2 Designers Transform Each Other’s Work (ft. Valentino's Pierpaolo Piccioli & Thebe Magugu) | Vogue

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Swrr92xQy2w

i think the concept of reworking and reinterpreting another designer's work is very exciting i think it creates an opportunity for there to be creative tension i love the idea of reinterpreting that actually i even more love the idea of creating a moment between two identities to culture a moment of meeting whatever this is in my favorite color already rice wow gorgeous when i opened the box from valentino for the very first time i was incredibly nervous because i'm a bit of a planner so i like to know what i'm getting in advance beautiful but it was completely kept a secret so when it arrived i opened up the box and was this beautiful fuchsia pink oat couture dress with these incredible pleats laying it on the table you really start to appreciate the level of work and craftsmanship that has gone into this garment and it's quite a lot of fabric on it not only the silk taffeta but inside it's lined with a very soft pink teal and then under there a very hard and even harder tool it really is a work of art and you almost have to just stand and be really arrested by its beauty even if it does come apart i think we will just replete the section that we need yeah stressful but it'll be okay it was very exciting this idea of reworking and recontextualizing another designer's pieces because it speaks to the conversations we're having already around this idea of overproduction you know instead of making new things let's look at what we already have and try and upcycle and reinterpret and change that the look that tab sent me was the very classic contemporary suit done with the blankets from his history his heritage i love the idea of reinterpreting i even more love the idea of creating a moment between two identities to culture i'm italian we are here in roma and we're working on a work of a human that comes from another part of the world and i wanted to get this heritage into my own culture which is the culture from a conversation always comes something something different especially when when you talk with people that are different from from you that have different stories of course i still feel that fashion is a self-expression is a language actually the the things that impressed me the most was this letter the one that tebby sent me he says something that is very moving to me and parallel tribe called the bassot and blankets form a very big part of our culture so i wanted to light this fabric but also this his culture and so that was the very starting point of this collaboration work or interpretation whatever you are calling i often say i'm not a great verbal communicator so to make up for that i use my clothes in a way to almost speak on my behalf i really wanted to take this out couture piece and move it into my universe my context and especially my way of working which is more in a really to wear context so for the dress i'm thinking it's going to break my heart but i'm going to completely unpick it remove the skirt part remove the top part and use one of my patterns to re-cut it as a very elevated trench coat and with the leftover fabric i think we're going to create a wide leg pair of pants with a very generous cuff on it and a matching shirt the cape is the the purest expression of future because it's so simple so pure and it's done with uh just cut and super knot decoration we deconstructed the suit actually and we we are applying the suit the the fabric on top of the cape giving shape to the cape but using the blanket as an embroidery saw between the cape as expression of couture and the blanket that is expression of debbie's culture i think this creates a conversation and a good tension between our history and his heritage i was very excited to work with pia paolo on this project i deeply respect what pierre paulo does as a as a designer i think his relationship to color his relationship to proportion is so fresh and i think he's certainly contributed to the changing conversation around what old creature is i love it clip there and it creates a really beautiful shaped hat i thought tepe has something to say he's from south africa which is i think it's difficult it's not exactly in the middle of fashion i think we share same values because talking about identities being faithful to who you are trying to face another world i think it's it's interesting i think the connection has to be human first of everything actually i don't have idea of what tev will do i sent him a very say classic in volume future tough address and i hope that he will handle it in his own way i think i've been respectful of his work but i've worked with my own instruments and i hope he will do the same i expect that he's going to do the opposite of what i'm doing so taking something uh and ready to it and moving it into his very high old couture universe i'm almost doing the opposite in a lot of ways taking this incredible piece that he's created at valentino and moving it into ready to wear where more people essentially can't see themselves in it what i did there was a exactly the mix between creating something which was the connection between your uh identity and my own identity it was actually quite intimidating because it arrived in like a very big metal flight case with not only one but like two keys but once we opened it you really get such a even bigger appreciation of like okay turn what uh pia pilot does because you know it's it's precision to look absolutely effortless you know and everything like nothing was out of place and i think the exciting challenge with it was using absolutely everything the zips the corsetry um the construction the tube i felt like if i was going to un-pick the beautiful cleats um on the waist i was going to just get struck down by lightning so we just preserved all the plisay pleats and moved it into the armhole and then the white tube that was inside the dress um we took for dying with this incredible dye master called paul in the south of johannesburg and we matched the pink to the exact level um as the as the original fabric on top so there was a lot of there was a lot to play with it was a lot of fabric right it was a lot of memory as i told you i love the the fact that this this fabric was originally a blanket and was it was definitely part of your culture i i wanted to be to yes to light the your identity your culture and your heritage with something that could be uh more like italian kind of cucu it's like a melting between the two the cape is a symbol of you know italian madonnas the renaissance culture and it's also a symbol of cujul because it is the purest shape in couture the fabric was the the starting point of the process and so what we did was to cut the the fabric in order to give it a different placement to a light the the fabric itself so i used a different fabric because there were not as much to to yeah i wanted to use the fabric as the embroidery itself or the of the game i'm very happy of you know this this the connection we created because i felt that even in yours there's something something that came out from our meeting and that's it so it's not something that i could do alone or nor you could do alone so yeah it's the result of the meeting of two humans which i like in my own work i really do love throwing opposites together just that idea of things that shouldn't even be together just like being meshed into one thing i think that's where a certain magic can happen the final look reflects the respectful conversation we we have in a way it reflects the roots of table his tribe it became a suit and now he had a new transformation becoming a cape because of how i grew up i used to be so embarrassed about everything around me but like i've made it my own personal mission to almost take that and move it into the echelons of luxury you know i think people have really stale ideas about what african fashion is i just want to show people that we're very nuanced so it's like a cape in a facing contemporary and it's of course the end of this path we had with tabeth i just hope that tebbe will recognize himself i think when you explore collaborative efforts like that and you test things that are very disparate i think when they come together it forms something new altogether something challenging and i think this project was exactly that i'm very happy i have to say that what i saw because at the end the challenge was to to reflect two stories to identities two big cultures melting together into something that could reflect both together you

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Young, Famous & African | Official Trailer | Netflix

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OF9z_Yibuxk

To us. To us being more fabulous, gorgeous, making more money. This is Sandton, Johannesburg. The richest square mile in Africa. Not one person here is a weak . We're African all-stars. To be young, African, famous. That's the most beautiful feeling. I don't know what you do to men. Men never get over you. Girl, it's the Ugandan sauce. You gotta give me some of that . They call me the OG, and I'm just a winner in general. I know myself, I'm a player.

You will know about me. -I feel it. -Let's see what the vibes are. I always come out on top, and that makes me a boss lady. Being rich and famous is not easy. You messed up. Diamond has kids with this woman. He said, "I want to jump your bones now." Zari's looking good. How could you break the bro code? -You don't touch your friend's ex. -Keep your hands off her titties. It just went zero to 100 real quick! I want castles where you expect to see princesses. -Yes. -But you're getting this. There's some bones to be picked between the women. You can't tell my husband I'm insecure. How do you know him? -You are very insecure. -Pow! -And he is not even my type. -Pow, pow! -Do you think there's gonna be fire? -So much fire. -Let's go. -You're coming across as a little girl. Is this how we want everybody to speak? You guys are dividing this friendship and this group.

Follow and like, and shut your mouth. We're in the thick of the war. -Bye, . -Have a nice day. Shoot me right now..

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West African Peanut Sauce with Udon Noodles - How To

https://www.youtube.com/embed/liYKQlhJ-CM

♪♪ -Hey, what's up, everyone? I'm J.J. Johnson. I'm the chef and founder of Fieldtrip in Harlem. I'm making West African peanut sauce with some udon noodles. It's gonna be super delicious and you're gonna want to cook it for everybody you know. I'm going to make the peanut sauce. Small dice on the onion. I'm going to use half of this onion. So, listen, there's five mother sauces right now. Tomato, bechamel, veloute, espagnole, hollandaise. And that's how you learn the cuisines of those regions of the world, through the mother sauces, in culinary school; I want culinary schools to add the West African peanut sauce and then culinary schools from around the world will be learning what West African food is all about.

And that's where it starts, right with the mother sauces. I don't like to peel my carrot. I like to taste a carrot before I peel it. If it tastes nice and sweet with the skin on, it's great. I'm going to small dice these carrots too. And the flavor here is gonna be a little bit spicy, a little bit sweet. You don't need them to be the perfect size because you're gonna blend this all up at the end. So, some oil. Onions -- have my pan at a medium heat. And add some salt just cause I don't want to get any color on my onions. Sweat those out for thirty seconds. I'm gonna throw my carrots in. I'm gonna add salt again. I'm gonna let these go. -Smash my garlic. Gonna small-dice this here too. Normally I would add garlic in first, but I want the garlic just a little bit of heat because I want the spiciness in the garlic.

When you talk about mother sauces, they come from a specific region in the world. And none of the mother sauces include Africa, which is one of the largest continents in the world. You learn cuisine through mother sauces so if there's no mother sauce that is taking us through West Africa, then how can you understand the food? So a little bit of celery, gonna sweat this down, and add a little bit more oil, a little bit more of salt. I love seasoning in layer, so everything is getting seasoned evenly. So I seasoned my carrots, my celery, my onions. Nobody's being disrespected in the pan. Tomato. Again, another medium dice, or small dice. I want the seeds and the guts. I want everything from the tomato in there for that flavor. Plum tomatoes are good, good balance of water and sweet flavor.

And then add some cumin, not powdered cumin, cumin seeds. I went this cumin, the seeds to pop, and you get all that nice flavor from that fresh cumin when it hits the oil. This is really smelling amazing. So good. So a couple of keys here. I'm going to add in the tomato paste first and I'm going to pincage this, and you know pincaging means separating the oil in the fat, but really cooking the paste to ignite the flavor so it doesn't taste like canned tomato paste.

I'm gonna let that cook for a couple minutes. I'm gonna get my peanut butter ready. Unsweetened peanut butter. And it's okay if the oil separates on the top. That's some good peanut butter. If your peanut butter doesn't separate, you should question the peanut butter maker, because peanut has oil in it and it should separate because it's... ...it's a liquid. Now, I'm going to add in my peanut butter. My history with the sauce is I cooked in Ghana in 2011. That's where my inspiration has always come from. I look through food to the West African lens everywhere I go when I travel. The next largest population of West Africans in the world is Brazil. And in this certain region in Brazil, the Japanese and the West Africans live together and they eat stewy meets with pasta or noodles.

So this was my inspiration of, you know, doing research and really seeing that these cultures really have an influence from West Africa from a food perspective. And that's what I celebrate. So you can start to see the peanut butter and the oil starting to separate. That's really good stuff. I'm going to turn this down so we don't burn the peanut butter. I'm going to add in the tomatoes and add in a little bit of my stock. I'm gonna stir this up, bring it to a simmer, as you can see. I'm gonna add the rest of the stock, or a little bit more stock just to see when it reduces. Gonna add a bay leaf. I'm gonna cut this bird's eye chili in half for some spice, with the seeds and the stem, because the stem is the spiciest part of the pepper in any pepper -- I learned that from a grandmother in her kitchen in Ghana when they were making their hot sauce.

And when she would add the stems in and blend it up, the fragrance and the aroma and the spice would just be at another level, so... Okay, let me add in the cilantro. Give it this nice, herbaceous flavor. I don't like to take the stems off. I think a lot of us remove the stems from our herbs and the stems have really great flavor. I'm gonna add that in. Gonna bring it to a hard simmer. Let it go for about 10 to 15 minutes. I'm going to make the udon noodles now, or the base for the udon noodles. So this time I'm using a yellow onion. And a little more oil here; salt. Okay, carrots. The food past of West African food around the world doesn't come from a celebrated moment in life.

There was West African slaves, they were taken around the world. When they didn't want to do the work, then there was other cultures that came in -- so you had the migrant Chinese workers, you had the migrant Vietnamese workers, the migrant Japanese workers that filled in to do the work because West African slaves refused to do it. I researched those places and I figure out how to make super crave-able amazing food around it. Let me check this West African peanut sauce. Ooh, yeah, look at that. It's coming together nice. I'm going to blend this sauce. I'm gonna blanch off my udon noodles. So you'll just drop them into some hot simmering water, doesn't need to be like a hard boil, for about two minutes. At a young age my grandmother injected DNA -- like, food DNA into me, like, I didn't watch cartoons at a young age, I was, like, in the kitchen with her.

I don't know if I was really cooking. I was there peeling carrots and onions, supposedly. My kids, they're in the kitchen with me all the time. I believe that if you cook with your kids in the kitchen, they will eat better because they feel like they're involved. You're able to teach your children the world through food. So, some udon noodles here, some peanut sauce. Ooh! Look at that! Little salt... Black pepper. The final touches -- some edamame. ♪♪ Just going to add a little bit of fresh lemon juice here.

Brighten it up. All right. Let's plate this up. A little bit of these edamame on top. ♪♪ Some Thai basil, little bit of mint, a little bit of basil flavor. It's going to be creamy. It's going to be like, goodness. Good. Great nutty flavor. You get a little bit of the cumin, a little heat from the bird's eye chili. And the basil goes so good with the peanut butter, get a little bit of that mint flavor, a little bit of the -- that nice sweetness. So good that you need to click the recipe below and come uptown to Fieldtrip between 115th and 116th on Malcolm X Boulevard, right in front of the 2 and the 3 train, and you can see me there.

♪♪ ♪♪.

african instruments

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Here's What Happens After an Elephant Dies | Nat Geo Wild

it looks like he's quite badly injured from  it looks like the size of that injury it looks   like he tangled with another big elephant and  it looks like a test punch or something he's   pulled out a lot of his insides so this  is quite a serious injury and that's why   he was probably trying to rest his head up  on that on that tree okay so shame boy now   we can't really see what's going on on the  other side well a lot of you were wondering   would Elif other elephants come round to  inspect the carcass and indeed there are now it's a young elephant bull probably I'd say  between 25 and 30 years old and that was killed   by a much bigger bull probably around 40 years old  the big bull was in the must must is a heightened   hormonal stage that African bull elephants  have when they are wanting to mate so they've   got lots of testosterone and there can be quite  unpredictable and aggressive when they are in that   state and massive carcass like this will produce  a huge amount of food for vultures for elephants   for Lions for hyenas oh he just popped the stomach  he just popped the stomach here we go oh so this   is not for sensitive viewers beware be warned  as hyenas just popped open the elephant stomach   that's been filling with a gas throughout the day  so now the smell is well and truly out and if you   had enough now a new full hyena and now you'll  watch the vultures immediately take that gap now   for this many vultures it's a very small gap look  at them clambering over each other to try get in   their last little flurry something that pushed all  the way out hyenas coming back might chase them hmm making way making room well the hyena Oh it's the vulture army and that hyena is  giving up the battle with the vultures just look at them descend amazing be the last of the real proper meetin  in they'll just be little bits around   and you'll find the vultures will feed a  little bit they'll kind of eat as they go   and you'll find lioness will kind of come in  and out as they have been over the course of   the sort of last a few days but we're gonna  get a situation now we're gonna get very in   the soil in the way of lions or leopard a  dark either one of them are going to come   into this area it's still a lot of kind of  Bones here but and smell but it really isn't   much for lions or later this caucus is a  bit rotten for both of them I don't think   they'd really be interested but you can see the  power that hyenas possess it really is amazing

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Afrobeats is the Nigerian sound taking over pop music

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RzT-NqqazDw

The individual vocal singing is Wizkid. He'' s a Nigerian singer. As well as this moment, when Wizkid sings on this track, was a huge deal for a musical genre It'' s called Afrobeats. It ' s high-energy, autotune-heavy, with a constant percussive beat as well as a kind of electro-hip-hop sound. It'' s likewise way even more than that. pop music all over the world. It'' s the tale of Africa ' s social impact, He'' s one of the most significant Afrobeats stars in the globe. Today, SARZ is one of the top Afrobeats producers out there, as well as he'' s a huge component of why Afrobeats appears the means it does. Afrobeat was Fela Kuti'' s large band, jazz-style, Afrobeats is entirely different. It'' s electronic, catchy; the noise of urban millennial Africa. As well as there'' s likewise this, and also certainly the kick drums. it simply made every little thing integrated. Also, there are keys. And also, include her vocals to it, as well as we have Maradona."" So, as African as this appears, it also appears. universal, like any person can hear this ... - ... And associate with it? - And also connect to it. As well as for me, that'' s a winner. This is The Beat FM, a London radio station. that plays nearly completely Afrobeats. - We'' re still in the UK.This is Afrohits on The Beat London 103.6 FM. Maintain it on The Beat! Allow'' s go!- As soon as it came, it simply took control of. DBoy and also Shopsy Doo are DJs here. And also they state this noise is anywhere in London. - The only songs they intend to hear their events, at their clubs,. at their occasions, is African prominent songs, a.k.a. Afrobeats. The Beat FM is possessed by a Nigerian firm. Their sis terminal is one of the greatest stations in Lagos. And if you ask these people why Afrobeats is removing. Bigger than the songs itself. I went back to Nigeria when I was 11 years old. Afrobeats faucets right into one of the most loyal. and prevalent fan bases on the planet: the Nigerian diaspora.Any area on the planet where there are Nigerians, Afrobeats allows.- The Nigerian diaspora is without a doubt one of the most essential. part of promoting Afrobeats to the remainder of the globe. Afrobeats has only been able to spread out around the globe as a result of YouTube,. and also social media, and streaming systems like Spotify as well as iTunes. As well as that ' s done something actually crucial. for'Afrobeats artists back in Nigeria. It ' s permitted them to in fact make cash from selling their songs.- Do you have an iTunes account? - No, I put on ' t. -Exactly. Spotify isn ' t available in the majority of Africa.'And also Nigeria is among great deals of countries where Apple ' s. settlement regulations make iTunes nearly difficult to utilize. The major songs circulation system in Nigeria is this: Road hawkers offering pirated music.These individuals can get you practically any type of. of the most popular Afrobeats tracks.

- You have music? In Lagos, Africa ' s biggest city, thousands. of CDs like these are scorched everyday.'And when it isn ' t taking place in the roads, it ' s happening. online, where lots of young people download complimentary music. -Provide me Tiwa Savage. And while it ' s casual as well as disorganized, it ' s quite reliable. The trouble is that it ' s awful for artists. Also as Nigeria ' s music scene flourishes, the. Or else, you can just truly generate income. from shows, wedding celebrations, ringback tones. - The origin and also the heart of the music is in Africa. -Twenty years from currently, you ' ll have appears coming from every edge. And also that ' s when we ' ll have our sector. Eze desires to develop a music distribution network in Africa that ' s so strong, music won ' t have to travel to London, or to New york city, for artists to make cash. African musicians can generate income selling their music in Africa. As well as for Universal, this is larger than just Afrobeats. -We have many various sounds, so numerous different. markets, and we still need to connect to every other. Eze claims a continent with greater than 54 nations, with over. a billion people shouldn ' t be reduced to selling one noise. And that ' s what Afrobeats has actually unlocked. There ' s a whole lot extra going on musically in Africa than just Afrobeats. Due to the fact that if the increase of Afrobeats proves anything, it ' s that markets from Lagos to London are prepared for even more. And additionally sign up for the Quartz network for even more video clips similar to this one. And also when it isn ' t taking place in the streets, it ' s happening. And also while it ' s informal and unstructured, it ' s pretty effective. And also that ' s when we ' ll have our market. Eze desires to construct up a songs circulation network in Africa that ' s so strong, songs won ' t have to take a trip to London, or to New York, for artists to make money. There ' s a lot much more going on musically in Africa than simply Afrobeats.

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George Ezra - Shotgun (Official Lyric Video)

(lively pop music) ♪ Homegrown alligator, see you later ♪ ♪ Gotta hit the road, gotta hit the road ♪ ♪ Something changed in the atmosphere ♪ ♪ Architecture, unfamiliar ♪ ♪ I could get used to this ♪ ♪ Time flies by in the yellow and green ♪ ♪ Stick around and you'll see what I mean ♪ ♪ There's a mountain top that I'm dreaming of ♪ ♪ If you need me, you know where I'll be ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ Someone, someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ We're south of the equator, navigator ♪ ♪ Gotta hit the road ♪ ♪ Gotta hit the road ♪ ♪ Deep sea diving round the clock ♪ ♪ Bikini bottoms, lager tops ♪ ♪ I could get used to this ♪ ♪ Time flies by in the yellow and green ♪ ♪ Stick around and you'll see what I mean ♪ ♪ There's a mountain top that I'm dreaming of ♪ ♪ If you need me, you know where I'll be ♪ (ball hitting bat) ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ Someone, someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone.

♪ ♪ We got two in the front ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Two in the back ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Sailing along ♪ ♪ And we don't look back, back, back ♪ ♪ Back, back, back, back, back, back ♪ ♪ Time flies by in the yellow and green ♪ ♪ Stick around and you'll see what I mean ♪ ♪ There's a mountain top that I'm dreaming of ♪ ♪ If you need me, you know where I'll be ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ Someone, someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ Someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone, someone, someone, someone ♪ (upbeat trumpet music) ♪ Shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ See what I mean ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ - Thank you very much.

(crowd cheering).

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How Product Design Was Transformed By 2020

https://www.youtube.com/embed/w6q9obdfe3c

It may be hard to believe that products based on racial stereotypes survived well into the 21st century. There was always these friends I had breakfast with and they always would take out their Aunt Jemima jug. I haven't really heard of any other syrups, so I usually just gravitate towards that one. It just seems like a super exploitation of a stereotype. What do we want? Justice! And when do we want it? Now! It took widespread protests in 2020 to send some companies a wake-up call.

But even as some of this controversial branding slowly disappears off store shelves, there could be an even more insidious and harder to fix form of racial bias coded into the technologies that have become ubiquitous in everyday life. Start your day with natural freshness from Darlie. One of the most popular toothpaste brands in East Asia, Southeast Asia, is called Darlie Toothpaste. Darlie is owned by Colgate-Palmolive and a local partner, and has a long history, goes back to, I think, 1930s. And it originally started out as Darkie toothpaste.

The packaging was pretty explicit. It had a picture of minstrel singer in blackface on the package with the big smile with white teeth. This came about at a time when movies like "The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson were very popular. ♪ Smile, Darkie, smile for me ♪ Darkie Toothpaste gives you a cool, fresh, tingling taste. You see how this is working in terms of marketing. There's nothing wrong with wanting white teeth, but when you contrast that with this jet-black person, the message is very clear. If you don't want to have dark teeth, you don't want anything dark, use Darkie. It will solve that problem. They changed the name in English to Darlie, so one letter gets rid of the problem. They also got rid of the packaging, so it was no longer just a picture of a man in blackface. On the box, it was somebody who was in a top hat, and there was a black and white contrast, still getting the point across, like, look "black, white," but it wasn't blackface.

That said, though, they didn't change the name in Chinese. The issue of having these kinds of brands with these racist legacies, it's a bit more complicated here in Asia than it is in other parts of the world, in part, just because of the different racial dynamics in Asia. You don't have a lot of Black people. And so, people just don't think about these issues the same way. So there's less pressure domestically to do anything about them. Meanwhile, across the world, the United States has its own version of the Darlie story, in a product familiar to many people on their breakfast table.

There were two Black families in the town I grew up in. And Aunt Jemima was literally the only Black person I knew most of my life. We used to use it a lot when we were kids and making pancakes in the morning and using the syrup too. I had good memories from my childhood, using it all the time. Well, I don't necessarily think Aunt Jemima was racist. I felt like it was just a brand that named it by that, and nothing more than that really. At the time of Aunt Jemima's inception, 1889, this was something where it was marketed to White folks. You have this very recent memory back then of just slavery, what it meant to people and what subservience meant in terms of not only a proposition but a role in the American way. The gentleman who came up with the idea for the Aunt Jemima motif and brand, Chris Rutt, he attended a minstrel show in Missouri in the 1880s, where he saw a White man in blackface performing a minstrel role as a mammy to target and make fun of African Americans, but also African American women. And it's out of that performance that Rutt got together with his collaborator, a guy by the name of Underwood, to come up with this marketing strategy for the Pearl Milling Company's brand of self-raising flour.

In the 1920s, Quaker Oats bought Pearl Milling Company, increasing the market share and cultural presence of the brand. Around the same time, mob violence and new forms of repression against African Americans were becoming more widespread. In the small Missouri town where the milling company behind Aunt Jemima's was based, a 19-year-old Black man was lynched in 1933 after he was accused of making a pass at a White woman. That's the immediate context, because if you think about it, in comparison to the sort of brutal lynching of a young African American man, Aunt Jemima's something very different.

It's a contrast to that sort of threat of Black masculinity. Aunt Jemima is the embodiment of the sort of safe, loyal, trusting house servant of slavery times. So that imagery of Aunt Jemima was both reassuring and nostalgic to White Americans, and particularly White Southerners. Nostalgia is an important emotion. People buy products on emotion. For generations, frosty mornings have seemed warmer with stacks of... Aunt Jemima Buckwheats. Quaker tweaked the brand image over time, replacing the kerchief on the Aunt Jemima character's head with a plaid hairband in 1968. And again, in 1989, by adding pearl earrings, a lace collar and then-fashionable perm hairstyle. It's got more maple in it. In the early '90s, a commercial campaign starring performer Gladys Knight tried to further normalize Aunt Jemima by showing how much African Americans themselves loved the product.

But even after the brand was acquired by PepsiCo in 2001, some still felt that the minor branding shifts over the years were mostly a convenient corporate distraction from a lingering racial bias. Aunt Jemima was a very strong brand, strong enough where it was never discontinued. And when we look at these products, the ethos of them and just being easy, ready-made products, that was the whole design.

To bring in these caricatures, to convey this ease as if you have this person, "Mammy," in your kitchen, cooking the pancakes for you. It's that easy that it's as if someone else did it for you. So racism is commerce, and in terms of this marketing, unfortunately it was hinged on a lot of this. Aunt Jemima buttermilk pancakes. Perfect pancakes in 10 shakes. This is a classic example of a corporation commercializing and capitalizing on racial stereotypes, and making in the process billions and billions of dollars in profit. Aunt Jemima is history. Quaker Oats announcing today that it is retiring both the logo and the name of the 130-year-old brand. Quaker, the latest company to take action as demonstrations protesting racial inequality continue across the country.

PepsiCo has recognized that we are in one of those moments, and that's to not lose market share, and to seem as though it's continuing to be relevant, they need to make this attempt. And so, they've done that with the Pearl Milling Company branding. Now the Pearl Milling Company branding sort of harken backs to the very beginning of this in St. Joseph, Missouri, that era in relation to racial violence. I don't know that it goes far enough to separate it from that racist and oppressive past that so many African American people were exposed to. While Aunt Jemima was probably the most notorious mainstream brand to face a reckoning after the 2020 protests, a few others, such as Land O'Lakes and Uncle Ben's, have also come under scrutiny in the wake of the renewed conversations around systematic racism. As corporations continue to navigate how to address racial stereotypes in advertising while still protecting profits, there's a whole other arena now where the problem of embedded racism may be even harder to detect and harder to stamp out.

I think my blackness is interfering with the computer's ability to follow me. As you can see, I do this, no following. Not really, not really following me. I back up, I get really, really close to try to let the camera recognize me, not happening. Now, my White coworker, Wanda, is about to slide in the frame, you'll immediately see what I'm talking about. Wanda, if you would, please. Sure. It stems from the roots, and AI is just the next branch.

Everything is the exact same when it comes to the application, the technology behind it. Because when you look at who's in the room, it's not Black people who are testing these AI algorithms. The system I was using worked well on my lighter skin friend's face, but when it came to detecting my face, it didn't do so well, until I put on a white mask. There's a really groundbreaking piece of research that I think many people sort of associate with this concern and movement around AI fairness and bias, and that's the 2018 research done by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. They were trying to figure out whether popular facial-recognition programs could correctly pick out the gender of different photographs. And what they found was that the facial-recognition software that they looked at, which was from Microsoft, IBM, and Face++, misidentified darker-skinned women far more frequently.

And a few months later, Buolamwini along with Deborah Raji, published a subsequent paper that looked at Amazon's cloud facial-recognition program, which is called Rekognition. They were already pitching it for use by police and by immigration services, and we pretty much said, "Well, these products are already out there in the market. Do they actually work for faces that look like ours? Darker, female faces." What we found was that these models were performing at less than 70% accuracy for darker female faces, while performing at pretty much 100% accuracy for lighter male faces, revealing a discrepancy in the performance of these systems for different demographic groups, and in particular, sort of endangering the lives of those that would be impacted by the deployment of these systems.

Eventually Microsoft fixed its facial-recognition software, and big tech companies, including Amazon and IBM, said they would stop selling facial-recognition products to the police. Some local governments have also passed laws regulating facial-recognition software, or banning its use in policing, but there's no federal law regulating its use. At the same time, there are other companies that sell their facial-recognition software to police departments. And there've been at least three cases of Black men who are suing because they say that they were wrongly flagged by this facial-recognition software. Police came after them because the software told them that they were a suspect they were looking for. This is what happened in the case of Robert Williams, who was one of the first recorded cases of a false facial-recognition match escalating to a false arrest. I picked that paper up and hold it next to my face. And I said, "This is not me." I was like, "I hope you all don't think all Black people look alike." And then he says, "The computer says it's you." Facial recognition is not the only example of algorithmic bias.

Machine learning, a subset of AI, powers many technologies. Huge data sets are used to train machine-learning models to make predictions. So we want a computer, for example, to learn the difference between a dog and a cat. We can show the computer a lot of examples of what a dog looks like, show the computer a lot of examples of what a cat looks like. And as a result of that, the computer kind of figures out that, well, pointy ears means a cat. Whiskers might mean a cat. Floppy ears means a dog, and uses these features in order to differentiate between any new image that it might see of what could potentially be a dog or a cat. If all of your cats are white and all of your dogs are gray and black, what happens if you put in a photo of a black cat? All of the cats that this algorithm has learned are cats are white.

Everything that it's seen is black is a dog. And so, the algorithm may decide, oh, this is black, it must be a dog. In reality, it's a black cat. Sometimes a data set that lacks diversity is the problem. Other times, the design of the model is the issue. It can be a completely unaccountable process. These data sets are so large. The AI system is analyzing data that they haven't, they can't even know the full scope of. It's sort of on the order of millions and millions of examples. The algorithm is sort of identifying patterns in order to create a relationship between inputs and outputs, but those patterns are not necessarily things that humans can understand or see very well. These algorithms should be able to learn over time, they should be able to incorporate new data from the people using it. Even if you create an algorithm, you check it for bias and it's fine, the new data, the way people use the algorithm, could work the algorithm over time and make it biased.

You know as an example of what could go wrong, a ProPublica article looked at software that's used to predict future criminals. Who is more likely or less likely to commit a crime? And a ProPublica investigation found that that algorithm, which was pretty widely used, was biased against Black people. And the issue here is that that algorithm gets used for all sorts of things. It gets used for deciding who gets what sort of bail, who gets what sort of sentence, who gets parole. And the algorithm was considering Black defendants as a greater risk than White defendants. And ProPublica tracked some of these cases, and it actually turned out that the White defendant did re-offend and the Black defendant didn't. The unwillingness on the part of some tech companies to fully disclose their algorithms makes it hard to hold them accountable.

In April, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned that it could crack down on companies that use biased AI software. But overall, regulation has been slow. So we're only going to see these AI systems being more and more prevalent, invisibly ubiquitous in society. If we don't do a good job of really thinking about how we're going to hold them accountable now, it's going to be even much more difficult later on to try to reel things back.

Just as with the ongoing fight to create more equitable political and socioeconomic systems, overcoming racism in product design may require more than simply renaming, rebranding or recoding. These changes, although helpful, only scratch the surface of the deeper problem. It just says a lot about corporate America when Black people ask for equality for hundreds of years, and then they're heard in a span of three months last year, and the solution was changing a box of pancakes..

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