Illinois news

• What happened to the blues?

  20-06-2018 23:12 via chicagodefender.com
   
  Chicago musician shares his thoughts.
  As Chicago legendary blues singer Tail Dragger (James Yancy Jones) performs around the world and at home, he says he finds it troubling that Black musicians are not embracing the Blues and show little interest in keeping the genre alive and authentic.
  “They don’ gave it away,” Tail Dragger said last week of what African-Americans have done with the Blues. “If it wasn’t for young White kids, blues would be dead. My entire
  
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• ComEd honors seven local diverse suppliers at annual awards celebration 

  20-06-2018 23:06 via chicagodefender.com
  Seven local companies owned and led by people of color and women were recognized for excellence in construction and professional services, environmental stewardship, community building, job creation, and more at ComEd’s third-annual Diverse Supplier Awards ceremony last week.  
   
  In 2017, ComEd spent $711 million – 36 percent of its total supply chain spend – with diversity certified suppliers, an increase from 33 percent of total su
  
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• Trump backed down by moral outrage on child separation

  20-06-2018 22:56 via chicagodefender.com
  State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children.
  Separating children from their parents is indeed a form of terrorism and it points not only to a society that has lost its moral compass, but has also descended into such darkness that it demands both the loudest forms of moral outrage and a collective resistance aimed at eliminating the narratives, power relations and values that support it.
  State violence against children h
  
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• Twenty years on, The Laramie Project is as relevant as ever

  20-06-2018 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  It asks questions that are fundamental to our national identity.With text drawn in part from court transcripts, this complex, multilayered piece of theater chronicles the case of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student whose 1998 murder paved the way for passage of federal hate crimes legislation. But the play also dramatizes the experience of its creators, playwright Moisés Kaufman and members of his Tectonic Theater Project, who traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, after Shepard
  
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• The Tempel Lipizzans show off their mastery of equine ballet

  20-06-2018 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  Then they nuzzle you and devour sugar cubes.Showbiz ain’t easy. Come hell or high water or 90-degree temperatures and biting flies, the show must go on—and smile, damn it.…
  
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• Pink Orchids and The Green Bay Tree look back at the bad old days of 20th-century queer life

  20-06-2018 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  The AIDS crisis! The evil gay villain!In a 2016 column in the British gay magazine Attitude, playwrightPatrick Cash confessed to a dick move he committed early on in his datinglife, when he was 23 years old. After meeting and hooking up with "one ofthe nicest people [he'd] ever met," a 20-year-old man who disclosed hisHIV-positive status before initiating consensual and protected sex, Cashgave in to fear and stigma the following morning.…
  
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