The Takeaway

As many as 23 million people in the United States are struggling with long Covid. The sometimes debilitating symptoms include brain fog, fatigue, difficulty breathing, and depression or anxiety. 

But almost a year after the Biden administration released guidance stating that people with long Covid can be included under the Americans with Disabilities Act, receiving benefits has been a struggle.

Even before the pandemic, roughly one in four Americans were living with a disability. And while people with disabilities are more likely overall to experience financial difficulties…that is particularly true for people of color with disabilities. According to The Century Foundation, one in four Black disabled people were living in poverty as of 2020. That’s compared to one in seven white disabled people.At the end of May, the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion held a hearing on financial inequities for people with disabilities, including those with long Covid.

Disability rights advocate and Century Foundation fellow, Vilissa Thompson testified at the hearing, and spoke with us more about the economic barriers that people with a disability face and gave us an intersectional framework for understanding economic justice for people living with a disability.

Many dancers are independent contractors with virtually no labor protections. While there are some unionized dance companies, the nature of the work is inherently precarious, with grueling training and policing of dancers’ bodies that seems intentionally designed to break them—physically and emotionally. In the past few months, more stories have come to light about serious abuses in dance companies: sexual harassment, revenge porn, etc. In all these stories, the abuse and corruption go straight to the top, and the institutions protect the abusers.

How can dancers increase workplace protections, what obstacles do they face to organizing, and how do realities like young age and the hyper-focus of body image exacerbate the power imbalances here? We discuss current issues facing ballet workers with Chloe Angyal, Senior Editor at VICE News and author of “Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers is Saving Ballet From Itself.” 

Top Gun: Maverick is flying high at the box office. This newest installment in the Top Gun franchise features Phoenix, the franchise’s first female pilot. We wanted to find out how real the portrayal of her experience was: so we turned to Commander Becky Dowling Calder, the first female pilot ever to graduate from the Naval Fighter Weapons School—a.k.a. Top Gun.

In 1996, 16-year-old Almeer Nance was an accomplice in an armed robbery in Knoxville, Tennessee during which 20-year-old Robert Manning shot and killed a worker. Despite the fact that Nance didn’t commit the murder, he was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to a minimum of 51 years in prison under Tennessee’s strict mandatory minimum laws. The other accomplice in the case, a white woman, only spent one year in prison for her involvement in the robbery.

For "51 Years Behind Bars," a new documentary from Al Jazeera English’s "Fault Lines," correspondent Josie Duffy Rice and producer Jeremy Young interviewed Nance and other people connected to his case to learn more about the consequences of his lengthy sentence.

The Takeaway spoke with Josie Duffy Rice about this reporting and how it coincides with recent developments in juvenile sentencing.

On June 8, Disney Plus’ "Ms. Marvel" will premiere. It brings New Jersey-based Pakistani-American teenager Kamala Khan’s story to Marvel viewers for the first time and represents a major moment for Asian American and Muslim representation in Hollywood. Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directed multiple episodes of the show, marking a major transition in her career. "Ms. Marvel" is the first fictional live action work Obaid-Chinoy has directed, after a successful career making documentaries and animated films.

The Land Back movement to return ancestral lands back to Indigenous tribes has gained momentum lately.  However, the efforts of tribal native reclamation are not new.  For decades, Indigenous peoples and allies have been working to restore land to Indigenous tribes through the courts, through protest, and through policy. Some tribes, such as the Kaw Nation in 2002, have even purchased parts of their ancestral lands back.  

First, we hear from Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, about the origins of the Land Back movement and what it means to different Indigenous communities.

Then, We speak with James Pepper Henry, Kaw Nation vice chairman and executive director of the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who was instrumental in the Kaw Nation purchasing 160 acres of their ancestral homeland in Kansas back in 2002.

The First Nations Version of the New Testament is a "translation" of the Christian text by Indigenous peoples that embraces tribes’ traditions, storytelling and language patterns in English. We speak with Terry Wildman, the lead translator of the text, about how language choices impact religious beliefs and how the historic relationships between Christian institutions and Indigenous people gave rise to this translation.

LGBTQ activists Kris Williams and Rebekah Wilson got married in 2019. In August of that year, Kris and Rebekah welcomed a baby boy into their family, and both women were recorded as mother and mother on the birth certificate. After two years, however, the couple divorced, and Rebekah petitioned the court to remove Kris from their son’s birth certificate. Oklahoma County Judge Lynne McGuire ruled in favor of removing Kris’s name from the birth certificate stating that Kris should have adopted her own son. Last week, Judge McGuire reversed her decision and recognized Kris Williams as a legal parent. We speak with Toby Jenkins, CEO and executive director of Oklahomans for Equality about this ruling and what it means for LGBTQ parents and all non-gestational parents in Oklahoma.

Just over one month ago, Politico published a leaked draft opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito, a nearly unprecedented breach of the high Court’s norms of non-disclosure until the moment an opinion is officially released. Now that it is June the Court is likely to release its official decision in the Mississippi case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The decision in this case could overturn the 1973  Roe v. Wade precedent which established that abortion rights were an extension of an implied Right to Privacy found in the 14th amendment. If Roe is overturned it is most likely that each individual sate would be left to decide legality and access to termination services within its own boundaites. . And according to the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states are certain or likely to ban or severely restrict the procedure. 

Planned Parenthood estimates that 36 million women – more than half of all women of reproductive age in the United States – live in one of those states.

The loss of rights is not consistent with the American narrative of ourselves. American exceptionalism. The shining city of the hill. Here, on this soil is where the arc of history is meant to bend toward justice, offering ever more access to liberty, equality, justice. But is the arc of American history always bending toward justice?

We look back through history with Blair Kelley, is a Professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is also the author of “Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship.”

And some legal experts and advocates worry that this Court decision could threaten other basic rights like access to contraception, same-sex marriage, and interracial marriage. We speak with Akhil Reed Amar, a Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, looking forward to what may happen next.

At Coosa High School in Rome, GA, five Black students and their parents are suing the Floyd County School District in a civil lawsuit in which they allege that the school district has continually shown indifference to racial discrimination.

The school garnered national attention after a group of white students carried Confederate Flag memorabilia and shouted racial slurs at students of color. In response, a multiracial coalition of students moved to organize a Black Lives Matter demonstration. The principal of the school denied the request to demonstrate and only suspended the five Black students in the lawsuit.   

We spoke with Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, about the Coosa High School lawsuit and what it means for the state of civil rights.

Editor's Note: The Takeaway reached out to the Floyd County School District for comment on this story and has not yet heard back. If we do receive a response, we’ll post it here.