iamjacofalltrades

[iamjacofalltrades]

This is beautiful! A father comforts his daughter, affirming her beauty after she said she wanted straight hair like her friends.

(🎥: @thejacksonfamilyvalues) #BlackDads #BlackDadsMatter

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What the media won’t show in Minneapolis. Free food, water and resources.

Community is a verb.

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My favorite thing about J Cole is how he doesn’t feel the need to do all that talking shit. He pulls up and shows what he’s about every. single. time. I’ll talk my shit about him forever.

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#relevant

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nye

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Finding out you’re going to be a mother is like accepting one of the most prestigious jobs in the world, but for women in the athletic industry, it’s one that also comes at a very expensive price point.

In May, Allyson Felix, who now holds the record for earning the most gold medals in World Championships history, opened up about how starting a family required her to take a 70% pay cut from her Nike endorsement deal. Recently, in a shocking tweet, WNBA player Skylar Diggins-Smith revealed that she was scoring buckets with a baby full of belly for an entire season due to fear of lack of support from her organization.

The Indiana-born 29-year-old Dallas Wings player started her professional career in 2013 and six years later, after becoming a four-time WNBA All-Star, wife, and mother, spoke her truth via Twitter last weekend.

Athletic companies don’t seem to care about Black mothers and athletes like Allyson Felix and Skylar Diggins-Smith refuse to be silent about it any longer. Skylar, who gave birth to her first child in April, first announced her pregnancy last October nearly two months after finishing out the five-month season.

Since then, she has taken maternity leave to focus on her family and received backlash from internet trolls and sports fans alike as a result of her absence. But Skylar had a classy clapback for her critics and opened up about that she had been hiding from the world for months:

“I played the ENTIRE season pregnant last year! All star, and led league (top 3-5) in MPG….didn’t tell a soul.”

In the tweets, Skylar also revealed that postpartum depression had played a huge part in both her hiatus from the sport and her new journey as a mother. Although WNBA rules state that if a player becomes pregnant, they are entitled to half their salary and have all of their medical bills paid, it’s unclear if Skylar’s employers kept up their end of the deal because the athlete went on to say that she was offered “limited” resources for recovery. 

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Black women in American face the highest infant mortality rates. The amount of stress, disrespect, pressure, ridicule and health disparities that Black women are subjected to during and post-pregnancy, jeopardizing the wellbeing of our children and ourselves to be everybody else’s content and willing superhero mule 24/7 is fucking insane. Why can’t we too enjoy our pregnancies and be treated with care and respect?…

AMERICA IS FAILING ITS BLACK MOTHERS

For decades, Harvard Chan alumni have shed light on high maternal mortality rates in African American women. Finally, policymakers are beginning to pay attention.

Serena Williams knew her body well enough to listen when it told her something was wrong. Winner of 23 Grand Slam singles titles, she’d been playing tennis since age 3—as a professional since 14. Along the way, she’d survived a life-threatening blood clot in her lungs, bounced back from knee injuries, and drowned out the voices of sports commentators and fans who criticized her body and spewed racist epithets. At 36, Williams was as powerful as ever. She could still devastate opponents with the power of a serve once clocked at 128.6 miles per hour. But in September 2017, on the day after delivering her baby, Olympia, by emergency C-section, Williams lost her breath and recognized the warning signs of a serious condition.

She walked out of her hospital room and approached a nurse, Williams later told Vogue magazine. Gasping out her words, she said that she feared another blood clot and needed a CT scan and an IV of heparin, a blood thinner. The nurse suggested that Williams’ pain medication must be making her confused. Williams insisted that something was wrong, and a test was ordered—an ultrasound on her legs to address swelling. When that turned up nothing, she was finally sent for the lung CT. It found several blood clots. And, just as Williams had suggested, heparin did the trick. She told Vogue, “I was like, listen to Dr. Williams!”

But her ordeal wasn’t over. Severe coughing had opened her C-section incision, and a subsequent surgery revealed a hemorrhage at that site. When Williams was finally released from the hospital, she was confined to her bed for six weeks.

Like Williams, Shalon Irving, an African American woman, was 36 when she had her baby in 2017. An epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she wrote in her Twitter bio, “I see inequity wherever it exists, call it by name, and work to eliminate it.”

Irving knew her pregnancy was risky. She had a clotting disorder and a history of high blood pressure, but she also had access to top-quality care and a strong support system of family and friends. She was doing so well after the C-section birth of her baby, Soleil, that her doctors consented to her request to leave the hospital after just two nights (three or four is typical). But after she returned home, things quickly went downhill.

For the next three weeks, Irving made visit after visit to her primary care providers, first for a painful hematoma (blood trapped under layers of healing skin) at her incision, then for spiking blood pressure, headaches and blurred vision, swelling legs, and rapid weight gain. Her mother told ProPublica that at these appointments, clinicians repeatedly assured Irving that the symptoms were normal. She just needed to wait it out. But hours after her last medical appointment, Irving took a newly prescribed blood pressure medication, collapsed, and died soon after at the hospital when her family removed her from life support.

Viewed up close, the deaths of mothers like Irving are devastating, private tragedies. But pull back, and a picture emerges of a public health crisis that’s been hiding in plain sight for the last 30 years.

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@ the.jade.dragon

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🍯

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More powerful than 2 cleopatras ✨

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10/7/19

Most recent y’all gon get 😅🥰

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Let's Talk About Vulnerability!

I posed a question on my story over the weekend about Vulnerability and what people felt was keeping them from being vulnerable. 👨🏿‍⚖Judgement was my answer, something I'm working on not worrying about as much.

Alot of responses came in giving different reasonings and perspectives. One common denominator was FEAR. Fear of how people would respond and what actions they would take.

💡Quick Reminder - FEAR is:

FALSE

EVIDENCE

APPEARING

REAL

We need to encourage eachother to move in love and truth and less in fear.

Also keeping in mind that we cannot hold on to past hurt and pain and assume that the next person will conduct themselves the same way towards you.

There is power in Vulnerability. Because there is nothing that you're holding back that will in turn hold you back. EX. Eminem's last freestyle battle in 8 Mile. He put it all on the table being completely vulnerable his opponent had nothing left to say.

It's your life... OWN IT!

[iamjacofalltrades]

a Jamaican X Nigerian wedding

Look at this INTRABlack cross cultural gorgeousness 😭😭😭😭

BLACK LOVE MATTERS

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Briana Babineaux’s Cover of He’s Able

Just in case you’re in need of a reminder today

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She went off on a racist cop for brutally beating an unarmed black man 👏🏾

THESE ARE PEOPLE WE NEED IN OUR SOCIETY YAAAAS

Make this VIRAL! #BlackLivesMatter 

[iamjacofalltrades]

What the western world is doing to Africa.