook the fact that there are also actual white supremacists within some police departments. How many? No one knows. Those mentioned here are just some of the ones who have been caught and identified. But there have clearly been enough of them that the FBI felt the need to issue a bulletin about it and warn that it was a threat. And what was done with that information in that warning after it came out? Did police departments change the way they screen recruits or do a deep dive into their own ranks? Unclear.

No one is saying that all police officers are blatant white supremacists, obviously. But we’ve seen far too many stories of officers voicing white supremacist beliefs and far too many officers and officials turning the other way instead of outing them and ousting them.

In 2016, Samuel Jones, professor of law at Chicago’s John Marshall School of Law, told PBS News Hour that neither the FBI or police departments had established systems for vetting people for white supremacist ties.

“I cannot imagine that the FBI today could issue a report concerning any kind of threat without people being alarmed and wanting immediate action,” he said. “But in this case there seems to be almost an acceptance of it. The thought is ‘it’s just ideology and they have a right to believe this.'”

The problem is “just ideology” isn’t a small thing when we’re talking about people with the means, power, and authority to take people’s lives. A police officer cannot serve and protect the public if they believe that a large percentage of the public isn’t worth serving or protecting. No matter what our personal beliefs are about policing, we should at least all be able to agree on that.

We’ve been hearing about racism much more frequently the past several weeks, but it’s not because racism just appeared. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Racism is sewn into the fabric of America and it doesn’t always look like overt racism. In fact, it doesn’t even always look like the microaggressions that we feel or see on a daily basis. The language we use is filled with racism that we don’t even realize or see. I like to call this “sneaky racism.” It’s sneaky because it is spoon fed to every American from birth through death, and if you aren’t made aware so you can look for it, it will pass right by you, creating what’s known as implicit bias.

Implicit bias is something that we have little control over. It’s that snap judgment or quick tug in your belly that you equate to intuition or just feeling like you have a better understanding of a situation than you actually do. It’s subconscious in nature and we often don’t even know it’s happening.

In American media, we are fed these biases through our television programs, movies, books, newspapers, and news networks. It’s everywhere, and in order to truly get rid of racism and lower the rate of fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people, we need to seek out and eliminate sneaky racism. The type of implicit bias I’m referring to implies that Black and brown people are inherently dangerous.

Implicit bias is a vicious cycle that Americans are caught in and the first step to breaking the cycle is recognizing it when you see it. A great example is this image of a newspaper page from Mississippi, shared by Orlando Jezebel. The caption reads, “Does anyone else see it. Take all the time you need. #BLM.”

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Immediately I noticed the disparity between the two headlining stories. I’ll break it down in case it’s not immediately clear.

The photo of the white man is very small, and looks to be a school photo of some sort. His headline is tiny and he’s in the side margin of the paper. The writer of that piece continually refers to the man as a “teen” throughout the article, which technically is correct as the suspect is 19, but in contrast, Black teens and children are often referred to as men and women in articles (even 12-year-old Tamir Rice was referred to as “the Black male” in an interview with the officer who shot him). This particular man is also accused of murder, but you almost wouldn’t know that by the size of the story in comparison to the other headline sitting flush with this one sharing the same front page.

In the larger photo, we see a Black man who was accused of burglary. Throughout this article the man is referred to as a suspect. The article does not use a school photo, which I’m sure is somewhere publicly as most photos are nowadays; they chose to use an obvious mugshot with him donning an orange jumpsuit.

The way implicit bias is displayed in these articles is blatant if you know to look for it. It may not seem like it’s a big deal, but language matters. By using the term “teen” when describing the white suspect, you are humanizing him and providing him more innocence than the Black suspect. Teens are impulsive and make mistakes. They’re easily forgiven their flaws in the name of a second chance due to a teens inherent naivety.

When you use the term “suspect” it conjures the image of someone that is guilty, or likely guilty. It invokes a feeling of wrong doing with little benefit of the doubt. It’s also peculiar that the story on the burglary took up more of the page than the murder. This is also a play on our psyche, making the Black suspect appear more dangerous than the white suspect. Our eyes will automatically be drawn to the larger photo and headline. A school photo versus a mugshot also aids in altering our emotion for the white suspect, though he was the one accused of murder.

These things are sneaky. I would wager that the editor likely didn’t even notice the disparity. These biases are present in movies and television shows with Black and brown characters who are typically portrayed as maids, drug addicts, drug dealers, thugs, gang members, or someone who generally just needs help to navigate life because they’re somehow doing it all wrong until their fairer skinned counterpart comes to save the day. This problem is starting to be somewhat counteracted with more Black and brown writers being hired to shape some of our favorite shows, but the implicit bias is pervasive, and even Black writers can be guilty of the same biases as white writers since we have all been eating from the same media spoon our entire lives.

As the world continues to wake up from its long slumber and actively works to become anti-racist, I have hope that we can work together to call attention to these biases in media and fix them.