37 min listen
Strange Fruit #147: I Said Bang! Upcoming Book Looks at Louisville's Dirt Bowl
FromStrange Fruit
ratings:
Length:
30 minutes
Released:
Nov 20, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In an interview with Matt Lauer, Charlie Sheen revealed earlier this week that he's HIV positive. But in the days leading up to that, media outlets were already reporting his status. And according to Sheen himself, other people in his life had been blackmailing him for years to keep his secret. While those of us who routinely pay attention to issues surrounding HIV and AIDS know Charlie Sheen is not the face of the disease, the mainstream and tabloid media seemed to have forgotten about HIV until now. And the headlines feel like they were ripped from the early days of the AIDS crisis. To make some sense out of the way we're talking about HIV in the wake of Sheen's announcement, we turned to health policy analyst and friend to the show Preston Mitchum. Mitchum says Sheen's revelation, after years of publicly seeming out of control, draws an unhelpful parallel between illness and a behavior. "There is no person who deserves HIV," he explains. "Not sex workers, not someone who's only had sex once, not someone who's had sex with 500 people, not drug users. No one deserves HIV." Sheen's statement also included a hefty dose of shame for sex workers, calling them "unsavory and insipid types." Mitchum says this is problematic too, because it operates under the stereotype that sex workers all have HIV and never practice safe sex. "We can criticize Charlie Sheen's statements blaming sex workers, and also critique people who are shaming Charlie Sheen for sleeping with sex workers," Mitchum says. Later in the show, we learn about an upcoming book that will document an important part of black history in Louisville. The Louisville Story Program has been compiling photos, stories, and oral histories for their book, "I Said Bang! A History of the Dirt Bowl." Darcy Thompson, the program's director, joins us to talk about their work. And West Louisville native Ravon Churchill, featured in the book, talks about growing up attending the Dirt Bowl - an annual amateur basketball tournament in Shawnee Park. "It's kind of like a rite of passage for people in the community," he says. "I went and saw my father play. My son went and saw me play. I took my grandson to see other people play." Books are available for pre-ordering through the project's Kickstarter campaign, which will be active until Sunday night.
Released:
Nov 20, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Strange Fruit #54: 'Eenie Meanie' Examines Baby Boomer Racism & Louisville Busing Riots: "These buses came back from the West End with these little kids on them, and they were crying, there were windows knocked out. They had been beaten with baseball bats, they had been called every horrible racial name you can expect, right here in this town." It sounds like a scene we'd expect to see in the deep South, but this happened in Louisville in the middle of the 1970s, when public schools implemented the busing system. That's how performing artist Teresa Willis remembers it, and it makes up part of her one-woman show, [Eenie Meanie](http://eeniemeanie.com/). Because Louisville itself was so segregated, neighborhood schools were largely either black or white. Busing was designed to achieve greater diversity within school, but was met with resistance. "Racism really came out of the closet in my community," Teresa remembers. "There's crosses burning at the football field. Literally, we're at a by Strange Fruit