Thursday, July 26: For Justice and HipHop!

Surprisingly, after two weeks we had finally learned to be on time. We made Matt’s day who didn’t miss Galen though. Our first speaker of the day was Veronica Eady who spoke the American fellows’ mind. She talked about Environmental Justice with focus on NYC. It was the first time we mentioned important environmental issues. The Europeans learned that environmental justice is not just an international problem of multinationals shipping off their waste to India, but of building schools on toxic grounds in the impoverished areas of NYC. Environmental justice in the US focuses mainly around the discrimination of race. The movement started in the 1980s growing out of the Civil Rights Movement. But even today, the battle has not finished yet. The New York Layers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) support communities in fighting against waste facilities in poor neighborhoods and for cleaning up contaminated soil. Even though Veronica tries hard she has not managed yet to make the Americans aware of the threatening environmental problems and to stop them from consuming too much.

Veronica’s colleges Cynthia Soohoo and Marianne Engelman-Lado working on the Campaign to Restore Civil Rights talked about the recent development in American courts and the drawbacks for human rights. According to our guests, the Supreme Court has interpreted the definition of discrimination very narrowly, which makes it very hard to prove discrimination in court. Moreover, individual states cannot be held responsible for civil rights violations. Highly motivated, they explained how conservatives do not preserve anything but are a great force of change and therefore do not deserve the label. The right wing judges have created an enormous gap between domestic and international human rights law. The last hope for human rights advocates is to fill loose state definition by international interpretations. In addition to creative legal strategies, Cynthia and Marianne have dedicated themselves to explain 55% of the Americans about the three government branches.

Next we welcomed increasingly pregnant Elena Cabral who promised us that we would learn how to look straight into somebody’s eyes but still write down every word he says. Although we doubt our multitasking abilities we appreciated her journalistic expertise. We are now ready to go out there and after a short but polite introduction of 20 words get the most amazing quotes. So, we ask: “Who else can we talk to?”

Nobody is perfect but we don’t talk about our failures. Although we haven’t seen the movie “about Wings and Roots”, we believe that it is very impressive. We will confirm so on Wednesday.

Off we were to the greatest show in town: The finale at the international National Dance Institute, which we had visited to teach Jumpstyle last week. We were taken on an artistic journey from Bali, through Mexico to NYC’s street culture. Rolling eyes and vibrating hands enchanted the crowd but imitations failed. Yet, Balinese dance can’t go with ballet, nor with tap, but with Mary Kennedy’s hip hop as demonstrated by kicking and pulling movements. However, we were really impressed by the talents. As they enjoyed the dancing, we enjoyed the show.

Even though we still really love each other, that night we split and didn’t decide on a common activitiy. However, we are sure everyone enjoyed the free night.

Pawel, Shauna & Julia