Cassandra Medley
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Cassandra Medley
Cassandra Medley (born August 12, 1949) is an American playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include '' A... My Name Is Alice'' (1984) '' Ma Rose'' (1988), '' Noon Day Sun'' (2001), '' Relativity'' (2004), and ''Cell'' (2011). From 1995-1997 Medley served as a staff writer on the long-running ABC series ''One Life to Live'', for which she was twice nominated for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. In 2023, Medley was awarded the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, “one of the nation’s largest and most significant prizes for playwrights.” Among numerous other career honors, she has been the recipient of an Outer Critics Circle Award, the August Wilson Playwriting Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts Playwright Award. In 1989 she was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Medley’s plays span a rich array of topics, including the African-American family structure, passing, colorism, melanin theory, the prison–indust ...
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Detroit, Michigan
Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of United States cities by population, 26th-most populous city in the United States and the largest U.S. city on the Canada–United States border. The Metro Detroit area, home to 4.3 million people, is the second-largest in the Midwestern United States, Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area and the 14th-largest in the United States. The county seat, seat of Wayne County, Michigan, Wayne County, Detroit is a significant cultural center known for its contributions to music, art, architecture and design, in addition to its historical automotive and industrial background. In 1701, Kingdom of France, Royal French explorers Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac and Alphonse de Tonty founded Fort Pontc ...
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One Life To Live
''One Life to Live'' (often abbreviated as ''OLTL'') is an American soap opera broadcast on the American Broadcasting Company, ABC television network for more than 43 years, from July 15, 1968, to January 13, 2012, and then on the internet as a web series on Hulu and iTunes via Prospect Park (production company), Prospect Park from April 29 to August 19, 2013. Created by Agnes Nixon, the series was the first daytime drama to primarily feature ethnically and socioeconomically diverse characters and consistently emphasize social issues. ''One Life to Live'' was expanded from 30 minutes to 45 minutes on July 26, 1976, and then to an hour on January 16, 1978. ''One Life to Live'' heavily focuses on the members and relationships of the Lord family. Actress Erika Slezak began portraying the series' protagonist Victoria Lord in March 1971 and played the character continuously for the rest of the show's run on ABC Daytime, winning a record six Daytime Emmy Awards for the role. In 2002, ...
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Ensemble Studio Theatre
The Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) is a non-profit membership-based developmental theatre located in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. It has a dual mission of nurturing individual theatre artists and developing new American plays. Overview The Ensemble Studio Theatre — commonly known as “EST”— was founded in 1968 by Curt Dempster. With 589 ensemble artists concentrated mainly in New York City, EST has been under the artistic direction of William Carden since 2007. EST hosts three groups of playwrights: Youngblood, EST's OBIE-winning collective of emerging professional playwrights under the age of 30; the EST Playwrights Unit, a diverse group of playwrights that comprises both EST members and non-members; and Going to the River, a group of women playwrights of color with distinct and powerful voices. EST also cultivates the development of plays during a three-week annual tenure as the resident theater company of the Southampton Writers Conference, in partnership with the S ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive with a respective county. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the United States by both population and urban area. New York is a global center of finance and commerce, culture, technology, entertainment and media, academics, and scientific output, the arts and fashion, and, as home to the headquarters of the United Nations, international diplomacy. With an estimated population in 2024 of 8,478,072 distributed over , the city is the most densely populated major city in the United States. New York City has more than double the population of Los Angeles, the nation's second-most populous city.
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Drama
Drama is the specific Mode (literature), mode of fiction Mimesis, represented in performance: a Play (theatre), play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on Radio drama, radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the Epic poetry, epic and the Lyric poetry, lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's ''Poetics (Aristotle), Poetics'' ()—the earliest work of dramatic theory. The term "drama" comes from a Ancient Greek, Greek word meaning "deed" or "Action (philosophy), act" (Classical Greek: , ''drâma''), which is derived from "I do" (Classical Greek: , ''dráō''). The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional Genre, generic division between Comedy (drama), comedy and tragedy. In English (as was the analogous case in many other European languages), the word ''Play (theatre), play'' or ''game'' (translating the Old English, Anglo-Saxon ''pleġan'' or Latin ''ludus'') wa ...
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Speech
Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, such as informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing; acts may vary in various aspects like enunciation, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, loudness, and Speech tempo, tempo to convey meaning. Individuals may also unintentionally communicate aspects of their social position through speech, such as sex, age, place of origin, physiological and mental condition, education, and experiences. While normally used to facilitate communication with others, people may also use speech without the intent to communicate. Speech may nevertheless express emotions or desires; people Talking to oneself, talk to themselves sometimes in acts that are a development of what some psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky) have maintained is the use of silent spee ...
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Social Inequality
Social inequality occurs when resources within a society are distributed unevenly, often as a result of inequitable allocation practices that create distinct unequal patterns based on socially defined categories of people. Differences in accessing social goods within society are influenced by factors like power, religion, kinship, prestige, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, intelligence and class. Social inequality usually implies the lack of equality of outcome, but may alternatively be conceptualized as a lack of equality in access to opportunity. Social inequality is linked to economic inequality, usually described as the basis of the unequal distribution of income or wealth. Although the disciplines of economics and sociology generally use different theoretical approaches to examine and explain economic inequality, both fields are actively involved in researching this inequality. However, social and natural resources other than purely economic resource ...
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Folk Religion
Folk religion, traditional religion, or vernacular religion comprises, according to religious studies and folkloristics, various forms and expressions of religion that are distinct from the official doctrines and practices of organized religion. The precise definition of folk religion varies among scholars. Sometimes also termed popular belief, it consists of ethnic or regional religious customs under the umbrella of a religion; but outside official doctrine and practices. The term "folk religion" is generally held to encompass two related but separate subjects. The first is the religious dimension of folk culture (folklore), or the folk-cultural dimensions of religion. The second refers to the study of religious syncretism between two cultures with different stages of formal expression, such as the melange of African folk beliefs and Roman Catholicism that led to the development of Vodun and Santería, and similar mixtures of formal religions with folk cultures. In China, fo ...
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Prison–industrial Complex
The prison–industrial complex (PIC) is a term, coined after the " military-industrial complex" of the 1950s, used by scholars and activists to describe the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment (such as prisons, jails, detention facilities, and psychiatric hospitals) and the various businesses that benefit from them. The term is most often used in the context of the contemporary United States, where the expansion of the U.S. inmate population has resulted in economic profit and political influence for private prisons and other companies that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Harcourt, Bernard (2012). The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.'' Harvard University Press.p. 236/ref> According to this concept, incarceration not only upholds the justice system, but also subsidizes construction companies, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities,Alex Friedmann (15 January 2012)The Soc ...
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Melanin Theory
Melanin theory is a set of pseudoscientific claims made by some proponents of Afrocentrism, which holds that black people, including ancient Egyptians, have superior mental, physical, and paranormal powers because they have higher levels of melanin, the primary skin pigment in humans. Claims Melanin theory posits that individuals' responses to social stimuli are determined by the prevalence of the skin pigment melanin. Historian Stephen Ferguson describes melanin theory as a component of "strong" Afrocentrism, which assigns biological causes to social phenomena such as white supremacy. Proponents of melanin theory ("melanists") argue that insecurity among European males leads to efforts to socially dominate and emasculate African males, taking the form of unemployment, incarceration, and political and social marginalization. Some black supremacists, including professor of black studies Leonard Jeffries and psychologist Frances Cress Welsing, argue without evidence that higher ...
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Colorism
Discrimination based on skin tone, also known as colorism or shadeism, is a form of prejudice and discrimination in which individuals of the same race receive benefits or disadvantages based on the color of their skin. More specifcally, colorism is the process of discrimination marginalizes darker-skinned people over their lighter-skinned counter parts. Historically, colorism on a global scale has colonial roots, ranging from early class hierarchies in Asia to it's impact on Latinos and African Americans through European colonialism and slavery in the Americas. Colorism focuses on how racism is expressed in the psychology of a people and how it affects their concepts of beauty, wealth, and privilege. A key difference between racism and colorism is that while racism deals with the subjugation of one group by another or the belief in racial supremacy, colorism deals with in-group discrimination in addition to between-group discrimination. Research has uncovered extensive evidence ...
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Passing (racial Identity)
In the United States of America, racial passing occurred when a person who was categorized as Black in regard to their race in the United States of America, sought to be accepted or perceived (" to pass") as a member of another racial group, usually White. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a black person, especially a Mulatto person who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination. In the Antebellum South, passing as White was a temporary disguise used as a means of escaping slavery. United States Passing for white Although anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in the North American Colonies as early as 1664, there were no laws preventing or prosecuting the rape of enslaved girls and women. Rape of slaves was legal and encouraged during slavery to increase the slave population. For generations, enslaved black mothers bore mixed ...
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