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Status Replies posted by richardmurray
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I admit this has me stumped. Majors was called guilty by a jury... he lost all his acting roles... now the woman whose claims led to said actions is retracting all of them... so were the producers wrong? was the jury wrong?
I don't comprehend what I will do if I was in his shoes. He didn't lose simply money... he lost a career? You can the only thing he gained is he knows exactly who his friends are now. But, he lost a career...
What do you do when someone cost you a career?
I learned about this from Steven Barnes, husband of Tananarive Due , of Lifewriting, who posited the following : If she settled, fine. If she lied, she need severe punishment
I don't know with this one. I admit, I would be angry, very angry. It seems majors just wants to move on which is very positive of him but... I would be angry.
“So she ruined Marvel for nothing”: Jonathan Majors Lost His Career and Lucrative Kang Role But Ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari Had a Change of Heart
Jonathan Majors' ex-girlfriend dismissed all assault and defamation claims, ending their legal battle that cost the actor his role as Kang in the MCU.Written by: Krittika
Reviewed by: Sayantan
updated November 22, 2024, 9:42 amSUMMARY
- Grace Jabbari dismissed her assault and defamation claims against Jonathan Majors in a surprising turn of events.
- The legal battle that led Majors to lose his high-profile role as Kang in the MCU finally came to an end.
- Netizens are furious and confused by Jabbari’s move, wondering the reason behind the legal drama that ruined Majors’ career.
After almost two years of chaos and legal battle that cost Jonathan Majors his career and reputation, the actor’s ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari raised eyebrows by surprisingly dismissing the federal lawsuit against him. Despite previously accusing Majors of assault and defamation, Jabbari recently put an end to their legal battle.
According to reports, attorneys for both parties asked the judge to dismiss all of Grace Jabbari’s defamation and assault claims against Jonathan Majors. Although this came as good news for the star, as it offered hope for his MCU return, netizens seemed enraged and baffled by the unnecessary drama, all this while.
Back in March 2023, Jonathan Majors’ life changed overnight, after his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari sued him for allegedly abusing her and starting an “extensive media campaign” to defame her (via USA Today). Thereafter, although 2023 was expected to be Majors’ breakout year, his arrest in March ruined every opportunity for him.
Soon, Jonathan Majors was dropped by his management and PR firms, as he ventured into lawsuits. Meanwhile, throughout the proceedings, although he denied all accusations and remained firm on his verdict that he had “never laid [his] hands on a woman”, a six-person jury found him guilty of assaulting Jabbari, in December 2023.
In the aftermath of the guilty verdict, Marvel fired Majors from his promising Kang role. Soon, not just his MCU role, but several other lucrative deals went out of his hand, as the entertainment industry wished to keep away from Jonathan Majors.
However, after such tumultuous drama and lawsuits that cost Jonathan Majors’ career, recent reports from Deadline revealed that Grace Jabbari dismissed the lawsuit on Thursday, November 21. Despite previously accusing him of assault and defamation, Jabbari filed a joint notice with Majors’ attorney stating that “all claims against Defendant” are dismissed.
Thereafter, as the sudden dismissal of Grace Jabbari’s lawsuit against Jonathan Majors hit social media, fans were left confused and frustrated, especially after the months of chaos ruined the actor’s career. Therefore, wondering about the reason behind the drama since March 2023, netizens took to X to express their rage
After a number of legal battles and public scrutiny, as Grace Jabbari unexpectedly dropped all charges against Jonathan Majors, people wondered if it was all for nothing. Although the dismissal of the lawsuit cleared Majors of all alleged charges, making him ready to return to the MCU, fans failed to wrap their heads around the reason behind the prolonged drama.
Now that all charges are dropped against Jonathan Majors, it remains to be seen what comes next for the actor. Considering that Marvel has dropped all hopes of making movies on Kang, now that Robert Downey Jr. is back to be the main baddie, only time will tell if Majors can reclaim his position in the MCU. -
The Last Day? stageplay
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1124559173
Authorization to Defend Humanity joint resolution
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1124555923
Abbreviated Timeline - The Last Day?
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1124557210 -
I quote the video below
2:18
Donald Trump is the best thing to ever
2:19
happened to America and I'm going tell
2:20
you why he don't hide his feelings he
2:23
don't hide his emotions he don't hide
2:24
who he is do you want somebody to hide
2:27
who they are no and Donald Trump doesn't
2:29
do yeah I love Trump let's
That quote is the prime issue, Schrumpf is rude, disrespectuful, backstaby, petty, not the brightest, crude, a liar, he has many negative traits but he has one that is sadly potent, he is true to himself.
People know Scrumpft is going to lie about hismelf, he is going to praise himself falsely, and he doesn't care for one people or another and he will sometimes tel the truth. But it is that bluntness that wins him.
Barrack Obama and Kamala Harris are the kind of black elected officials many black people are tired of. They went to one white school or another, they marry whites, they integrate to whites so mcuh , but then they want to suggest they are all in for black and when you look at their activities as elected officials they have never helped black.
TRANSCRIPT
0:00
Donald Trump was president was life
0:01
better life was a 100 times better and I
0:03
felt like the tip of the spirit was
0:04
sharp come on
0:05
now America this man Donald Trump is the
0:08
best thing that ever happened to America
0:10
and I'm going tell you
0:11
why money with Trump right let's go
0:13
money with Trump of course who you
0:15
voting for Trump yeah watch that because
0:18
we need to be Republican again I don't
0:20
know what they got to say about Trump
0:21
but I know what I got to say about I
0:23
with him excuse my
0:25
language hold on we going see that that
0:29
joint on yeah oh these My People by here
0:32
watch out 2024 now I got to put that on
0:35
for real do you think Camala would ever
0:36
come to this neighborhood who is that
0:40
[Music]
0:41
yes you want to make America great again
0:45
yeah make babyk
0:48
you let me
0:51
see yeah that's the look right there my
0:54
brother there you go Donal TR
0:56
essentially that America was in better
0:57
hands under Donald Trump so vote Trump
Fulton County Georgia
1:03
welcome to Fulton County Georgia
1:05
otherwise known as Atlanta it's one of
1:06
the most dangerous counties in all of
1:08
America it also votes overwhelmingly for
1:11
Democrats this place has seen better
1:13
days that's for sure how popular is the
1:16
Maga hat around here you wouldn't expect
1:18
it but Donald Trump did go to a
1:20
Chick-fil-A in this County he's also
1:22
being prosecuted in this County and this
1:24
is the county that gave us the legendary
1:26
Trump mug shot we rolled up in the Trump
1:29
rolls rooll with rapper forg aut blow to
1:32
hand out Maga hats in the hood today in
1:35
fton County let's see if the people of
1:37
fton County want a president with a mug
1:39
shot what's up guys we're out here in
The Setup
1:42
fton County with the Rolls-Royce full of
1:45
Maga hats 4G auto blow we're going to be
1:48
handing these hats out today and see the
1:50
reaction the fine people in Atlanta is
1:53
this Trump country let's go find out
1:55
boys Trump country baby West Side
1:57
Atlanta let's go who wants mag hat the
2:00
setup for the free Maga hat giveaway is
2:02
pretty simple we just parked the
2:03
Rolls-Royce on the curb and started
2:04
handing out hats instantly a crowd
2:07
formed and we ask a simple question why
2:11
are you voting for Donald Trump they are
The Video
2:13
for
2:14
you make America great again this man
2:18
Donald Trump is the best thing to ever
2:19
happened to America and I'm going tell
2:20
you why he don't hide his feelings he
2:23
don't hide his emotions he don't hide
2:24
who he is do you want somebody to hide
2:27
who they are no and Donald Trump doesn't
2:29
do yeah I love Trump let's
2:32
go you more money let's go Trump more
2:35
Mone with Trump right let's go more
2:36
money with Trump SCH man make sure you
2:39
go vote for with that hat you feel me
2:40
get my hat off my head keep pushing the
2:42
you know the knowledge of the kids in
2:43
the street vote
2:45
Trump there you go we not we not voting
2:48
Trump because it's a racist situation we
2:50
voting Trump because we believe in the
2:51
South and our gun rights right I'm
2:54
pro-life I think inflation was under
2:56
control during Trump it's time for
2:58
America to get back to being great and
3:00
know America was always great for black
3:02
folks Latino folks white folks ain't
3:03
nothing wrong with being pro Amer we
3:05
born here we raised here we ain't never
3:06
seen nothing else most of us these
3:08
neighborhoods American Heroes American
3:10
history why not you see artists
3:11
supporting things you supposed to do you
3:13
go to any other country around the world
3:14
they doing it why can't we love our
3:16
country why can't we hey make America
3:18
great again I'm a small business owner
3:20
you see my son in the car with me we
3:21
just dropped off of order we trying to
3:23
do business I love Atlanta this I love
3:25
this city some people vote blue some
3:27
people vote red me I have a right to say
3:29
hey I want to make America great again I
3:31
believe in Brotherhood I believe in
3:32
Sisterhood I believe in spirituality I
3:34
believe all the good things that made
3:35
this country great still exist back
3:37
before if Donald Trump ran for president
3:39
we all want to be like him and if you
3:40
say different you a
3:43
lie hey I'm I'm a Democrat you know what
3:45
I'm saying I've been Democrat for years
3:47
but she ain't making sense to me you
3:49
know she got to make sense to me she
3:50
ain't made no sense she ain't made her
3:52
policies Foundation she ain't made it
3:54
strong enough so I don't met with them I
3:55
hope Trump win that's put it like that
3:57
that I hope Trump win what do you think
3:58
about the Border I think what TR did
4:00
with the board what we needed I don't
4:01
like everybody coming over here you know
4:03
what I'm about cuz we can't do that in
4:04
their country they'll lock our up
4:07
they'll kill us Trump what's up Trump I
4:09
get you a MAG hat you want a mega hat my
4:11
brother for sure I don't know what they
4:13
got to say about Trump but I know what I
4:14
got to say about I with him excuse my
4:18
language can't you one right there my
4:20
man thank you yeah y'all want a hat free
4:22
hat love he for the community community
4:24
for the people for the people help
4:26
people get money care about people right
4:27
Trum 2024 trun 2024 2024 over with I
4:31
like America I want America to be great
4:33
he says he's going to do it so hey I'm
4:35
putting my word in him yeah man Trump
4:37
man WOTE Trump man make America great
4:38
tell tell me the reason why you just
4:39
said though oh Trump like that money he
4:41
ain't RAC it man make America great
4:43
again make America Rich again America
4:46
great again man vote for Trump look at
4:48
that Trump 2024 I already voted yeah
4:52
look man you voted Trump I voted Trump
4:54
you know I voted Trump man who better
4:57
than to run a country than a businessman
4:58
when when the country you know what I'm
5:00
saying but I just don't want to see that
5:02
woman in office at all not because she's
5:04
a woman just because of her track
5:05
history I'm saying she done locked up
5:07
too many black men as a prosecutors so
5:09
she'll never get my vote I'm Trump all
5:11
day I own a black truck company anybody
5:13
voting for Trump call me free rid to the
5:15
voting booth if you voting for Trump if
5:18
you voting for camela I'm charging you
5:19
extra the news won't show that there's
5:22
people out here in the hood or different
5:23
areas rocking with Trump we come out
5:24
here we can't even keep these things in
5:25
hand they taking them yeah we with Trump
5:28
make America great again Trump up yeah
5:30
that's it make Trump why you vote Trump
5:32
man cuz I like him man me person I like
5:35
him I like his personality I like his
5:36
attitude and I like his understanding of
5:39
how he need to shape how America need to
5:40
be shaped again hold up mag hat delivery
5:43
Rolls Royce B mag hat delivery thank you
5:46
oh these My People by here watch out
5:51
2024 now I got to put that on for real
5:55
was life better for you under Trump
5:56
trump most definitely most defit better
5:58
years here most definitely defitely we
6:00
seen Trump here and this chick the same
6:02
chick-fil before do you think Cala would
6:03
ever come to this neighborhood who is
6:05
that
6:07
yeah make America great again okay where
6:10
we at right now we in
6:12
Atlanta Ro
6:14
iuck y hold on let me see yeah yeah
6:18
that's you right there make America
6:20
great again America great all
6:23
right sir was your life better when
6:26
Trump was President oh yeah yeah it was
6:28
better when he was the president he W
6:30
better when Democrat with the President
6:33
Joe Biden or all
6:35
Obama now they ain't no good man I'm
6:38
telling you now trunk is the good see
6:40
trunk is a gangster
6:42
man American Gangster that's right I
6:45
like that American Gangster he was over
6:46
here at the for County Jail getting a
6:47
mug shot I know that remember the mug
6:49
shot who you voting for Trum yeah watch
6:52
that because we need to be Republican
6:54
again what would you say to Camala if
6:55
you she was here if you got a
6:58
chance you want some Trump
7:00
hats this is probably Obama's motor cave
7:03
this is presidential
7:07
detail Obama's not in it yet but this is
7:09
a presidential detail they V they voting
7:11
for a puppet in in com that's right a
7:14
real puppet don't even don't and don't
7:16
even know it you vote for your own Dems
7:18
and not even know it that's
7:20
right
7:22
put what your it's all
7:25
yours she ready let's go go and vote he
7:29
was right here at the cha on the Block
7:31
in my hood this my hood yeah there your
7:32
where we at tell the people Ash Cash MLK
7:35
all day hold it down my brother yeah he
7:37
t to the car the car T back we got some
7:40
money
7:43
now Trump 25 let's go oh yeah you
7:50
here oh Donald Trump watches our Channel
7:52
and shares our videos what's your
7:54
message to Donald Trump hey Trump we
7:56
love you pull up on us what's your
7:58
message to Donald Trump stay strong keep
8:01
doing good work hey man what's up man
8:03
hey I'm rooting for you
8:06
guy and what's your message to Camala
8:09
hey my message to Camala is hey better
8:11
Lu next time like keep it simple hey he
8:14
need to be president yeah Donald Trump
8:17
get in there and make America great
8:18
again yeah that's right do it again make
8:20
Trump great we going we out here trying
8:21
to make you great again so do do us
8:23
right that's right hit the
8:26
STW Trump keep the money running in man
8:29
good luck on the
8:31
presidential
8:33
campaign make America great again we are
8:36
with you what's your message to Donald
8:38
Trump everything like no hom people on
8:40
the streets and there like that that's
8:43
right that's right everyone to be safe
8:45
you want to make America great again
8:46
yeah hey keep your head up cuz Trump is
8:50
going to be here 2024 25 keep making
8:54
America great drop the grocery prices
8:56
and the gas prices that's right sir and
8:58
we'll be good all right y thank you all
9:00
right my
9:03
brother hey how doing how are you my
9:07
great honor to be here I am I am
9:09
surprised how popular the magah hats are
9:11
out there they they are going like hot
9:13
cakes because Trump actually came to
9:15
this neighborhood and showed us love we
9:18
have never seen you show you show me
9:21
love K show me love I give you one my
9:24
brother
9:26
yeah CH will do it strong so did you see
9:29
Trump when he was here yeah yeah Andy
9:32
threw up the fist he threw up the Fist
9:34
and he walked out with no security he
9:36
Secret Service was around but he pimped
9:38
out a little bit pimped out I want to
9:41
keep America great that's what I want to
9:43
do I'm trying to keep it great what did
9:45
that what did that say to the community
9:46
when he went to Chick-fil-A bought
9:48
everyone milkshakes and stuff what does
9:49
that say that says he cares yes and he
9:51
cares a
9:52
lot that's what I'm about I'm about
9:55
people who care about us I like H and
9:57
love Camal a want to come out here she
9:59
ain't me no hug she didn't give me no
10:01
hug she would come down here for a for a
10:04
pop off takeoff contest she didn't come
10:05
for nothing around I ain't seen
10:10
him was life easier or harder when
10:14
Donald Trump was president was life
10:15
better life was 100 times better I felt
10:18
secure as American I felt like our
10:20
military was at our strongest and I felt
10:22
like the tip of the spirit was sharp
10:23
come on now man it was great it was a
10:26
great great environment everybody came
Outro
10:28
out and best thing about it was in an
10:29
area West Side Atlanta where people said
10:31
Donald Trump probably could never show
10:32
his face Donald Trump went in barber
10:34
shops there Donald Trump with the
10:35
Chick-fil-A there Donald Trump got a mug
10:36
shot there you know what I'm saying so
10:38
the people came out that showed love and
10:40
we need more hats we barely got any hats
10:42
my favorite interaction dozens of hats
10:44
that we gave away that were to City
10:46
officials to police officers that
10:48
couldn't be in the video well that's
10:49
good because they know Donald Trump's
10:51
fighting for them if you see like a
10:52
police escort they came through I guess
10:53
for Barack Obama or whoever's here today
10:56
that's cuz they have a job to do they
10:57
have to do that they'd much rather be
10:58
driving around Trump that's right good
11:00
luck Atlanta you're now covered in Maga
11:02
hats you're welcome Fanny Willis thanks
11:05
for the mug shot out here in Atlanta
11:07
Benny on the Block peace
11:11
[Music]
11:23
[Music]
English (auto-generated)
AllPolitics News
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The First Steps To PlimBwa
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116364574
Henda jr. and the Highest Striker
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116366320
Koko Henda and the wails
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116366734
The Unlucky Foot
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116367352
Koko Henda and the Stitched People
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116368214
Old Tony
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1116368825
Scary Set 2
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/gallery/94457407/scary-set-2
Scary Set 1
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/gallery/89629359/scary-set -
Historical Black Colleges or Universities academic press
I emailed each of the Historical Black College or University listed from the following wiki page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historically_black_colleges_and_universities ]
My agenda is to see if any have an academy press, a publishing arm. I recall a listing a while back for various colleges across the usa, but I am interested in HBCU's specificallyMost of them used a framework to make their websites, which I would had opposed. A college or university is unique, no two are the same, and all of these colleges have students capable of creating a unique online portal.
Only a few seemed to have made their own webpages that don't have a style closely to another.
Huston–Tillotson University + Interdenominational Theological Center+ Mehery Medical college+morris college+ north carolina agricultural and technical university+Paul Quinn+payne seminary+selma university+virginia unionOther things
Did you know Langston state is the westernmost historical black college or university?
Payne Seminary school had the first african american college president.
Tougaloo college is aided by Will SmithUPDATE:
The first college to reply was Dillard and they said they do not.UPDATE:
Many no's, many no's, many no's
Fayetville said no but directed me to the university of north carolina press, which covers the entire university of north carolina set of colleges, which includes the fayetville hbcu.
Spelman gave the first yes. https://spelmanblueprint.com/
The person who responded literally said, it is the voice of black woman hood, which is the tag line and as i am not a black woman, well...:)
But I am happy to know this and will share to black female writersThe first response that is positive and I can utilize is from xavier university of louisiana
https://www.xula.edu/mainacademics/collegeprogram/departmentprogram/department/department-of-english/xavier-review-xavier-review-press.htmlXavier Review press is a not for profit , and they only do one or two a year.
Because of their location in louisiana they may fit my concept.
UPDATE
Meharry has a peer reviewed journal - The Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved
https://www.meharryresearch.org/research/office-for-research-and-innovation/about-jhcpu/
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forum post
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1
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- Report
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Why is France so OBSESSED with ONE PIECE (and Anime/Manga in general)?
4:30 in france, fist of the north star and city hunter wer ebeing shown to kids in the 1980s see, this is what i mean about the usa.
6:28 i see, so after the french government banned these cartoons, french kids who wanted to spend money on japanese animation properties bought manga instead where no bans could work...
7:25 the bande desseinne artist were foolish, they wanted to fight other artist , and chose to use the government arena instead of their paper and pens. You see this today all the time. I know people don't read poetry or enjoy calligraphy which i like to create, but I don't mind ai artists or manga style artists or artists who make adult work which is more financially profitable or desired.
8:21 ahh princess mononoke is beloved in france huh and then the publishers of bande desinee acted financially and supported manga through translation which many bande dessinee artists had spent years fighting in the government arena.
10:25 the french government gave youth three hundred euros to spend on art. well done franceWell, one piece like anime or manga is popular in the usa, BUT two points, media in the usa, and i mean the disney's plus other big media firms worked hard to emphasize the disney /pixar/dreamworks way which has key differences in themes or styling to manga. Things like the thundercats also became the industrial buffer. From what you say, the french artistic community chose to essentially reject changing or finding a bridge between bande dessinee and manga and instead maintained themselves as a separate identity.I think also manga has never had a multiracial comic that can really be embraced by the most multiracial populace in humanity that exist in the usa. France has more than white people in it, but it is mostly a white country, the idelaisms of one piece can work, but for a manga to represent the usa it requires more than idealistic themes it requires a makeup of various peoples that to be blunt, make for more complicated storytelling in character background or world bulding background that are uncommon to manga.
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Interesting take on the criminal in the film collateral. I personally can't stand poorly written criminals and criminals tend to be simply poorly written. Powerful criminals act as if they don't truly comprehend their power. Crude criminals seem to be too smart enough to evade control. Poorly written all.
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Entergalactic reviewed by Movies That Move We
glad to see you guys back:)
2:36 keith david is getting work late in the career
4:11 interesting, they made the characters indicative of the voice actor
8:05 good point an african american romantic animation
10:03 oh nike, you and your sexual themes ahhhh,great show:)
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The entire adopt a white asian movement in the usa is filthy. To me the greater tragedy is how the usa made tons of war babies through the japanese occupation after world war two, the vietnam war, the korean war. But the children adopted were from chinese or korean clans who were simply financially in danger or worse schemes.
South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning
Part 1 ... part 2 is in the comments
KIM TONG-HYUNG, The Associated Press:
[Speaking Korean] How many flyers did you make? There are so many.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] I made a lot of flyers. These are what I have left.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] Is this your wedding picture?
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] This is my child.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] This is his first birthday picture. This is a picture of my son from when we lost him. I cried so many times whenever I saw these pictures. My heart is trembling.
Our son went missing in 1975. We lost Sang-yeol when he was 4 years old. That was the last time I saw him.
I've been searching for my son for 48 years. We visited all the orphanages in Seoul. We also reported it to the police and asked for a nationwide search to find our missing child. We did everything we could.
Not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about my son. I could see and imagine our son everywhere I looked. We speculated that our son might have been sent for adoption. We visited the adoption agency once a month. We asked if this child had come in, showing them our son's picture. The agency said they didn’t have him.
FANNY THIEBAULT:
I was adopted into France in 1982.
ANNA SAMUELSSON:
I was adopted—
LISA NYSTROM:
I was adopted—
THERESE OERTENBLAD:
I was adopted to Sweden in 1982.
ANNA SAMUELSSON:
1974.
LISA NYSTROM:
1988.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
There are about 200,000 people around the world who were adopted out of South Korea.
MULTIPLE ADOPTEES [in unison]:
I was adopted to the United States.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
It’s believed to be the largest population of adoptees out of any country.
CHRISTINA ANDERSEN:
I was adopted in 1977 to Denmark—
LOUISE SVENDSEN:
—to Denmark in 1972.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
An adoption program that ran for decades.
REUNION SHOW INTERVIEWER:
What would you tell to your birth mother if she was watching on TV right now?
MALE ADOPTEE:
My dream would be one day to find you.
FEMALE ADOPTEE 1:
Mom and Dad, if you’re watching this, by any chance, if you could just meet with me? Just once?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
For decades, Korean television programs have been featuring foreign adoptees in search of their biological parents.
FEMALE ADOPTEE 2:
To my birth mother, I hope to meet you someday.
ALICE STEPHENS:
I hope that someday I can learn more about you.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
These reunions are meant to be feel-good stories, almost fairy tales. But for some adoptees, under the surface is a much darker story. In the years since I began investigating adoptions, a growing number of adoptees have come back to Korea as adults, only to discover that what they had been told about their origins was not true.
ROBYN PARK:
Everything that I knew to be true was suddenly erased.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
There are accounts of false identities.
MICHAELA DIETZ:
It feels so careless, like systemic disorganization.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Fabricated documents.
YOO-REE KIM:
They never checked whether my parents existed or not.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
And even stolen children.
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
You are feeding a very dangerous and very dark system.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
This has sparked a national reckoning. A truth and reconciliation commission is now investigating hundreds of cases of possible human rights violations associated with past governments’ handling of foreign adoptions.
FEMALE ADOPTEE TESTIMONY:
This was all a lie. A lie made up for adoption procedure.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Over the past several years, I have been reporting on how South Korea is dealing with these allegations.
This is the one where they banned adoption agencies from touring hospitals and maternity homes for babies.
With my colleagues at The Associated Press, we submitted over a hundred public record requests—
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
What’s this outlining? Like father, mother?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
—and examined thousands of pages of documents, many that have never been made public before. Along with FRONTLINE, we’ve been speaking to more than 80 Korean adoptees from eight different countries—
ALICE STEPHENS:
Korea had no place for mixed-race children like me.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
—as well as people who worked at adoption agencies.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] I have a lot of doubts about adoption. Not about adoption itself, but the adoption methods.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
And we’ve interviewed experts and government officials, in South Korea and abroad.
AMB. SUSAN JACOBS, Special Advisor for Children’s Issues, 2010-17:
There were a lot of children brought to the States who might not have been orphans.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
This is the story of how South Korean leaders promoted a historic adoption boom, despite decades of warnings about problems; how Western governments also turned a blind eye; and the consequences that are still playing out today.
Many of the adoptees I’ve met are in the process of trying to piece together their origin stories, including some dating back to the early decades of foreign adoptions.
ALICE STEPHENS:
My mother told me when I was growing up that I had been found abandoned.
Alice Stephens
Adopted in 1968
ALICE STEPHENS:
My name is Alice Stephens. I was adopted into a family in Philadelphia. I was the youngest child of four; the three other children were biological children of my adoptive parents.
My parents gave me a really good life. Everything they gave their other children, all the advantages, all the love.
I was in my 30s when my adoptive mother suggested that I find my birth mother. To me it just seemed like an impossible mission. The big game changer was DNA, for everybody. [Laughs] And I took the DNA test, and it came back and there was a very close match. So I contacted the woman. It turned out to be my father's cousin. She very quickly figured out who my father was.
She sent me his obituary, photos. The family gave me lots of information. And then this one photo of my mother dressed up in a hanbok and my father in his U.S. military outfit. It took me a long time to understand just what she did here in Korea, that she—that she was a military prostitute.
He kept her in a home that was quite near the base. They were in a common-law marriage. His family told me that he loved her. He left Korea when my mother was six months pregnant, so he knew that she was going to have his baby. Since my father wasn't Korean, I would not have been recognized by Korean society as a Korean. She knew that life here would not have been good for me, and so she gave me up.
ELEANA KIM, Author, Adopted Territory:
One of the reasons that Korean adoption is important to understand is that it represents the first large-scale adoption program in the world.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Eleana Kim is a leading scholar on South Korean adoptions and their legacy.
ELEANA KIM:
Korea was the top-sending country for so long, and really laid the groundwork for transnational adoptions to come.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
No other country in the world has sent its children abroad for adoptions for a longer time than Korea.
Korean adoptions really begin in the aftermath of the Korean War.
ELEANA KIM:
By the end of that conflict, there were thousands of children who had been separated from their families or had been orphaned. There were also mixed-race children who had been fathered by U.S. soldiers and born to Korean women.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee, saw the mixed-race children as a threat to his rebuilding efforts, which was focused on restoring an old idea of Korea based on ethnic homogeneity. There was a lot of emphasis on maintaining the pure Korean bloodline.
In 1954, he issued instructions making adoptions easier. He said, "If a foreigner wishes to adopt a mixed-race orphan, take the necessary measures."
ELEANA KIM:
And certainly on the U.S. side, there was also a lot of interest in rescuing those mixed-race children.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Pictures of mixed-race children began appearing in publications in the United States, and adoptions began at a small scale. But they really took off when an evangelical missionary named Harry Holt came onto the scene.
ELEANA KIM:
Harry Holt went to South Korea to find children that he believed God wanted him to save.
ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL:
In Portland, Oregon, a welcoming committee of foster parents and—
ELEANA KIM:
Cameras were waiting at the bottom of the steps when the Holt children arrived, and it was broadcast all over the nation.
Voice of Harry Holt
HARRY HOLT:
Many of these orphans are ours. There’s at least 1,000, maybe 1,500 Black and white American orphans with American fathers. I’d like to say to the American people this: open your hearts to these little ones and help to bring them home where they belong.
ELEANA KIM:
And that was the point at which the Holts decided to start the Holt Adoption Program.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Together with Syngman Rhee’s government, the Holt Adoption Program pioneered a method called proxy adoption, which allowed Americans to adopt a child in Korea without actually coming to the country by having Holt or another local agency acting as their proxy.
ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL:
Here is Harry Holt. He is flying 89 of the tots to America.
ELEANA KIM:
Holt brought over planeloads of children. He would charter airplanes.
ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL:
His third trip from Korea brings the total to 76.
ELEANA KIM:
So this is how you see Holt's program grow over the years.
The Associated Press
New York
CLAIRE GALOFARO, The Associated Press:
The Reagan Library might have records related to adoption. He met with the Korean president.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Yeah, that’s possible.
My AP colleague Claire Galofaro and I have been focusing our reporting on explaining how South Korea's government, Korean adoption agencies and Western governments worked together to ship huge numbers of Korean children to the West for decades.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
The question we asked was how did this program that started as a really small and contained program grow dramatically over time to become this industry. Before South Korea, there was no systemic way for an American family to adopt a child from abroad. But in 1961, Congress passed a law that defined what an orphan eligible for adoption meant. They defined an orphan as a person who had lost one or both parents to death, disappearance or abandonment.
That language became important because what our reporting has found is that the adoption agencies relied on the word "abandoned," because that made processing adoptions much quicker, much easier. And they could get kids out of Korea and to Western countries faster if they listed them as abandoned.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Korea didn't have—and still doesn't have—an automatic birth registration system. So what the Korean adoption system did was register these children with a unique document called "orphan hojuk," or an orphan certificate. This document would describe that the child's parents were unknown and therefore classifying them as abandoned orphans. It didn't matter if the child was really left on a doorstep or actually had parents who agreed to the adoption of the child. They just documented these children as abandoned. That ensured that the child was adoptable in the United States and other Western nations.
When you live your whole life believing that you were abandoned by unknown parents, do you even try to find your roots? Many adoptees I've spoken to said they never really wanted to find their parents because they didn't really think there was anything to find.
This was part of the problem in Choi Young-ja’s search for so many years. Her son had gone missing in 1975 after running outside to play with neighborhood kids. She told me she looked everywhere for him, visiting police stations and orphanages.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] The orphanages advised us to visit [the adoption agencies], as well.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] Back then, did people think if a child was lost and not found for a long time that the child may have been adopted abroad?
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] People were saying that these children were already gone and sent for adoption.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
A few years ago, her search took on a new urgency.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] I underwent surgery for cancer. As I entered the operating room I made a promise to myself that I must keep on living to see my child.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
She submitted her DNA to a database that helps reunite families.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] When I received the call, the caller asked, "Hello, is this Sang-yeol's mother? We found Sang-yeol." I asked, "What?" She reiterated, "We found your son." Sang-yeol had become Frank. I cried so much I felt paralyzed. Overwhelmed, I hung up and burst into tears.
I had a video call. Looking at my son's face through the video, I was shocked. His hair is gray. My 4-year-old son has gray hair and is an adult.
Because he was told he was abandoned he said he didn't look. The first thing I said was that I did not abandon you, and you were in a loving family.
I've been searching for my son for 48 years. Without a DNA test, we had no way of finding each other. It's dizzying to think about it. I might have died without meeting our son.
After various operations, my cancer has spread. Now, my sole wish is to live the rest of my life with our son. That is my wish. That's the only desire I have left.
FEMALE VOICE:
—and being adopted, you're asked a lot about these things.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
When I first started developing a reporting interest in adoption, I, like most Koreans, I thought of it as a humanitarian response rooted in the Korean War that was helping orphans find families. And I thought there has to be a deeper explanation than the explanations that the Koreans have shared for a long time. Is this really a war-relief effort?
By the 1960s, South Korea's adoption program, which had primarily focused on mixed-race children, shifted to children who are fully Korean.
ELEANA KIM, Prof. of Anthropology, UC Irvine:
That's really the moment when adoptions should probably have been reconsidered, but they just continued. And so there was essentially, if you want to talk about it in terms of supply and demand, there was a new supply.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
This was happening under the dictatorship of President Park Chung-hee, who made it his mission to dig South Korea out of poverty and create a formidable military force to counter threats by North Korea.
ELEANA KIM:
South Korea is spending 40% of its budget on national defense and 2% on social welfare.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Over the next decade, they began sending thousands of children overseas in adoptions every year.
Ministry of Health and Welfare
May 1978
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
By sending needy children overseas, it allowed them to reduce the annual costs of supporting orphanages and keep spending on national defense. And by the mid-1970s, Park's government passed a law that removed judicial oversight over adoptions, which made the foreign adoptions of Korean children even easier.
Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare, which oversees adoption policy, wouldn’t go on camera, but they did give us written answers to questions we submitted. They attributed the increase in adoptions, starting in the 1970s, to a reduction in foreign aid that was crucial to their child welfare budget. They also attribute it to an increase in child abandonment in that era.
But I talked to Kyung-eun Lee, a former health ministry official who oversaw adoption policies starting in 2010. She questions whether there were really so many abandoned children in need of adoption.
KYUNG-EUN LEE, Director, Child Welfare Policy, 2010-13:
This number of abandonment of a child, it does not really reflect the reality.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
She’s been instrumental in passing adoption reform in South Korea.
Why was the government so eager to facilitate foreign adoptions?
KYUNG-EUN LEE:
From my understanding, the government did not really care about the details. The top level of policymakers were not really interested about the specific rules and regulations to protect the rights of the child, the safety of the child, the need of the children. What they focus was the welfare need of the national budget.
Orphanage received the government subsidies. If the number of children in orphanage increased, the welfare cost of government would increase. So if you want to decrease that welfare burden, you just decrease the number of children in orphanage, and orphanages send those children to adoption agencies.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
At the time, many poor families were using orphanages to temporarily care for their kids. She said once children left the orphanages, the government pretty much abdicated oversight.
KYUNG-EUN LEE:
This system is totally under the power of private agencies, and a fate of a human being is decided by a private entity. How can you expect an appropriate decision to fulfill the best interest of a child?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
The majority of adoptees I've spoken to left South Korea when they were very young and have believed the origin story they were told.
Korean Broadcasting System
DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR:
[Speaking Korean] Kim Yoo-ree was adopted to France in 1984.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
But Yoo-ree Kim’s case was different. She was 11 when she was adopted to France and always knew that she wasn’t an orphan. Her story caused a stir in Korea when she went on television in 2022.
Korean Broadcasting System
YOO-REE KIM:
[Speaking French] Because my adoption was illegal. My parents are still alive.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Her mother was poor and had placed Yoo-ree and her brother in an orphanage until she could get back on her feet. Her mother stayed in touch, sending letters and money over the two years they were there.
YOO-REE KIM:
I was waiting for my mother to come and pick us up. I did not understand why Korea was taking me away from my motherland.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Did you demand that orphanage worker just contact your father, contact your mother, contact any relative you had?
YOO-REE KIM:
Yes, I did. But she refused. I told her that my mother was unable to do such a thing. She said it was done, and that my mother will never come back.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Yoo-ree and her brother were adopted by a couple who lived in a small town in southern France.
YOO-REE KIM:
The sexual abuses started on the second day, as soon as we arrived in the family house.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
From your adoptive father?
YOO-REE KIM:
Yes, from my adoptive father. It was almost daily at the beginning. And I was hoping that someone will show up to investigate, then I'll be able to explain what's happening and I'll be able to go back to Korea. But they never came.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Yoo-ree eventually ran away from home and filed a complaint, but the case was dismissed by a judge due to insufficient evidence.
Her adoptive parents and her brother denied the abuse ever happened. In a letter to Yoo-ree, her adoptive father called it a “false accusation.” He passed away in 2022.
Yoo-ree's adoption paperwork had multiple conflicting stories about how she became an orphan, and she spent years thinking that her parents had abandoned her. Until she went to South Korea.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
You came to Korea to visit them.
YOO-REE KIM:
Yes.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
How did that go?
YOO-REE KIM:
It went well. My mother insisted I see my father, and I asked to both of them, why did they abandon me, and why did they sign the paper for the adoption? And both of them denied being involved with the adoption.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
When did you realize that your parents were telling you the truth? That they never relinquished you?
YOO-REE KIM:
It took me years before being able to find all the adoption paperwork. And I went to the city hall and requested the family registry. I asked to the employee from the city hall, what does this paper concretely mean? He told me that I was a Korean citizen who has been living her entire life in Korea.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
So based on just looking at this paper, it seems as if you and your brother just never left.
YOO-REE KIM:
No. And we were never adopted.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
So this was when you realized that your parents never gave consent?
YOO-REE KIM:
Yes.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
I spoke to Yoo-ree’s mother, and she told me she had previously worked at the orphanage and assumed her children would be cared for there, not sent away.
Yoo-ree reached out to the Health Ministry for answers about how her adoption could have gone through.
YOO-REE KIM:
They sent me a letter with a vague apology, and they said they will monitor adoption better for the future.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
So it says it sympathizes with the pain that you went through and—
YOO-REE KIM:
No, I don't care about the sympathy.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
It doesn't acknowledge—
YOO-REE KIM:
No.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
—any responsibility of what went through in the '80s?
YOO-REE KIM:
No. So I was separated for 40 years from my mom and dad, and I have no idea what it's like having a family. It's an immense sense of loss.
PART 2 is in the comments
URL
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/south-koreas-adoption-reckoning/transcript/
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Part 2
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Yoo-ree is now seeking accountability both in South Korea and France. Last year she asked the French authorities to investigate her adoption, and she’s submitted her case to South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
More than 350 people have also filed claims, and while it’s impossible to know just how many problems there were over the years, that’s thought to be just a fraction of the overall number.
The commission is supposed to release its full findings next year. But they agreed to talk to me about what they’ve learned so far.
PARK GEON-TAE, Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
[Speaking Korean] Were there so many abandoned children in South Korea? We have yet to see this.
My hypothesis is that in the face of high demand, the South Korean government may have considered overseas adoption a tempting option for child welfare.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] What was the reason it was tempting?
PARK HYEJIN, Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
[Speaking Korean] I believe the reason was to reduce costs. For children who were too young to be sent to facilities and were in demand overseas, sending them for adoption may have been a way to reduce welfare costs.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] What do the 367 adoptees whose cases are being reviewed want from this investigation?
PARK HYEJIN:
[Speaking Korean] The applicants' expectations and desires vary widely. Some express anger and intend to take legal action not only against Korea, but also against the receiving country if the government is found responsible. Others say sending people overseas was problematic and a human rights violation. They say it should not happen again. So their goal is to campaign against these actions.
PHILLIP PELLOUCHOUD:
I was adopted through the Holt Adoption Agency.
ANNA SAMUELSSON:
Social Welfare Society.
MEEKYUNG FLIPPEN:
It was KSS.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Four agencies inside South Korea handled most of the adoptions in the years after the Korean War.
ALICE STEPHENS:
KSS.
THERESE OERTENBLAD:
Social Welfare Society.
AMANDA CHO:
Eastern.
LOUISE SVENDSEN:
Holt International.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
They always publicly pointed to the benefits of adoptions as a way of saving vulnerable children.
PATRICK ARMSTRONG:
Holt Children's Services.
CHRISTINA ANDERSON:
From Holt International.
BANG INSOOK:
Holt Children’s Services.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Holt was the largest, handling about half of all the adoptions. In 1977, Holt split in two: Holt Korea, which processed the adoptions of children leaving South Korea; and Holt International, which paired adoptees with families in the West.
Holt International was the only adoption agency that would agree to an on-camera interview.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX, Holt International, 1983-2022:
This is the historical wall that tells the story of Holt. See, these are all the kids as they were coming off the plane.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
At Holt’s headquarters in Oregon, Claire and I met Susan Soonkeum Cox. She’s a longtime executive and spokesperson for the agency and is now retired.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
So Mrs. Holt took lots of pictures. When I first came to work at Holt, Mrs. Holt asked me if I would like to see her scrapbooks. And of course I said yes.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
Did you find yourself in any of them?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Yes, I did.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
She joined Holt in the 1970s, two decades after becoming the 167th South Korean to be adopted through the agency.
Is '56 your year, too?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Mm-hmm.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
She has been a vocal defender of Holt and says that most adoptions have gone well over the years.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
That’s me.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
Oh, wow.
Will you tell us how you came to work for Holt to do this as your career?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Well, it certainly wasn't ever a plan that I had. The board decided to put an adoptee on the board of directors, and so I was that first adoptee. I was the only one for many, many years that was involved in adoption work. And in 1983, I went from being a member of the board to a member of the staff.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
You were adopted in the aftermath of a very devastating war. The '70s, Korea was very far off economically, but at the same time Korea was rising as an industrial nation in Asia. So did it feel strange that your birth nation is continuing to rely on adoptions because they couldn't find social welfare solutions for these children?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
But that wasn't what I saw. What I saw were the kids. What I saw were the consequences. And there was still a huge effect of war in the '70s. The whole concept of the war seemed pretty—didn't seem all that far away still.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
Some people have said to us that period of time, when it went from being people who are mixed-race to fully Korean children, that that's when we maybe should have taken a look at whether continuing to send children abroad in huge numbers for adoption was really the best solution. Did you question whether continuing adoptions at a large scale of fully Korean children was really the best thing?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Well, I think philosophically you can say, "Is that the best thing for children?" It would be wonderful if every child born in Korea, and every other country, could stay with their biological family and live a happy, fulfilling life. But that's not the reality. I mean, it just simply isn't. And I think to not accept that fails to address what is important for children.
FEMALE VOICE:
Look how cute. Look at her.
MALE NEWSREADER:
For many couples, looking for an American baby or a young child to adopt is a long, arduous and, sadly, often unsuccessful ordeal.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
By the '70s and '80s, demand for adoptive children in Western countries had skyrocketed.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
American families were really desperate for children. There was access to birth control and abortion like there had never been before. The number of domestically available children for adoption had plummeted. Waiting lists were extremely long, sometimes years. And so families were really eager to adopt from abroad.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The coincidence of Western demand and Eastern supply has now led to 23 Third World countries allowing their babies to be sent to Europe and America for adoption.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Most of the 5,000 foreign children adopted in the U.S. last year came from Korea, one of the few countries that's made such adoptions easy.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
I think Western demand is one of the most fundamental pieces of this, because if there had not been this incredible demand for babies in the West, a lot of these kids would've never left Korea because they would have had nowhere to go. More than half of the 200,000 adoptees from Korea ended up in the United States.
There were essentially two governments with the power to reign this in at the beginning, and that was the South Korean government and the United States government.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
We’ve been asking the U.S. State Department for details of their involvement in adoptions over the years. They said records are very scarce, but our questions prompted them to begin looking more closely at adoptions.
They declined to talk on camera, but we spoke to former Ambassador Susan Jacobs, who was the State Department’s first special advisor for children's issues and who has worked on the subject for years. She acknowledged there were problems since the beginning of adoptions out of South Korea, partly because of political pressure.
AMB. SUSAN JACOBS, Special Advisor for Children’s Issues, 2010-17:
There was pressure to issue the visas to allow people to bring children to the United States to be adopted. The parents were pressuring the Congress, and these were individual constituents. And then the Congress would call the State Department and you would get a call from your assistant secretary.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
There's congressional testimony, I think it was from 1977, where officials talk about how one officer flew from Tokyo to Seoul for one week every month. In that week, they processed all of the orphan petitions. And so that would be hundreds of children in that single week, every month. Do you think that is a sufficient period of time to be able to process that kind of question? "Is this an orphan?"
SUSAN JACOBS:
Absolutely not. There couldn't have been any rigor in that process whatsoever. They were probably filling out—I mean, I hate to say this, they were doing what they were told to do. They were signing off on these forms and letting the children go on their way to the United States.
International Social Service report
March 1976
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
This one ISS social worker wrote in her report about Korea that she brought these concerns to the attention of the people at the embassy.
SUSAN JACOBS:
And what'd they say?
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
She said that they seemed somewhat indifferent to them, and that they thought that the agencies should be left—
SUSAN JACOBS:
To do whatever—
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
—to do their business.
SUSAN JACOBS:
I can imagine that that is the exact truth. "Don't tell us how to do our work." The Korean government was in favor of this, and if they didn't care if their children were being adopted into the United States and other countries, then why were we worried about it?
You wish you could go back in time and change the way we did things and that people would not change the facts of a child's birth or how they came into care or anything else. But those things did happen. I do think that the country of origin has the first responsibility to raise alarms about what's happening to its children.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
When Choi Young-ja discovered that her son had been adopted abroad, he sent her his adoption paperwork. The documents said he’d been found in a neighboring city and given to Holt, where he was registered as an orphan and five months later adopted to Norway. Holt had repeatedly told her they didn’t have her son. But she went back to them after seeing the paperwork.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] I insisted they bring me the documents. I looked at the documents and it matched what my son had. The pictures were the same and so were the other details.
I hit him with the documents. “You sold my son. You claimed you didn’t have my son. You created all those years of heartbreak for me.”
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Holt Korea did not respond to questions about Choi Young-ja’s son. Susan Cox of Holt International also said she couldn’t respond to specific adoption cases. But she questioned how representative cases like these were of the overall adoption program.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Has there been some activity that shouldn't have happened? Probably, of course. We're human, and everybody is different. There's good social workers, there's bad social workers. There's good employees, bad employees. And so that's going to be—that's the reality. What I'm talking about is the accusation of systemic, deliberate wrongdoing. That I reject.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
How have you felt about that number of people who've come forward to say that they aren't happy about their adoption or that they think it was sort of tainted? Has that been an upsetting experience for you to watch?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
It depends on—it depends. Anyone's experience is their own experience. I'm not going to disagree with that. But I think there's different levels of discontent. And I think that what I really disagree with are people who just outright say that Holt is a terrible agency, that everything is done for profit. Those things are disturbing to me because that’s not accurate. For people who say, "My adoption wasn't good, my parents were abusive," or whatever, I give a lot more credibility and concern to those because that's more tangible. That's more real.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Since I began reporting on this story, I’ve been trying to get interviews with adoption workers in South Korea.
[Speaking Korean] Hello?
[Speaking English] It’s hard, because they’re legally forbidden from speaking publicly about their cases.
[Speaking Korean] Sorry, I missed your call. Are you available to meet us today, then?
[Speaking English] But for years I’ve been talking to one former adoption worker.
[Speaking Korean] If you don't want to show your face we can film you from behind.
[Speaking English] She worked at one of the four agencies in South Korea in the early '80s.
[Speaking Korean] Thank you for meeting us today.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] No worries. I took a day off from work.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
We agreed to conceal her identity and not name the agency she worked for.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] I saw so many children in these situations, where parents cannot raise their kids. The majority were children of unwed mothers. A lot of kids would be sent to facilities. If they had no choice but to grow up in facilities, isn’t it better for them to have parents? We didn’t see other options.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] You worked from ‘79 to ’84. What was it like working on the inside at that time?
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] We felt so much pressure that we were working around the clock. Children came in. We would work on sending them away while more are coming in. All I heard was, "Work faster, faster and more. Do it faster and faster."
Behind the scenes, we questioned is this really all for children? So in our child studies, even if there was information, if the kids were set to be adopted we’d say we cannot find their parents.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] So when an adoption agency said a child was abandoned on paper, how much effort would the agency put into finding the parents or—
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] The adoption agency put in zero effort, I believe. They would have never tried. I never saw them trying.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] Once they said abandoned, there was no reason to look.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] I don’t think they even thought of that as part of their job. A child that was selected for adoption had to be adopted.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
In addition to the immense pressure, she told me that she sometimes came across records that she believed had false information in them.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] There was a child who had come from the countryside who was a little over 1 year old, I don’t remember exactly. When I looked at her study, her intake sheet, it had literally said she was abandoned, but the period was too short.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
She said the policy at the time required an abandoned child be held for six months before adoption in case a relative turned up to claim them.
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] I talked to the intake manager and also the branch manager and said, "We cannot send this child for adoption."
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] The time between being reported as abandoned and leaving the facility was less than six months?
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] I don’t know. Could she have gotten lost? I’m not sure, but I thought something was off, so I told them to take her back. It wasn’t that long after the same person brought the same kid to me, but she came with a different name on her photo.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] The same kid?
ANONYMOUS ADOPTION WORKER:
[Speaking Korean] Right. So I compared it with the photo that I had, and it was her.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
While she didn’t know if this child was eventually adopted abroad, I’ve spoken with other adoptees who said they were misled by adoption papers that distorted or fabricated their origin stories.
ROBYN PARK:
I had a book that had all of the different photos of my arrival that my parents had put together. Growing up, I really had access to my paperwork. I really believed so much of what was written and documented as truths and my truths of who I was.
I have this case number tattooed on my back, and so I really identified with it.
Robyn Joy Park
Adopted in 1982
ROBYN PARK:
My name is Robyn Joy Park. I was adopted to the U.S. in 1982. After college I decided I'm going to just pack my backpack and move back to Korea.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
To help find her birth parents, Robyn Park reached out to Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency that handled her adoption.
ROBYN PARK:
It was really fast. I was notified that they had located and contacted this birth mother. I think a part of me was just in kind of shock and awe that this was just really happening. We held hands and sat on this little couch. I'll never forget her spoon-feeding me rice for the first time. The relationship with her developed over time. It was about six years. The deepening of the relationship, it meant everything.
I didn't know about my biological father. It was a sensitive topic.
My now husband, he's a forensic scientist and works with DNA. And so I requested a DNA test to be able to have her profile. And then, based on that information, my husband would be able to create this profile for a biological father.
The moment that I learned about the results for the DNA test was a really surreal moment. All the profile markers that should have indicated that we were biologically related were showing that we weren't. I learned that this was not my biological mother. Initially, it was denial, like, "No, this can't be true. All the paperwork that I have had shows otherwise." And we shared the DNA results with her, and it was pretty devastating, seeing her response to it. And it really flipped my world upside down and had me really questioning then like, "Well, who am I, then?"
I brought this forward to Eastern, the Korean agency. They were in shock. They were trying to cobble together some sort of response and suggest that it was another potential adoptee case that I was switched with.
I had never met anyone who had had similar experiences. The first case that I learned about was through the The Ricki Lake Show.
MICHAELA DIETZ:
So I took the DNA test, and the people who I had met, whose names had always been on my birth records, were not genetically related to me.
I went on this show. I was just hoping that maybe someone out there would maybe have a similar experience or have a lead.
RICKI LAKE:
Were you able to find your biological parents?
MICHAELA DIETZ:
I’m in the process right now.
ROBYN PARK:
It was just mind-blowing to know "Oh, my goodness, I'm not alone in this." So I actively pursued her, and since then we've really been able to meet more switched cases. It's really revealed to us that we're not isolated incidences, that there's quite a large amount of us.
MICHAELA DIETZ:
My story is straight out of a Choose Your Own Adventure, man. An adventure that nobody would choose.
Michaela Dietz
Adopted in 1983
MICHAELA DIETZ:
I’m Michaela Dietz. I arrived in the States in February 1983. I had follow-up calls with Eastern to figure out why the DNA test was not a match. Eastern actually never apologized, and they didn't really admit fault. They said in looking back at their records, the only thing that they could determine was that two girls were born on the same day and perhaps their paperwork was switched.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
With new details Eastern provided her from their files, she was able to track down her family. In 2015, she went back to South Korea to meet them.
Michaela’s home video
MICHAELA DIETZ:
I learned pretty early on that my birth father died in the '90s, my birth mother was alive and that I had four biological sisters. Meeting my sisters for the first time is, I think, one of the highlights of my life.
And then meeting my birth mother was a lot different. It was hard. It was really hard. She never explained to me directly, and I think giving me up, it just was too much for her to handle.
But I actually tracked down the man who was very close with my birth father. My birth father said to his friend that he wanted me to have a better life. But this man told me, "Why'd you wait so long? Your birth father, he wanted to meet you, and he left all the information for you in your files. His name, his phone number, contact, everything." And that's, I think, one of the hardest things to hear, is he was expecting me to reach out. And even if I wanted to, I couldn't, because our records were switched. I mean, it's just Shakespearean, in a way.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Unlike Michaela, Robyn still hasn't been able to locate her biological family.
I reached out to Eastern, which handled both of their cases, to find out why the switches happened. Eastern declined an on-camera interview, but I did get to talk with the president of Eastern, and she defended the agency's practices. She said it was an overall process of finding Western homes for discarded children who otherwise wouldn't have had a chance at a decent life. She acknowledged there were some adoptions that went wrong, but she described them as mistakes or isolated incidents that happened because so many children were being sent.
When I spoke to the investigators from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they told me they’d also found several switched cases.
PARK HYEJIN, Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
[Speaking Korean] There were times when the administrative process was completed in Korea when the child suddenly became unavailable for adoption, either due to death or because the birth parents took the child back. When this happens, the adoption agency should have informed the adoptive parents and started a new adoption process with a new child.
But they didn’t do this. Instead, the agency took sent another child of a similar age who had been abandoned or was relinquished by the birth parents with the [previous child’s] documents to the adoptive parents. These are switched cases we have identified. We presume, because restarting the administrative process would be inefficient in cost and time, the agency took the easy route. But we have to investigate further.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
This is a summary of a meeting between the government and the head of the adoption agencies.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
Do you know when this meeting was?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Yeah, it was in 1982.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
Oh, wow. OK.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Adoptions in South Korea hit their peak in the 1980s, with an annual average of around 6,000 children sent abroad every year.
In our investigation we found internal health ministry documents that show the government knew there were serious problems in the country's adoption system. They were aware that there were child intake problems, which refers to how they were procuring these children from different sources.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
What problems are they describing with intake?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
This doesn't specify the problems, but when they get to the part about discussing fees, they say they should control fees to a level so that it doesn't create concerns about human trafficking.
Agencies were no longer just relying on the orphanage system to receive babies. They were sending workers to actively gather the babies in what some critics call as a process that amounted to baby hunting. That meant adoption workers were touring poor neighborhoods looking for financially struggling parents who could be persuaded to give away their babies. Most importantly, they were sending adoption workers to hospitals and maternity homes and other birth venues.
PHILSIK SHIN, Anyang University:
[Speaking Korean] The important documents are from the National Archives.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Researcher Philsik Shin has studied how hospitals and maternity homes became a major source of children for adoption.
PHILSIK SHIN:
[Speaking Korean] In ‘88, the total number of children [acquired for] adoption was 7,800. The average number of kids from hospitals and maternity homes made up 4,000 of the total 7,800, so about 60%.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
His research has raised questions about the common practice of labeling children as abandoned to facilitate adoption, and he points to the fact that the number of adoptees during the '80s was often 10 times higher—or more—than the number of children reported as abandoned to police.
PHILSIK SHIN:
[Speaking Korean] So in a way, Korea more than met the demands by having a system of producing an unbelievable number of desirable kids. And there was a vacuum that created the demand. Quite literally, it was a form of demand and supply.
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?
Robert Calabretta
Adopted in 1986
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
My name is Robert Calabretta; that was my given name at adoption. I was adopted at the age of supposedly six months old. When I look back at it, I was grieving for a language, a culture, a person that I had lost. And so that began the quest for, "Who am I really? Where do I come from?"
I contacted Holt. Within a couple months, they came back saying, "We're sorry. Everything that you have is on the short two-page dossier," which essentially said, "Your parents met at a office that they both worked at. They were not married, they had you, they wanted to keep you, but they were too young. And so your mother put you up for adoption." And that was the story that I was given.
A good portion of adoptees in my community, they were able to find their family or information about themselves using a Korean government organization called the National Center for the Rights of the Child. So I filled out their application. And this is 2019. It took them three months to get through to me. And I got an email saying, "We have good news. Your father called us today." He became very emotional, but also a little confused. We started video calling. He was like, "Your mother and I thought you were dead." Everything just kind of fades to black. What do you do when you have someone come back from the dead 30 years later? [Laughs]
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Robert Calabretta returned to Seoul in 2020 to meet his father and mother and has been visiting them every year since.
LEE SUNG SOO, Robert's father:
[Speaking Korean] [Laughs] Hey, son.
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
[Speaking Korean] Have you been well?
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] Yes. Are you hungry?
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
[Speaking Korean] Yes, I'm hungry.
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] You look like you lost weight. You need to eat more. Hanil, do you have money?
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
[Speaking Korean] Yes, I'm OK.
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] For me lately, the money’s not enough. Not enough. But I can still give you a small amount.
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
[Speaking Korean] I’m always fine. [Laughter] Really.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Lee Sung Soo, Robert’s father, told me that contrary to what is in the adoption papers, he and Robert’s mother were married and looking forward to raising their first child.
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] We were extremely happy from the moment we knew we were pregnant. We gave birth right on our due date. We checked into the Red Cross Hospital in Daegu. I remember it was June of 1986. And it was a boy, so we were very, very happy. Very, very happy. Our whole family all came to congratulate us and share the happiness.
We were at the hospital for the next two days to recover. The night before our release date, the hospital director told me about the condition of the baby. “His heart and lungs are in terrible condition.” But operating on his heart and lungs would be extremely difficult since he is a newborn, and the surgery would also be very, very expensive. Even if he survives, he could develop a disability.
The director told me the crushing news, that it’s all just a terrible situation. I felt like the sky was falling.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
He told me that the hospital director proposed a solution to him and another new father with infant twins.
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] While I was agonizing over this, the hospital director said there is one last option.
If we send the kids to Holt for adoption and give up our rights as parents, then they might have a chance at surgery. If the surgery goes well and the kids get better, they will be sent for adoption. So, as parents, once you give your kids to Holt, you have to forget about them.
I felt like my heart was being ripped apart. I came out of the room crying. After hearing everything and signing the papers for Holt, I came outside and paced in the hallway for hours.
In the morning, I went to tell my wife what had happened as she was about to be discharged. She saw my eyes and my expression and how I couldn’t get the words out and immediately started crying.
Every so often, I thought my child probably died.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
The hospital, which was a source for adoptions, has long since closed, and its records were destroyed. I wasn’t able to find the director from the time, or the other father. But I reviewed Robert’s adoption documents from Holt. They say he had pneumonia but there is no mention of any surgery. He was described as a “normal healthy baby, adoptable.”
LEE SUNG SOO:
[Speaking Korean] Once I met him, I did feel from time to time that those lost years were so unfair. I felt so powerless. It felt unfair, so unfair. We were supposed to be a happy family, not separated. And he was my precious, first-born son. For over 30 years, he lived in a foreign land against his will, lonely and facing the world alone.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Holt Korea would not answer questions about Robert’s case or any other specific adoptions. But its former president told me Holt and other agencies were following government policy in sending kids abroad.
By the end of the 1980s, uncomfortable questions were beginning to be raised about the country’s adoption system.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
South Korea is ready to show the world a pristine city.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
South Korea was modernizing, transitioning away from a military dictatorship to a democracy.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Protest denouncing the government and calling for an uprising.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
And this was during the time when South Korea was also preparing to host the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The games were his top priority. The president-elect needs to prove Korea has gained a political maturity to match its economic progress.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
The 1988 Seoul Olympics for South Korea was billed as the country's arrival in the international stage as an economic power and a newborn democracy. It was its coming-out party to the world.
MALE NEWSREADER:
In a few hours’ time, the 24th Olympiad will get underway.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Korea loved the international attention it got, but there was also the concerns about how the Western media was focusing on its adoption program.
FEMALE SPEAKER:
This is a shame. National shame. They should be cared by our people.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The authorities are embarrassed by this export of human beings.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
And the government was very sensitive about its international reputation.
In the wake of the Olympics, the South Korean government conducted its first meaningful audit of the adoption system. A lot of different types of birth mothers in different situations were sucked into the adoption system. In this document, it covers a lot of wrongdoings. It includes payments to hospitals, maternity homes or other venues where women gave birth. This audit report was probably the most significant accounting by the government of problems in the adoption system, pulling together years of internal warnings under previous dictatorships.
EMILY STERNLICHT:
And then what happened after this came out?
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
So this coincided with government efforts to just clean up the acts. Their focus was to stop the direct intakes from hospitals and maternity homes for babies. And once they do it, you see adoptions dropping once the government clamped down.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Certainly just before the Olympics, there was a lot of introspection about "What are we going to do? The world is going to see us on the world stage, and what will we do about adoption?" That was a huge concern in the '80s.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
There's a lot of reports about the government internally raising concerns about how adoption agencies were gathering children and paying hospitals for unwed mothers to provide their babies. How much were you aware of these allegations or concerns being expressed in Korea at the time?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
What you're talking about with regard to paying hospitals, I don't know about that in terms of—did the agency pay the hospital bill for the mother? Maybe. I don't know how that worked. But as far as a bribe or a payoff or a, I don't know, a finder's fee or something, I'm not aware of that.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
I think at the peak, it was mid-1980s, more than 8,000 children were leaving Korea. Is it your understanding that if they had not been adopted abroad, almost all of those children would've grown up in orphanages, institutions?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Yes.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
That's your belief?
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
Oh, yeah.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
OK.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
What else would they have done?
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
I think what the other side would say is that agencies or agency representatives were going to hospitals and encouraging families to give their children up. And if that hadn't happened, maybe they would've grown up with their birth families. Some of these children would've never even entered an institution if it hadn't been for very active adoption agencies working on the ground.
SUSAN SOONKEUM COX:
But see, that's a premise that I don't accept. Certainly that is not what I'm familiar with. So when adoptions are done improperly, it puts to risk the entire process. What is good about it is lost to what is bad. Has there ever been inappropriate adoption? Probably, yeah. I think that's probably true. I think mistakes were made. But was there deliberate intent? I don't think so. I believe not.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
By the 1990s, adoptions out of South Korea dropped from a peak of more than 8,000 to just over 2,000 a year. And in 2007, the U.S. ratified an international agreement known as the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which established standards to ensure that adoptions are made in the best interests of the child.
SUSAN JACOBS:
After Hague, people began to look at what was in front of them. They were looking at these adoptions and trying to figure out, "Is this child really an orphan?"
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
What do you think is the U.S. government's responsibility now in addressing those concerns of the past?
SUSAN JACOBS:
In addressing the concerns of the past, I think we just have to promise not to make the same mistakes that we did. And I think that that might be the best that we can do. And promise to listen to the voices of everyone that's involved in the process.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
As the State Department has begun looking back on adoptions in the '70s and '80s, they told us their early findings suggest there may have been adoptions based on falsified documentation, though they said they have no indication U.S. officials were aware of it.
Some U.S. agencies have paused accepting children from South Korea.
In Europe, France and Switzerland have publicly acknowledged their inaction on preventing abuses. Denmark and the Netherlands no longer allow international adoptions from any country, and Sweden has stopped taking children from South Korea entirely.
CLAIRE GALOFARO:
South Korea is really important in the conversation about the future of intercountry adoption. Adoption agencies created an adoption industry in South Korea and then moved around the world to almost every continent. What happened in South Korea and what is happening now in South Korea will say a lot about the very foundation of the intercountry adoption industry.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
In South Korea, recent reforms, including a 2011 law that reinstituted judicial oversight, has led to a significant drop in foreign adoptions: just 79 last year. Most of the focus now is on preventing future abuses and helping adoptees reconcile their pasts. By 2025, the government has pledged to make it easier for adoptees to get access to their adoption records. But the agency responsible for amassing all those files concedes it is a huge undertaking.
SARA YUN, National Center for the Rights of the Child:
[Speaking Korean] There really isn't much time left until the implementation in July 2025.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
[Speaking Korean] Realistically, this could take several years.
SARA YUN:
[Speaking Korean] Yes, the archives themselves must have a dedicated building and a system to safely store them. And accordingly, manpower is also needed. This is not a problem that can be resolved in a short period of time. And we have these big tasks ahead of us. Since this is not something that can be done simply with a small budget, we’re in a situation where we’re asking the government and National Assembly for support.
ALICE STEPHENS:
Good morning.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
For the last five years, Alice Stephens has been struggling to track down her South Korean birth mother, who gave her up in the '60s.
ALICE STEPHENS:
I've also been told that it's the most common name for Korean women at that time. So it's like looking for Jane Smith in the U.S.
ELEANA KIM, Prof. of Anthropology, UC Irvine:
Adoptees, as they're trying to use their paperwork, thinking it's going to lead to the truth of their adoption and their biological parents, it just leads back to the system. Built into the design of it was not a returning adoptee who later in life will want to know where they came from and who they might be related to. The paperwork produces a child that's adoptable. It doesn't record a history.
ALICE STEPHENS:
I’m hoping that’s her name.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
Alice had more to go on than most adoptees—a name and some basic information—but still, no success.
ALICE STEPHENS:
Looking for my birth mother has been an exercise in extreme frustration. It's just kind of a bureaucratic maze. I’m trying to follow the procedures right now. I’ve gone through avenue and avenue, and now I’m trying another avenue.
You could go to the police station. You can go and submit your DNA to the government. You can do all these things, but they give you very little help. I'm just extremely angry at the way that the whole system was set up. They made it impossible for me to find my birth mother and for my birth mother to find me.
This is where my father would come to visit my mother from the Army base. This is the closest thing I have to my origins. To think that I was probably born here, it’s very moving, very emotional to think that my mother lived here and my father visited her here. [Cries]
I’ve got to keep searching for her. Definitely.
ROBERT CALABRETTA:
How do you live as a family that has had such an early disruption?
YOO-REE KIM:
My mother, my dad, they have no idea who I am.
MICHAELA DIETZ:
I used to be angry. And now I'm just flabbergasted.
ROBYN PARK:
I think I've come to peace with my own story, that I may or may not know in my lifetime.
ELEANA KIM:
So if you want to talk about ultimate accountability, I think that clearly state policies had something to do with it. There was an interest in adoption as a form of population control.
Each moment in South Korean modernity has had adoption fulfill a certain function. So mixed-race children were a problem, adoption. Oh, you have children who are poor and in institutions, or you have children born out of wedlock, or you have children from divorce. Whatever the issue, decade by decade, adoption has been seen as a solution, and not scrutinized enough.
KIM TONG-HYUNG:
It's a dark side of the country's industrialization that the country has never been able to squarely address and reconcile with. Among the legacies of its brutal military dictatorships of the past, adoptions could be the issue that South Korea finds most difficult to address.
Last fall, Choi Young-ja was finally going to be reunited with her son, Frank. We accompanied her to the airport. Frank didn’t want to be shown on camera.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] How long do we have to wait for the arrival?
FEMALE VOICE:
[Speaking Korean] The plane has arrived.
CHOI YOUNG-JA:
[Speaking Korean] I am really, really nervous. My heart is pounding. I can’t have a conversation with him. I can’t easily ask how his life has been. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find him.
I think my son has arrived over there. Oh, my goodness, there he is. [Cries] I am so sorry. Mom is so sorry that I couldn't find you sooner. I love you. [Cries]
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TO THE FIRST HAITIAN CONSTITUTION
Interesting points,
- it starts with the term supreme being which is a term not meant to be solely for christianity, and it also starts with a Black proclamation concerning the black communities relationship to whites overall.
- It defines haiti as made from the people of former santo domingo and is independent of any power in the universe , beyond earth itself, which is interesting.
- whereas the usa needed a 13th amendemtn to its constitution, slavery is abolished as the second act after the creation of haiti itself. so from a mere legal priority perspective, , the first black american- canada to argentina , legal document makes ending slavery the second most important aspect after the state itself. i find that legally interesting from a historical point of view, because outside haiti, all other governments in the american continent- canada to argentina, needed amendments of proclamations long after their formation. It proves that at least centuries ago the legal view of blacks was fundamentally varied from whites in terms of what is important.
- the third article suggest a socialism or communism, but also a complication. The only ranks that can differ people in haiti are "services to independence or liberty" which means in my mind , the concept of elected officials is deleted. A president can not exist because a president isn't a soldier to the services of independence or liberty. Soldiers or civilians are the only two classes which explains how haiti being surrounded by non black countries who have a financial gentry class + elected official clans who are not for independence or freedom but financial advantage or power accumulation to be a class above dont fit.
- The sixth clause, no retroactive nature is another note. In the usa, the usa constitution speaks of the constitution being malleable and even potentially invalid in the future but the haiti constitution speaks of it not being applicable to the past which means criminal acts during the freeing of black people by black freedom fighters are acceptable.
- PRoperty is deemed sacred. It is interesting Blacks relationship to ownership. White people view ownership as part of the market place but the haitian constitution almost treats owning property as a right to be protected once earned equivalent to the right of free speech. The placement of this and its existence is so different to other initial legal documents .
- Haiti is an anti immigration country. The seventh clause essentially states a haitian immigrting is punishable by death. That is very different from the legal norms outside haiti, which explains haiti's relationship to its neighbors but like the chinese communist constitution's particular differences based on their history of being satraped by usa/japan/western europe. By this initial constituton every single person who left haiti to become usa citizens or citizens of france are no longer haitian.
- Black members of the party of lincoln will love the eight article, it states that financial failure means one losses their quality as a citizen, an interesting article. It essentially says no one can fail. In the usa, a firm can be too big too fail but by this constitution, financial activity must lead to at least break even. It never suggest one must make a profit but one musn't fail.
- The ninth clause proves what Haiti really is. Haiti is a militaristic society. I don't mean war mongering. By the ninth clause every single person in haiti should be a member of the military by law, it isn't said outright but it is implied.
- Tenth interesting how so many articles in the haitian constitution deal with ownership or the role of the haitian military as synonymous to the haitian people, it explains how the outside influences of haiti could only hurt because in the usa/brasil/western europe the idea of the marketeer is strong but doesn't fit where the original haitian constitution was going. So many haitians didn't own anything outside of land and they coudn't disinherit children by law. I don wonder where the tenth clause can be used in terms of shifting inheritance.
- Twelve states what i have always said is a big difference. the haitian constitution admits phenotypical race and more importantly denies whites the opportunity or right to own anything of haiti. Which means any firm with a white investor or shareholder by this constitution has no right to own anything in haiti. When i think of clause twelve and i think of how black people outside of haiti are denied the ability to own anything absent white presence as a investor it is very telling.
- thirteen exposes something I didn't consider was clearly more important during jean jacques time in haiti and that is of white women who were allowed to own land essentially in haiit where they would not outside of it. It also shows how haiti's minority of mulattoes from the time of jean jacques existed as an anomaly populace.
- The haitian constitution basically goes against the casta concept and calls all children of black people regardless of shade as black from a fredi washington/devil in the blue dress to satchmo/hariet tubman skin tone.
- I have to say administratively i found the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth articles interesting. First, the haitian constitution made ceding illegal initially, whereas the usa needed the war between the states. and it makes legal sense based on the earlier article about immigrations illegality. But haiti was an empire because by said articles, haiti was split into six divisions, which had a general that was independent from the other. so jean jacques dessalines, while he was emperor ,literally allowed the six generals under him to have their own suzerainty as a general of division, with a liaison in a general in chief to him. So it explains one of the problems. where most history books suggest haiti split up with petion and henry christophe, the truth is, the emperor role was always going to be weak when you have six divisions each with their own independent governor, they needed the emperor to have one division.
- The first magistrate role is not emphasized later but I wonder their thinking with it. the first magistrate isn't defined how this person is elected or comes to power, it seems to be through military means but it is unclear and thus what happened when dessalines died.
- twenty three says the crown is elected not hereditary , which is funny cause in many history books outside haiti they suggest hereditary lineage.
- twenty eight suggest a code of conduct while the earlier provisions provide a financial salary to the emperors family, it is interesting how they make a code of conduct mandatory
- No religion is predominant which is interesting, the larger black american community has always had problems accepting what faith beliefs should dominate and tend to allow all which is complicated because some beliefs come from the enslaver. .
When I look at haiti today the reality is, it is a country that has never left the military structure first suggested by the first constitution. the problem is, the usa's meddling led to a constitution that tries to turn a community made by enslaved people who only had space for soldiers and an extended soldier society into one with marketeers and various ranks that don't fir the simpler paradigm. and the existence of the government elected class, the intelligista raised in foreign colleges has only complicated the country. All governments are the same in on eway, they are created by the conditions of the people who made them initially and usualy don't change their essence even if they make facade changes.
Haiti ConstitutionARTICLE TITLE Haiti, Constitutions
ARTICLE BODY
Haiti has had about twenty constitutions, both real and nominal, many illustrating the apt creole proverb: "A constitution is paper; a bayonet is steel." A common characteristic of most of them has been a strong president and a weak legislature.The first constitution, Autonomy and Independence (Toussaint, 1801), written ten years after independence from France, gave France suzerainty and provided for forced labor. The second (Dessalines, 1805) abolished slavery "forever," separated church and state, applied the word "black" to all Haitians, and prohibited foreign ownership of land. The third (Pétion's first, 1806) is modeled after that of the United States. The fourth (Christophe, 1811) created a nobility. The fifth (Pétion's second, 1816) granted the president his office for life. The sixth (Riché, 1846) empowered the joint chambers to elect the president. The seventh (Domingue, 1874) concentrated all power in the presidency. That of 1889 (Hyppolite) revised the previous constitution of 1879 (Salomon) and served as the basis of government until the U.S. occupation.
The Constitution of 1918, written during the U.S. occupation by Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, cancelled the prohibition of foreign ownership of land and added individual democratic rights. The eleventh constitution (1927) increased the powers of the president, as did that of 1932 (Vincent).
The constitutions of the postoccupation and Duvalier era were the thirteenth (Magloire, 1950), a liberal one written by the scholar-diplomat Dantès Bellegarde that provided for female suffrage beginning in 1957, and the fourteenth (Duvalier, 1957), which increased the powers of the president and excluded foreigners from retail trade. Duvalier's second constitution (1961) reduced the legislature to one chamber and increased the powers of the president. Duvalier's third, which was the sixteenth constitution, made Duvalier president for life, authorized him to choose his successor, and changed the flag's colors.
"Baby Doc" Duvalier's first constitution, the seventeenth (1983), combined a set of progressive social goals with new presidential powers of appointment and new power over the legislature. Baby Doc's second (1985) provided the legislature with new powers, created the position of prime minister, and permitted political parties (a public-relations response to U.S. pressure, approved by a fraudulent referendum).
The first constitution of the post-Duvalier era, that of 1987, restored the two-chamber legislature, reduced the powers of the president by dividing the executive authority between president and prime minister, created a permanent electoral council, removed the new force publique from direct control of the president and minister of the interior, prohibited for ten years the participation in government of "any person well known for having been … one of the architects of the dictatorship and of its maintenance during the last twenty-nine years," provided many basic human rights, recognized Creole (Kreyol) as the national language, legalized vodun, and recognized no state religion. It was approved by a free and popular referendum.
President Leslie François Manigat was removed by General Henri Namphy, who became president, dissolved the legislature, and abolished all constitutions. Namphy in turn was removed by General Prosper Avril, who restored the nineteenth constitution, except for thirty-eight articles.
General Avril was forced out in 1989 and he was replaced by supreme court judge Ertha Pascal-trouillot, who became provisional president in 1990 under article 149 of the constitution. (This article provides that if the office of president is vacant, the chief justice or a member will become acting president until elections are held.) In free elections, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftist priest, was elected president; he was inaugurated in February 1991. While president, Aristide took advantage of article 295 of the constitution, which authorized him for a six-month period "to proceed to carry out any reforms deemed necessary in the Government Administration … and in the Judiciary." He gave some provocative speeches threatening the elite "bourgeoisie" and the military; the latter overthrew him in late September. The Organization of American States (OAS) responded by approving economic sanctions against the military government of General Raoul Cédras to bring about Aristide's restoration. The United Nations joined the OAS in 1993 and joint efforts were made to negotiate a settlement. An accord was reached in July, providing for the selection of a prime minister (Robert Malval), lifting of sanctions, political amnesty, and Aristide's return. The accord could not be implemented once the military reneged although sanctions were strengthened. In June 1994, the military government, acting under article 149, inaugurated Supreme Court Chief Justice Émile Jonassaint as provisional president. President Aristide was restored to power in late 1994.
ARTICLE URL
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/haiti-constitutions#: -
The Wall Of Phoenix Tears
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1082140108
Phoenix Crying Colored
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1082137037
Phoenix Crying Black and White
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1082135508featuring
Phoenix Crying Black and White +Activities + New View
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/status-update/Phoenix-Crying-Black-and-White-1082267241
Phoenix Crying Colored + In Memorium+ DTIYS+Celebrities in Action + Groups + Nature+Clancute+Tutorial + Synthography+Artificial anarchy
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/status-update/Phoenix-Crying-Colored-from-Thirstyrover-1082270321The Wall Of Phoenix Tears+ fandom + States in the union+ Photography+ artfighter+ literature+ OC+ Noddy+Black and white+ feather+craft+artificial anarchy+development
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/status-update/The-Wall-Of-Phoenix-Tears-1082274544Fanartfriday- Kolchak the night stalker+features+commissions
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/status-update/From-moonbeam13-fanartfriday-inspired-by-1082277679 -
Contest 5 (and) 7 is 1 (and) 2 is 3
The journal listing
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/journal/Contest-5-and-7-is-1-and-2-is-3-1057747565
Entries
Tree
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Ancestral-Tree-front-color-966926481
Spring
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-11-Crows-ink-894624695
Sky
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Promptpot2022Day06-932264684
Music
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/What-s-god-got-to-do-with-it-1002676684
Flower
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Skirt-19-Witchtember-2022-930139763
Monument
I learned for this challenge that getting plans for buildings is a process. The department of buildings in NYC has a bureaucratic process to obtain original plans for buildings that took me back, I never tried hard enough to get through this. But the building I want I will produce something later.
Everlasting Memory
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Everlasting-Memory-1057744285
Thankfulness
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Thankfulness-1057745323
Birds
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Imaginary-friend-color-2023-959899729
What could Malintra shadowmoon be?
colored
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1058384368
black and white
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1058370026 -
Make a horror story in six words or less
"Stop playing the slot machine? "
Who!...
Referral
https://x.com/Thetenner10/status/1795948733420466484
tips
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The lynching of Jesse Washington.
Washington was beaten with shovels and bricks,was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire. Jesse attempted to climb up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers.
Jesse was 15.
1916. -
A question of who is the wealthiest through a prospective psychological pageant P.P.P.
Title: The S.S.S.
Author: Richard Murray
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1049984281 -
Dystopian Springtime
stageplay
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1049231711
Illustration- photomanipulation- referred to in stageplay
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1049228838
Poem- referred to in stageplay
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1049230295 -
Title: The Settlement
Author: Richard Murray
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1048148238 -
Weed Gone Wild: 34 Cannabis Shops — But Just One Licensed — on the Lower East Side
New York’s marijuana legalization was supposed to bring order and justice to the market. Instead, one year later, it’s created a confusing potpourri of vendors.
BY ROSALIND ADAMS
JAN. 5, 2024, 6:00 A.M.A map shows unlicensed Lower East Side cannabis shops near state sanctioned smoke shop Conbud. Credit: Illustration by Naomi Otsu
This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and THE CITY.
On a recent Friday afternoon, a line of people wrapped around a corner of Delancey Street waiting for a turn to get into Conbud, one of the city’s 15 legal weed dispensaries. It’s the kind of scene New York State lawmakers imagined would be commonplace when they legalized cannabis in March 2021: customers neatly queuing up at a limited number of suppliers.
But instead such crowds are a rarity outside Conbud, and this particular one wasn’t even there for the weed. People were there to see Mike Tyson, the boxer, who grinned and flexed with fans inside to promote the New York launch of his cannabis brand.
On line, I met Vinay, 23, who had invited a group of his college buddies to the event. “My roommate sent me the email, and my friends are in town, so why not?” Vinay told me. “We love weed, and Mike Tyson is cool,” one of his friends interjected.
While we chatted, dispensary staff moved through the line with iPads to take orders (a purchase was required to snap a photo with Tyson). Vinay told me he had never been to Conbud before. He said he usually bought weed from one of the smoke shops a couple blocks away on Clinton Street. None of those are licensed to sell cannabis products, though. When I mentioned this, Vinay shrugged.
“I guess if I knew it was illegal, I wouldn’t go, but you don’t realize,” he said.
There are, in fact, only 43 legal retailers across the state, including delivery operations — and they are all run by people impacted by cannabis charges. When lawmakers legalized pot, they intended to give those harmed by prohibition a head start in the market. But a year after the first legal store debuted near Astor Place, the pace of licensed dispensary openings has been painstakingly slow.
Just to open their doors, legal dispensaries had to overcome a gamut of regulatory hurdles that came with a steep price tag. Anthony Crapanzano, who has a dispensary license in Staten Island, said he has racked up about $1.6 million in expenses so far, including $200,000 in legal fees, and is still not open. Coss Marte, the owner of Conbud, said he’s spent more than $1 million getting ready to open.
Once in business, state-approved weed shops can only carry products cultivated by New York farmers and are subject to strict regulations on how they market their goods. Neon colors, bubble letters, and colloquial references to cannabis itself are barred from store advertisements. Everything must be tested — and taxed.
While the cannabis-impacted entrepreneurs waded through Albany’s new marijuana bureaucracy, an estimated thousands of unlicensed smoke shops popped up in New York City. Because there’s little oversight, the exact number remains unclear. Around Conbud alone, rival smoke shops and weed bodegas line the blocks, flouting the rules with their white fluorescent lights and bright signage that make them so instantly recognizable as cannabis stores with names like Zaza City and Smoke Kave.
These unlicensed shops can be cheap and easy to set up (some keep just a small amount of product in the store in case they’re raided). And unlike their legal counterparts, the unlicensed stores don’t pay state taxes on cannabis sales, which means their weed is often cheaper. Some of them try to get around the regulations by operating as private membership clubs where pot isn’t sold outright but “gifted” or held onto for a friendly patron. Others are bodegas that dedicate a small amount of shelf space to cannabis products alongside the usual offerings of pints of ice cream and cans of Arizona iced tea.
The rapid rise of unlicensed shops has alarmed lawmakers who are trying a number of solutions to deter them. This past February, the Manhattan DA sent out letters warning more than 400 smoke shops that they could be evicted for unlicensed activity. In June, the Office of Cannabis Management and the Tax Department began the first of hundreds of armed raids of shops around the state, seizing product and posting vibrant warning signs in store windows. The city has filed lawsuits against dozens of shops in Manhattan for allegedly selling cannabis to minors. The New York City sheriff, too, has been inspecting unlicensed shops and seizing their goods. While a few shops have shuttered, the sheer volume of stores is proving to be a difficult test of these efforts.
THE CITY and New York counted at least 33 stores selling cannabis within a few blocks of Conbud on the Lower East Side. We visited five of the stores in the neighborhood to learn more about how the weed market has developed a year after the first legal sale of cannabis in the state.
Conbud – The Sole Licensed Dispensary
Conbud, which finally opened in October, is the only licensed dispensary in the neighborhood so far. Owner Coss Marte, who has three felonies for dealing drugs, was awarded a special license back in April. But after a lawsuit challenged the legality of the license program, a court injunction prevented stores from opening for months. Marte’s plans for a summer launch were derailed. Meanwhile, he and other licensees were racking up expenses paying pricey New York rents for idle storefronts.
In the meantime, the delay gave unlicensed stores an opportunity to gain more of a foothold in the neighborhood, Marte acknowledges. “The market has already matured in the Lower East Side specifically. Some of the stores around here have already been open two or more years,” he told me. “Consumers are just thinking that this is what it is, not that the stores are illegal.”
Inside, the shop borrows a lot from Marte’s personal story: There are product displays reminiscent of the milk crates he used to sit on outside a bodega selling drugs. A full-screen television shows a loop of Marte at a local farm tending to cannabis plants that would soon be harvested and sold in the store, an employee told me. On one wall, the text of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, is posted in bold letters. Conbud-brand T-shirts with the law’s text are available for sale, too. The effect is twofold: Marte is selling customers on the store’s cannabis products, like gummies marketed for sleep or energy and locally grown cannabis flower, but more broadly on the idea that legalization can be a form of reparation to those harmed by the war on drugs.
One of the most popular products is an ounce of Hudson Cannabis that’s grown upstate and runs for $185 — the best deal in the store but not as inexpensive as what some of the unlicensed shops offer.
A week before the Tyson event, Conbud threw a party to celebrate the launch of the Dr. Midtown brand, owned by a former legacy operator who goes by Nas. He told me he used to run a 1,200-person delivery route in Manhattan and was arrested in January 2021, right before the law changed. “I grew up in Queens, and it’s just been constant harassment,” he said. To see his brand now in stores, he added, “is exactly what we’ve been fighting for.” Promotional flyers for the party were printed with both Marte’s and Nas’s old mug shots along with the slogan “From Legacy to Legal.”
Part of the goal in hosting events like the one with Tyson and the launch party for Dr. Midtown is to educate people, Marte said. People living in the neighborhood see the long lines or hear the music and stop by to see what’s going on. That gives Marte an opportunity to explain that Conbud is the only legal cannabis store in the Lower East Side, he said.
“The more events we do, the more the community is aware that, ‘Hey, we’re here and we’re legal.’”
Flame Zone – A Shiny Smoke Shop
Shortly after Conbud opened in October, a flashy new smoke shop called Flame Zone Convenience appeared right across Delancey Street. The store employs several of the marketing techniques that legal stores are specifically prohibited from using. Its signage is written in a neon-green rounded bubble font. A sign advertised a grand-opening sale of an eighth of an ounce of weed for $20 (less than half what an eighth of Mike Tyson’s brand costs across the street), while another says the vape shop has the lowest prices around. If there was any doubt the store sold weed, there’s a towering inflatable joint just inside and a second one suspended from the ceiling.
Before Flame Zone opened, the business here was called Gee Vape and Smoke Shop. In February, Gee Vape was one of more than 400 stores the Manhattan DA warned in a letter could be evicted for selling cannabis. The store later closed. Flame Zone, according to the employee at the counter, is a different business from Gee Vape. “This is a new owner. She changed everything,” he told me.
While the shop may have a shiny new exterior, the property owner has been the same since 2007, city records show. Enforcement efforts have started to increasingly target landlords, not just the stores. But so far those measures have done little to deter a landlord from simply leasing the space to a new smoke shop. The volume of shops is simply too high.
In mid-November, shortly after Flame Zone opened, the Office of Cannabis Management and the New York State Tax Department raided the store. The two agencies are one part of the enforcement effort to curb the illegal shops. Last year, the state inspected 350 storefronts and seized more than $50 million worth of product, according to its latest figures LOOK BELOW. Though a pink slip from the raid is still posted in the door, it’s open for business.
Behind the counter, there are vape cartridges and pre-rolls branded with major California companies like Stiizy and Jungle Boys. House pre-roll joints are three for $20. When I ask the shopkeeper where the weed is from, he says, “Here, it’s in-house.” Only New York–grown weed is permitted in legal shops, and it remains illegal to transport cannabis across state lines. But for years California brands have faced allegations of “backdooring” their product to other states, and a number of websites sell counterfeit packaging from California brands down to a randomized serial number and QR code. That makes it hard for customers to know what they’re really buying.
Despite the bright lights and the low prices, the store still gets little foot traffic on a chilly December evening. In a half-hour or so, I see only one woman go into the store. She popped in while waiting for her order at Wingstop next door, she told me. When I asked what made her choose that particular store, she shrugged. “It’s just the closest one,” she said.
MetroBud – A Private Members Club
Owned by Joe and Jason Coello, two brothers from Queens, MetroBud on Allen Street operates as a private membership club. Blue velvet ropes guide customers to the entrance, and an employee checks IDs before letting anyone inside. The shop differentiates itself by encouraging people to stay awhile. Inside, two televisions loaded with video games are available to rent, and there are a few couches where you can just smoke and chill. MetroBud also hosts events like a weekly yoga class.
Joe Coello started planning to open the store as soon as legalization passed in March 2021, reasoning that a membership model was a way to get started without a state license. “We were trying to operate as above board as we could,” said Coello. “We were operating legally, as far as we were concerned.”
When the cannabis law passed, it included protections for people possessing weed as well as giving it away to their friends. Interpreting the latter to mean that they may legally “gift” weed to patrons or possess weed on behalf of members, cannabis membership clubs like MetroBud began popping up across the city. At one club I visited, customers pay for a photograph — and then are “gifted” cannabis in return.
There are no specific regulations that govern how the clubs operate because the distinction is not sanctioned by the state regulatory agency and there’s no specific license category for the model.
On many days, MetroBud seems to function like any other weed store. Daily membership is effectively free, so anyone with ID can walk in off the street and make a purchase. On a recent Saturday night, there was little foot traffic and just one customer inside fixated on playing Mortal Kombat. The store carries various branded MetroBud strains of weed from New York farmers as well as other brands. Prices are divided by tiers and at the low end can beat prices that legal shops like Conbud offer.
The membership-club interpretation of “gifting” hasn’t been tested in court, but last year, the Office of Cannabis Management sent out letters warning operators that running unlicensed shops could potentially jeopardize their ability to get a license in the future. The letters specifically stated that a membership-club model was not allowed.
Despite the state’s warnings, Coello still hopes to go legal and has applied twice for retail licenses since opening MetroBud. “It would be nice just to not have to look over our shoulder,” he said.
Meanwhile, Coello defends his business model — and the crop of unlicensed shops in the neighborhood. “I believe in a free market,” he said. “As long as they’re putting out products that are safe and don’t have heavy metals, mold, or pesticides in them, I don’t see a problem with it.”
Allen Convenient Exotic – Twice Raided
Walk down Allen between Delancey and Broome Streets, and you’ll find two more smoke shops near MetroBud: Green Apple Cannabis Club and Allen Convenient Exotic. Red, green, and purple lights from the trio of stores overwhelm passersby. As I stood outside on a recent evening, I watched a couple point to the fluorescent lights. “Why do all these places look so ugly?” one asked.
Cannabis was legalized just one year into the pandemic, as restaurants and retail shops were struggling to stay afloat. Some smoke shops have opened in place of establishments that stopped paying rent in the pandemic. The space occupied by Allen Convenient Exotic had been a smoke shop for years, selling items like vapes and glass pipes and cigarettes. But Green Apple Cannabis Club used to be a clothing store, and MetroBud was previously a pop-up space hosting events from brands including PornHub and Subway.
The three stores are an example of how ineffective state enforcement has been in curbing unlicensed sales. While Green Apple and Metrobud’s owners both say they’ve never had any major issues with state or local law enforcement, Allen Smoke Shop has a poster in the window with loud red letters: ILLICIT CANNABIS SEIZED. The store has been raided at least twice by state officials, according to the posted notices.
To allay any doubt that it still sold cannabis, the shop projects a roving image of the cannabis plant on the sidewalk outside.
Inside, there’s a wall of sodas and chips and even a small shelf of Bounty paper towels as in any other neighborhood bodega. Much more discreetly than in a place like MetroBud, the cannabis products like THC-laced edibles as well as “mushroom extract” gummies are confined to just a small section at the front counter. With a few cannabis-plant signs in the window and a bit of shelf space, the shop is an example of how easy it is for owners to add on a few products. When I snap a photo with my phone, it immediately catches the attention of the shopkeeper. “Hey, no photos. You can’t take a photo in here.” With the flip of a switch, the clear glass counter turned a frosted white, concealing the contents from view.
Dubai Cannabis Supply – Sued by NYC
I head over from Allen to Stanton Street, which has its own row of unlicensed shops selling cannabis. I pass by a few of them and head into Dubai Smoke, which the city sued in July, to see how it’s currently operating.
The complaint cited three instances in which the shop allegedly sold illegal psilocybin products. Created in the 1970s as a means to shutter undesirable businesses like places of prostitution, the nuisance-abatement law is one more tool the city has to curb illicit cannabis shops. In 2023, it filed at least 35 cases against smoke shops and their landlords for selling cannabis products to minors. Inspections are typically carried out by the NYPD, which documents at least three instances of the unlicensed activity before seeking a court order to close the store for one year. The city settled with Dubai in November on the condition that it would not sell unlicensed cannabis or tobacco products.
But a December visit shows that’s plainly not the case yet. Inside, the shop looks like the color palette of a Jojo Siwa concert. The walls are covered in rainbow graffiti, and under the glass cases there are glass tubes of pre-rolled joints for $20 labeled ZKITTLES. The man at the counter pulls out the tray of ones that come in flavors labeled Cotton Candy, Jungle Juice, and Froot Loops. A row of vape cartridges has options in lilac and teal and fuchsia. There are more California brands, like Stiizy gummies, on display here, too. None of these rainbow offerings would be allowable at the neighborhood’s one legal dispensary, Conbud.
Outside, I spot a group of what appear to be teen boys passing a joint among them. I nod to the joint and introduce myself as a reporter working on a story about cannabis shops in the neighborhood.
One tells me loudly they’re all 21 before laughing.
“Bro, no you’re not, no you’re not,” one of them shouts.
“Okay, yeah, we’re all 16.”
“I’m actually 35,” says a third. (I start to believe they are indeed 16.)
Dubai Smoke Shop wasn’t cited for selling to minors, but at least 34 other shops in Manhattan last year were, according to a review of nuisance-abatement complaints. This has been a rallying cry of lawmakers looking to shut down unlicensed shops with no oversight of its sales.
When I asked the teens where they liked to go for weed, they brushed me off. “I mean wherever they will sell to us, there’s only a few places around here,” one said.
“We’re not gonna tell you which ones.”
Article link
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/01/05/weed-gone-wild-cannabis-lower-east-side/New York Fined Unlicensed Weed Shops More Than $25 Million — and Collected Almost None of That
Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she wants to shut down the illegal stores, but the lack of enforcement reveals just how hard that task will be.
BY ROSALIND ADAMS
FEB. 22, 2024, 5:00 A.M.The state has levied more than $25 million in fines against unlicensed smoke shops for selling cannabis products since last year, but so far only a minuscule percent of those fines have been collected by both the state Tax Department and the Office of Cannabis Management, THE CITY has learned.
The two agencies were granted greater authority last year to enforce the 2021 cannabis law and began joint raids against smoke shops for selling cannabis products without a license last summer. They levy and collect fines separately, however. Fines may be levied against individuals who operate the smoke shops or the business itself when it’s difficult to track down an owner.
The Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) said it has collected $22,500 in fines from unlicensed shops. The Department of Taxation and Finance has collected $0 in fines so far, said sources familiar with the state’s enforcement progress.
Last October, THE CITY reported that the state cannabis agency, citing a lack of resources, had paused the enforcement hearings that follow state agency raids on unlicensed shops. Lawyers for unlicensed shops told THE CITY at the time that they had received notices on behalf of their clients that the cases were being withdrawn. Meanwhile, the raids have continued.
But while OCM has withdrawn many cases, some shops and their operators have separately received letters separately from the tax department warning them of fines more than $150,000, according to notices obtained by THE CITY.
“Currently, the State is prioritizing shutting down illegal shops and seizing unlawful products,” said Aaron Ghitelman, a spokesperson for OCM. “While we recognize entities being fined have a right to due process, we are committed to working within the confines of the law to collect the fines once the legal process is complete.”
Fines levied by the tax department may be appealed, for example. And shops fined by the Office of Cannabis Management may be challenged in the administrative hearings the agency paused back in October, which lengthens the state’s timeline to collect the fines.
Ghitelman added that the state has seized tens of millions of dollars in illicit products as part of its enforcement measures. Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly emphasized the amount of product seized in press releases about the progress of the raids.
The governor’s office and the state tax department declined to answer questions and deferred to the statement provided by OCM.
The dearth of fines collected so far highlights the challenge of enforcing the cannabis law in a state with a booming gray market.
In New York City alone, unlicensed shops are rampant throughout some neighborhoods. Though there is no official count of the number of unlicensed smoke shops, it is estimated to be in the thousands. Last month, local news outlet CNY Central reported that OCM has only 14 investigators on staff.
The two state agencies are not the only ones involved in enforcement. The Sheriff’s Department is inspecting smoke shops in New York City as well, and the NYPD has done undercover inspections of shops suspected of selling cannabis to minors.
In Hochul’s annual state of the state address last month, the governor said that she would seek new enforcement powers this year as part of the annual budget.
“We know there’s more to be done and we need more tools to do it. We’re going to continue working with local leaders, including in New York City, to shut down illegal cannabis stores once and for all,” she said.
Sen. Jeremy Cooney, the chair of the Senate Cannabis Committee, agreed that more enforcement powers are needed, but added that the effort has to be in tandem with opening up new stores.
“The way forward is to make sure that we have more legal stores operating on our streets,” Cooney told THE CITY in an interview. “It’s a parallel track – one is to close down stores and make sure enforcement is happening, the other is to make sure that new ones are opening.”
“We’re not moving fast enough,” Cooney added.
At a Senate hearing in late October, executive director Chris Alexander testified that he did not think fines were enough to deter unlicensed shops. In response to questions, he said that he expected OCM’s administrative hearings to resume within weeks. But months later, the hearings have not resumed. OCM said it is seeking expanded enforcement powers to padlock stores instead of issuing fines.
Sen. Cooney told THE CITY he was unaware of this and found it “very concerning.”
The fines levied by the Tax Department are determined by a formula that assesses that unlicensed shops owe up to two times the amount of tax that would have been due on that illicit cannabis, the deficiency notices said.
Both letters reviewed by THE CITY say that more than 12 pounds of illicit cannabis had been seized but do not show specifically the details of the calculation. The law affords people the right to appeal the fines, which may be part of the reason why the agency has not collected any fines from unlicensed shops yet.
But in both instances, the shops had been raided by the OCM and the Tax Department and had product seized but the state cannabis agency had withdrawn their proceedings.
“Of course no one is paying them,” said Paula Collins, a lawyer who represents clients who operate unlicensed smoke shops. “They thought it was over.”
URL
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/22/new-york-state-hochul-fines-illegal-cannabis-shops/CANNABIS FIGURES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 4, 2023
CONTACTS: Aaron Ghitelman /Aaron.Ghitelman@ocm.ny.gov / 518-728-9570
NEW: OFFICE OF CANNABIS MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER ENFORCEMENT UPDATE ON STATEWIDE ACTIONS AGAINST UNLICENSED CANNABIS SHOPS The Office of Cannabis Management and the Office of the Attorney General win major court victory; new precedent set for State to use Cannabis Law to permanently close illegal businesses More than $50 million worth of illicit cannabis seized to date Additional court victory and new trainings for localities also announced NEW YORK, NY – Today, the New York State Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) published the second in a monthly series of enforcement action updates against unlicensed cannabis shops across the State. These updates will be released on the first Monday of each month through the end of the year. Inspections & Seizures: During the month of November, investigators from OCM and the Department of Taxation and Finance (DTF) inspected 71 shops, including 13 re-inspections, suspected of selling unlicensed cannabis. These inspections resulted in the seizure of 812 pounds of flower, 701 pounds of edibles, and 61 pounds of concentrate, with an estimated value of $7,284,986. These actions bring the total of inspections to 350 locations, 88 of which have been re-inspected, to yield over 11,000 pounds of seized illicit cannabis worth more than $54 million. OCM and DTF investigators will continue inspections each and every week across the State. Court Victories: On November 21, OCM, in collaboration with the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), won its first petition for emergency relief under Section 16-a of the Cannabis Law, a new section of the law that just went into effect this year. This victory established an important precedent allowing the State to seek longer term closures for businesses found to be illegally selling cannabis. In this case, the Court issued a permanent injunction and one-year permanent closing order against illegal operator David Tulley of "I'm Stuck" in Wayne County. The Court agreed with OCM and the OAG that Tulley had engaged in unlicensed sale of cannabis and rejected Tulley's argument that the “cannabis consulting business model” did not require a license. The Court’s Order continued the padlocking that had been granted by the Court on an emergency basis earlier this year. An assessment of total penalties will be finalized in the coming weeks. On November 29th, OCM, in collaboration with the OAG, also successfully secured a temporary restraining order and temporary/closing/padlocking order against the unlicensed operator George West of Jaydega 7.0 in Canandaigua. A hearing on the request for a permanent injunction and closure of Jaydega 7.0 is scheduled for next month in Ontario County Supreme Court. Training for Municipalities: With a continued focus on collaboration and coordination with the goal of maximizing enforcement partnerships, OCM and the OAG will host a public webinar for municipalities across the state on Thursday, December 7 to provide vital education and resources around best practices and opportunities to shut down illicit operators. “As we look ahead to this next chapter in New York’s cannabis market, we continue to prioritize safety across the state by working diligently to shut down illegal operators,” said Chris Alexander, Executive Director of The New York State Office of Cannabis Management. “The number one remedy for the problem of these illicit shops is getting more legal businesses open. New Yorkers want to know where their products are coming from, and they know they can rely on safe, trusted, and locally grown cannabis when they walk into one of our legal dispensaries. We will continue to seize illegal products, and we know that the collaborative work continues across all levels of government to address this public health crisis.” Fines for the illegal sale of cannabis start at $10,000 per day and can rise up to $20,000 per day for the most egregious conduct. An additional fine of $5,000 can be levied for removal of the Order, and the inspected businesses may also be subject to additional violations and penalties under the Tax Law. Additional fines may be assessed. The enforcement legislation passed in May 2023 also authorizes OCM to seek a State court order to ultimately padlock businesses found to be in repeated violation of the law. In addition, the law makes it a crime to sell cannabis and cannabis products without a license. To bring many levels of government together to combat the illicit sale of cannabis, Governor Hochul announced partnerships between OCM and the OAG through which municipalities across the state can receive training on how to utilize a particular provision -- Section16-A -- of the new enforcement law signed by Governor Hochul in May 2023 to pursue padlocking orders in State Court. 16-A authorizes local governments, including county attorneys, with OCM’s approval, to pursue padlocking orders from a court against an unlicensed cannabis business found to be engaged in egregious conduct. This authority significantly augments the ability for different levels of government to work together to shut down illegal cannabis operators. In addition to these new partnerships with localities, the Governor announced that additional State agencies will now be bringing the weight of their business enforcement powers to bear as part of the State’s creative and aggressive approach to combating the illicit market. The Department of Labor and the Workers Compensation Board are joining these efforts to ensure businesses selling cannabis without a license are compliant with New York State labor and workers compensation laws. This approach, which combines the enforcement powers of labor law, tax law, and cannabis law, can result in non-compliant business owners potentially facing tens of thousands of dollars in penalties as the result of a single inspection and violations, significantly enhances the State’s ability to crack down on those who engage in illicit sales, and reaffirms the Governor’s deep commitment to ensuring that the law is being followed and that New Yorkers are protected from potentially unsafe products. New York State currently has 27 licensed adult-use cannabis dispensaries and has approved 44 Cannabis Growers Showcases. All regulated, licensed dispensaries must post the Dispensary Verification Tool sticker near their main entrance. Any store selling cannabis that does not display this sticker is operating without a license. ### Follow us on all of our social media at @nys_cannabis
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Man cleared in a 1996 Brooklyn killing said for decades he knew who did it. Prosecutors now agree
By Associated Press New York State
PUBLISHED 9:36 PM ET Jan. 18, 2024
NEW YORK (AP) — A man who served 14 years in prison for a deadly 1990s shooting was exonerated Thursday after prosecutors said they now believe the killer was an acquaintance he has implicated for decades.
“I lost 14 years of my life for a crime that I didn’t commit,” Steven Ruffin told a Brooklyn judge after sighing with emotion.
Although Ruffin was paroled in 2010 and has since built a career in sanitation in Georgia, he said that getting his manslaughter conviction dismissed and his name cleared “will help me move on.”
“If you know you're innocent, don’t give up on your case — keep on fighting, because justice will prevail,” Ruffin, 45, said outside court. “That’s all I’ve wanted for 30 years: somebody to listen and really hear what I’m saying and look into the things I was telling them."
Prosecutors said they were exploring whether to charge the man they now believe shot 16-year-old James Deligny on a Brooklyn street during a February 1996 confrontation over some stolen earrings. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said after court that charges, if any, wouldn't come immediately.
“You have to be able to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt, and we have to make sure that that evidence is sufficient to do so,” said Gonzalez, who wasn't DA when Ruffin was tried. “You have a lot of factors working against us procedurally, but also factually — unfortunately, this is 30 years ago.”
Ruffin's conviction is the latest of more than three dozen that Brooklyn prosecutors have disavowed after reinvestigations over the last decade.
Over a dozen, including Ruffin's, were connected to retired Detective Louis Scarcella. He was lauded in the 1980s and ‘90s for his case-closing prowess, but defendants have accused him of coercing confessions, engineering dubious witness identifications and other troubling tactics. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors said in their report on the Ruffin case that they “did not discover any misconduct by Scarcella" in the matter. A message seeking comment was sent to his attorney.
Prosecutors said the police investigation — and their office's own at the time — “were wholly inadequate” and tunnel-visioned, failing to look into the person they now believe was the gunman.
The mistaken-identity shooting happened as Ruffin and others were looking for a robber who had just snatched earrings from Ruffin’s sister. In fact, Deligny wasn't the robber, authorities say.
Tipsters led police to Ruffin, then a 17-year-old high school student, and the victim's sister identified him in a lineup that a court later deemed flawed. Scarcella wasn't involved in the lineup, but he and another detective questioned Ruffin.
The teen told them, twice, that he saw but wasn't involved in Deligny's shooting, according to police records quoted in prosecutors' report.
Then Scarcella brought the teen's estranged father — a police officer himself — to the precinct. The father later testified that he told his son to “tell the truth,” but Ruffin said his father leaned on him to confess.
And he did confess, saying he fired because he thought Deligny was about to pull something out of his jacket. Ruffin told the detectives they could retrieve the gun from his sister's boyfriend, and they did, prosecutors' report said.
Ruffin quickly recanted to his father, who didn't tell the detectives his son had taken back his confession, according to prosecutors' report. The teen went on to testify at his trial that he didn't shoot Deligny but saw and knew the killer — his sister's boyfriend, the one who'd given police the gun, broken up into parts and stuffed into potatoes.
Jurors at Ruffin's trial heard from the boyfriend, but only about his relationships with the defendant, his sister and others in the case. When the jury was out of the room, the boyfriend invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer other questions, including where he'd been on the night of the shooting.
Prosecutors didn't release the boyfriend's name Thursday, and the names of lawyers who have represented him weren't immediately available. He told prosecutors during their recent reinvestigation that he had nothing to do with the shooting and didn't give detectives the gun. He also said he never confessed to anyone, though prosecutors say Ruffin's stepfather, sister and late mother all have said he made admissions to them.
Asked Thursday about the boyfriend, Ruffin's lawyers noted that the prospect of any prosecution now is uncertain.
“We only wish that in 1996, Detective Scarcella and others had performed the investigation they should have and been able to get this right the first time," attorney Garrett Ordower said, noting that Deligny's family may now never have the finality of a conviction in his death.
As for Ruffin, he's focused on his future, including promotion opportunities at his job in Atlanta. His now-voided conviction, he said, “never defined me.”
“This never really spoke of the person I was or the man I was going to become,” he said. “So this, to me, is a great closure of a chapter my life, but my life is still going up.”
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Richard Murray Centos 2023
a poetry book, free top read, all inspirations are cited
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/richard-murray-centos-2023 -
Salvador, Bahia Festivals
January 2024
February 2024
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Happy Perihelion
It will occur at 7:38pm Eastern standard time or UTC -5 the earth is the closest it will be to the sun, at 91,404,095 miles, and on its elliptical orbit about the sun, continuously increases the distance between the earth's center to the Sun's center, till the July aphelion
To see my 2023 art list use the following URL
https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/02/2023-art-summary.html
A condensed form is the following Art vs Artist
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Art-Vs-Artist-2023-1007446039photo of sun from ben heine, title good morning
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Enter our free and fun Best First Sentence Contest!
Each winner will receive a 10-page critique from one of the teachers of the Master Class. The deadline for entries is May 1, 2024.To enter the 2024 Best First sentence contest, please email your submissions to BestFirstSentence@gmail.com. You may only submit one entry. To qualify for entry you must be an ITW member or registered for ThrillerFest XIX (2024). Winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 29, 2024, at the CraftFest Luncheon and on social media. All winners will be notified shortly thereafter via email.
Watch our Animation Producing Course these holidays!
It's the end of the year, and we're thrilled to gift you with access to our course, Producing for Animation, designed to empower aspiring producers and creatives in the world of storytelling!You’ll get to learn what a producer really does, what an animation pipeline is, and how to manage creative teams, budgets, and schedules. All while working alongside a director to optimise the creative vision within the budget.
Best of all, it's completely free of charge, made possible through our donor, BMZ and partner GIZ.
Meet the Experts: Dianne Makings and Kaya Kuhn
Dianne Makings and Kaya Kuhn, two of South Africa’s most experienced animation producers, explain what a producer does and what skills and proficiencies are required in the role, as they guide us through each stage of a production, from bidding to broadcast.Dianne joined the animation industry after an 11-year career in advertising, PR and events. Not only does she perform the mammoth role of CTIAF’s festival director, but she also has produced a series of high profile projects. Her latest project; Aau’s Song was an original story produced for Lucasfilm. She has managed creative teams and processes for a variety of digital content including 2d, 3d, stop motion and VR. She is passionate about African animation and believes that the continent is more than ready for the global stage.
Kaya Kuhn started her career in the South African film industry in live action post-production where she notably post-produced six seasons of reality television series The Voice. In 2017, she took the leap into producing animation at Triggerfish. Since then, she line produced critically acclaimed short films Zog (BBC1) and The Snail and The Whale (BBC1), co-produced animated feature film Seal Team (Netflix), was involved with pre-production for animated series Supa Team 4 (Netflix) and Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes (Disney+), and most recently was the senior producer on the groundbreaking anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (Disney+) which is set to release in 2023. She was the consultant producer for animated short Aau’s Song which forms part of anthology Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 (LucasFilms) and has recently been involved in producing live action feature films for local broadcaster, Kyknet. Currently, she runs a production services company ‘Those Production Girls’ which offers high end production support through innovation and inclusion.
https://www.triggerfish.com/academy/
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Response and Articles 12/19/2023
At the end of the war between the states: louisiana, south carolina, mississippi had majority black populaces, but the governments of said states had no black officials. One of the problems with some Black people in the usa is they speak very neutrally when it comes to humanity. Being verbose is a long thing, can be fatiguging, but is usually more descriptive and being more descriptive is needed when you speak of the past in humanity anywhere. The palestinean people had the majority in palestine when the zionist came but the government was completely run by members of the british empire. so...
I think a valid question exist. Beyond the law, did the 14th or 15th amendment's make the Black Enslaved or former enslaved citizens? What makes a citizen? is it the law? or is it, the communal context? I argue the history of the native american in the usa+ the black enslaved or descended of enslaved in the usa, refutes the idea that citizenry comes from the law.
The authors states tremendous progress for the black populace in what is commonly callted reconstruction in the usa, but i argue that is erroneous. First, most black people in the usa, 90% were still financially dead, no savings, no money, no land, n opportunity to gain financially. Tremendous progress I thought represented a lifting of a majority in a populace, not a financial stagnation from a majority that never had financial betterment.
The biggest problem with Black people in the usa, is the lie we tell ourselves about the commonly called Great Migration, which I call the Black fleeing. Black people flew from the south cause black people were being killed/murdered/incarcerated absent criminal activity/assaulted through the entirey of reconstruction, ask Ida B Wells and flew to the northern cities to be treated better. Most black people did not think they were going to financial betterment outside the south. I wonder where that myth comes from. Yes, some black people sought financial betterment but most wanted away from whitey.The firs thing he said that is truth, Black people always flew back to the south. But the reason was always simple. Thew white governments of the exosouth [north or west] was no better than the white governments of the south. Remember, Tulsa, which wasn't majority black like NYC, Chicago, Los ANgeles, had a government that aided in the bombing and looting of the black community in tulsa by the white community. To be blunt, NYC, Chicago, Los ANgeles were not haven cities for blacks, that is a myth. But the fact that they were not is why black people flew back.
Now what is missing. Many years ago, during Obama's first campaign I suggested Black people in the usa needed a black party of governance in the usa to focus on places where the populace of black people is largest. He speaks of Black Power in government locally in the southern states but doesn't suggest a black party of governance in said states? why? I always find it strategically silly that any community is unwilling to support organizations strictly to their benefit when they have numerical advantage.
Why do the black towns and counties of the south have representatives of andrew jackson or abraham lincoln when both have proven to be useless in being effective to making or administering legal policy to Black benefit.I emailed him my thoughts, you can do the same
chblow@nytimes.comSome post where I spoke on this
https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-496
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1945&type=status
This photo is part of the problem. Most black people didn't own a car. This black family is financially the black one percent. This black family is looking for financial betterment but most black people owned nothing. I know for certain. Most Black people fled the south , walking, taking the train, fleeing white violence. But the narrative whites like to hear, ala magical negro is it was a simple financial move.
Charles M. Blow on reversing the Great Migration
sunday-morning
BY CHARLES M. BLOWDECEMBER 17, 2023 / 10:25 AM EST / CBS NEWS
Our commentary is from New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, whose new HBO documentary "South to Black Power" is now streaming on Max:At the end of the Civil War, three Southern states (Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi) were majority Black, and others were very close to being so. And during Reconstruction, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution made Black people citizens and gave Black men the right to vote.
This led to years of tremendous progress for Black people, in part because of the political power they could now access and wield on the state level.
But when Reconstruction was allowed to fail and Jim Crow was allowed to rise, that power was stymied. So began more decades of brutal oppression.In the early 1910s, Black people began to flee the South for more economic opportunity and the possibility of more social and political inclusion in cities to the North and West. This became known as the Great Migration, and lasted until 1970.
But nearly as soon as that Great Migration ended, a reverse migration of Black people back to the South began, and that reverse migration – while nowhere near as robust of the original – is still happening today.
In 2001 I published a book called "The Devil You Know," encouraging even more Black people to join this reverse migration and reclaim the state power that Black people had during Reconstruction. I joined that reverse migration myself, moving from Brooklyn to Atlanta.
Last year, I set out to make a documentary which road-tested the idea, traveling the country, both North and South, and having people wrestle with this idea of Black power.
Here are three things I learned from that experience.
First, Black people are tired of marching and appealing for the existing power structure to treat them fairly.
Second, young Black voters respond to a power message more than to a message of fear and guilt.
And third, many of the people I talked to had never truly allowed themselves to consider that there was another path to power that didn't run though other people's remorse, pity, or sense of righteousness.
I don't know if Black people will heed my call and reestablish their majorities, or near-majorities, in Southern states. But sparking the conversation about the revolutionary possibility of doing so could change the entire conversation about power in this country, in the same way that it has changed me.
URL
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charles-m-blow-on-reversing-the-great-migration-south-to-black-power/Different Tribes of Black people slowly becoming one takes too long to retain gains or start new gains
Alabama
Black Descendent of enslaved leaders guided the majority populace of said people to do what Maher says the palestinean should do. Based on the history of said people my advice is for the palestinean to keep fighting for the river to the sea. Yes, it may lead to a termination of palestineans. But, look at the native american in the usa. Look at the black descended of enslaved in the usa.
Two peoples who in overwhelming majority, not all, chose the path Maher suggest the palestinean choose. What did it lead to?
Whites in the USA got what they wanted, they got to win a blood feud absent having to kill the rivals in the feud, and then use that as a symbol of usa greatness. The black descended of enslaved plus native american became idolters, mostly ranked by people who are completely infatuated to the culture of those who enslaved them, completely impotent populaces concerning what can only come from collective force, beggers or crawlers in the system designed by rivals in a blood feud.
Maher is correct, as someone in this community said to me the same as other black people said many times in earshot in my offline life, the past can not be changed. But, how you plan for the future does not have to suggest the past didn't happen. And that is what Maher truly wants, what the native american of the usa did, what the black descended of the usa did, for the palestinean people to eat the crow of accepting the system of their opposer and embrace said system. Then they can have a palestinean president of israel. They can have dancing jolly musicals about the fiscally poor palestineans abused by the tyrranical israelis hurting each other for relief. They can mate with israelis and have a bunch of loving palestinean-israeli mulattoes. Yeah, I know what Maher is suggesting to the palestinean. If the palestinean is wise,better for the community to die than to become the native american of the usa.Maher on palestineans
Maher on netanyahu
IN AMENDMENT
The problem with netanyahu is like so many , he is unwilling to embrace the truth of his country,this is what hitler did that many leaders are unwilling to do. Embrace the power and violence of their government as power+ violence. The Statian empire teaches all governments that power must always be wielded as benevolence, this comes from the british imperial tradition that create the usa. But I oppose that, if you are a bully be a bully. You want to push the palestineans out, then simply do it. Trying to suggest you are legal or pure or a good person or some other thing to make a false narrative in a history book or to assuade your descendents of how they got their wealth is to me a true sin. Maher says Israel is powerful , well it is time for israel to embrace that position. And to embrace that the zionist chose this location. If the zionist were wise they would had chosen somewhere in europe but they were not, they assumed they could chose a muslim place and convert it through influence of their big brother who was started the same way, the usa. But they underestimated that not all peoples are the native american + black descended of enslaved who are weak peoples. So the zionist made the bed, the israeli has to live in it, israel will always be the enemy of its neighbors, that is the zionist legacy, netanyahu needs to embrace it and kick the palestinean out and live surrounded by enemies.
What DAvid Alan Grier said is correct, and in the situation of candy cane lane holds truth but the reason it isn't industry wide must be discussed. The problem with the narrative is, who owns is irrelevant . Grier says all need to see themselves, and he isn't wrong but black people don't see themselves in media in the usa cause black people don't own the media. Many black people in the usa seem to think not owning sports team, not owning film studios, not owning music labels, not owning car companies, not owning gun manufacturers, not owning cement makers, not owning real estate , not owning mass produce producers[corporate farms], is not a factor. Black people in the usa don't own any industry. That is why Black people are not present as we will like in any industry in the usa. IT is very simple. But the reason black people don't own is because of our history under this government , historically white, that placed us in a negative financial state where whites disallowed us from owning. Yes, starting in the 1980s, it can be said that the black populace in the usa finally was free from the yoke of the whites to grow as individuals BUT it matters when whites in the usa have opportunities to take native american land, when whites have the opportunity to rip natural resources from the earth, when whites have the opportunity to have a gilded age making fortunes for bloodlines off of acts today deemed illegal. MErit isn't unimportant. I am not knocking down merit. But merit isn't more important than opportunity but opportunity in the usa comes from ownership not merit. And ownership in the USA 99% of the time comes from advantage through an ancestor using arms, guns, or inheriting wealth from an ancestor who used arms, guns.
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This situation reflects my point, ownership is more important than merit or equality. eddie mruphy is an owner/a producer and makes the choices, if eddie murphy didn't put grier or someone black as santa that is his choice. My point is ownership is superior to merit. Black culture/storytelling has always been present to support black people feeling apart of anything. And I know cause growing up as a kid I never felt deprived of black presence in media or in any season cause of my parents.David Alan Grier on Why His Surprise Cameo as Black Santa in ‘Candy Cane Lane’ Reminded Him of ‘Black Panther’
The film reunited him with his 'Boomerang' collaborators Eddie Murphy and director Reginald Hudlin.
BY CHRIS GARDNERPlus Icon
DECEMBER 9, 2023 11:15AMAs the Candy Cane Lane premiere red carpet heated up Nov. 28, two publicist elves worked their way down the press line to remind journalists not to spoil the big reveal from the Reginald Hudlin-directed holiday adventure.
The Prime Video release, penned by Kelly Younger, stars Eddie Murphy as a recently unemployed man on a mission to win his neighborhood’s annual Christmas home decoration contest. The hush-hush surprise happens late in the film when David Alan Grier crash-lands in an ultra-slick sleigh as (the lifted embargo permits us to announce) Black Santa Claus.
“Reggie called and told me what his idea was and I was overjoyed, man. He let me flow and egged me and Eddie on,” explained Grier of reteaming with Hudlin and Murphy with whom he teamed for the 1992 romantic comedy Boomerang. “That was over 30 years ago and all we talked about were cars, clubs, big houses, like ‘Where y’all going tonight.’ This was different because Eddie is so chill. He has kids, grandkids. He seemed really, really happy.”
As far as the significance of playing an iconic character as a Black man, Grier said the opportunity reminded him of Black Panther. “When you see yourself represented in movies or stories, it’s an affirmation that you exist, that you belong, and that you’re legitimate. That’s what people forget about to see ourselves, not just us, everybody. There’s room for all of us at the table. This is the first Christmas movie I ever did so it’s got to last a long time.”
Who knows, there may also be a sequel. Prime Video announced last week that following its debut, Candy Cane Lane quickly became the No. 1 movie worldwide on Prime Video, the most-watched am*zon MGM Studios-produced movie debut ever in the U.S. and among the top 10 worldwide film debuts ever on the service.
“The sensational debut of Eddie Murphy’s first-ever Christmas movie, Candy Cane Lane, is a true demonstration of how joyful, family-oriented stories can touch the hearts of viewers around the world,” offered Courtenay Valenti, head of film, streaming, and theatrical at am*zon MGM Studios.
Grier is also counting his blessings this holiday season. “I’m going to tell you right now, I’m 67 years old. I did not think that my career would be here at my age. I have more work than I can even say yes to. My career is booming and I feel like I finally figured out what I’m doing, so I’m only getting better and better. We’ll see what happens.”
the american society of magical negroes trailer
For centuries, there has been a society hidden in plain sight, working in secret to protect Black people from harm. It’s called THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES.
A new satire from writer/director Kobii Libi and an official selection of Sundance 2024. Only in theaters March 22.guiliani as mayor of new york made policy intentionally harming the black populace in nyc, that being the selling of nyc properties that black people lived in, properties nyc owned because the real estate industry failed which many forget... is his actions toward two black female poll workers a shock to black new york city dwellers? The answer is no.
kamala harris broke the record on tiebreak votes but is the quality of her tiebreaks showing she is thoughtful or functional?
https://www.blackenterprise.com/kamala-harris-200-year-record-tiebreakers-cast/Question, should black people in the south look to reboot the majority of historical black colleges that went under?
For example the Conroe Normal and Industrial College faculty (c. 1903)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conroe_Normal_and_Industrial_College
referalMandela on a Black countries government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5TiUhhm7cQor
Please read MEdical Apartheid by Harriet Washington
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/medical-apartheid
the referral
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/smithsonian-targeted-dc-s-vulnerable-to-build-brain-collection/ar-AA1lukXG