Hi friends,

Another week is done and it dawns on me that it is the end of July! Usually, the end of July signals the end of summer vacation with school right around the corner, but since Stanford is on the quarter schedule, school doesn't start until the end of September so I still have quite a ways to go. Anyway, this has been a solid week with lots of learning.

Highs and Lows? 📈📉

📈 My personal high this week was finishing a YouTube video! If you didn't already know, I have a strong desire to share content and my learning with the world. I wanted to do this through YT last year but I found it challenging to carve the time out regularly then I started making it to be a bigger lift than it really is. Do you ever postpone tasks that really shouldn't take too long but you do but then it ends up not being too bad? Yea, that was me this week with a video I recorded earlier then edited this week. My intention here is to form some kind of habit or rhythm for planning, recording, editing, and sharing videos in addition to writing about my experiences. If anyone has any tips for succeeding with personal projects, please do share.

📉 Again, not quite a low (maybe I should think about renaming this portion of the newsletter); but I'd say one thing I'm working on or still making progress on is my internship this summer. Being in a virtual setting presents all kinds of challenges and with my work being a lot of reading and writing, sometimes I don't get the bursts of energy to work consistently. I'm not a big coffee drinker so I am struggling a bit to be productive during my set working hours. I could try to shift my hours to times I'm more alert, but I'd rather have my mornings and evenings to myself. Since I still have a month left of this internship, I think it's worth making a plan to address this issue. I think concrete next steps could schedule my work times in smaller chunks so it doesn't feel so daunting; so maybe Pomodoro style. This has never really worked for me since I have always had more analytical work to do (like engineering problem sets) and those felt easier to work through in longer chunks but I think this might be the way to do it. If you have any suggestions for powering through the day, hit me up on Twitter!

Book Talk!📚

This week I continued my journey in Caste x Isabel Wilkerson. I have to say this is probably the most comprehensive book explaining race as a component or representative of a larger, more deeply engrained system and that is Caste. My biggest takeaway so far has been that Caste gives us a better and more precise language to describe the inequities and injustices we experience. I think one thing I'm hoping for before this book ends is some commentary or analysis on if caste systems can be overthrown. Below are some of the most shocking points I've learned:

• Gynecologists originally tested techniques on black women (even supported by the belief that black women have high pain tolerances).
• The criminalization and stigmatization of drugs as a means of demonizing minority groups (people of color and low-income) directly led to the failure to build adequate infrastructure to address the current opioid crises we're dealing with today.
• Also on the opioid crisis, black folks have historically been perceived to have high pain tolerances so they don't get painkillers; in contrast, white folks got a lot of painkillers and lead to the painkiller for everything culture which led to the opioid crisis today.

Intentional Content Consumption📰

TV — I May Destroy You (IMDY)

I have been watching Michaela Cole's I May Destroy You on HBO Max and I've loved every minute of it. I say go watch it and a few points I'll have below are minor spoilers for the show. Consider this your warning. IMDY is a show about Arabella, a twenty-something Twitter star turned writer who seeks to rebuild her life after being raped. Its central themes include consent and it provides a solid commentaries on social media personas and responding to sexual assaults for both straight and queer relationships. One of my favorite dimensions to the show was that Arabella and her best friend Kwame were British-Ghanaians with their culture just as facts in their lives. As a Ghanaian-American, I saw many parallels in my life represented on mainstream media and the differences for what life could've been like had we grew up in England instead of the US. I've never seen Ghanaian culture so up-front in TV shows before, from the main characters speaking Twi, to the terse familial dynamics. Two moments that really stood out to me were:

1. A scene where Bella was going through it and breaking down crying only to turn around, fake a smile and post on social media.
2. The reporting process for Bella was completely different from Kwame's because his was an LGBTQ assault. That made me reflect on how far we as a society still have to go.

Article — Urban Highways

The development of the US Highway system has traditionally been hailed as revolutionary and has directly lead to the urban landscape we live in today. However the price of this effort is far more overlooked. Often, highways would demolish predominatly black neighborhoods for the sake of connectivity. Additionally, they formed the foundation for an automobile dependent culture which has directly contributed to the climate crisis we are dealing with today (a topic for another day).  

As many of these highways near the end of their lifespans, a national reckoning with structural racism has put them in the spotlight, and has elevated plans, dreams and fights to reconnect what was divided.

But in no city will any single construction project bring back the bustling corridors that were lost. Residents who remember well the recent history of highways fear further infrastructure changes could bring further displacement. Meanwhile, some communities are simply fighting to keep more highways from being built.

Things we can do about highways today:

• Reclaim the land above: ReConnect Rondo in Minnesota
• Turn the Highway back into a boulevard: New Orleans
• Elevating the highway and building public spaces beneath it: Miami
• Stop future highway expansions: Houston

This week's video📹

Like I stated earlier, I made my first YouTube video in quite a while! I have a lot of ideas so stay tuned and keep encouraging me!

Thanks for reading and I'll catch y'all soon!

Warmly,
Awoe

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter @up_up_nd_awoe!