OneOpp has partnered with Shondaland on their upcoming podcast #Matter.
#Matter is Shondaland’s first ever scripted podcast, and the show takes a retrospective look at a case of police brutality. The story focuses on main character Gerald Hayes witnessing his teenage son Niles’ brutal beating by police officers, and a split-second decision that leads to him being barricaded in a friend’s nearby restaurant with one of the officers.
For the final two episodes, #MATTER and OneOpp have designed unscripted segments that explore the past, present and future of police brutality — and the community-driven solutions that lead toward safe and healthy neighborhoods.
MEET THE talent
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Elizabeth Hinton
healthandjustice.org/elizabeth-hinton/
Elizabeth Hinton is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing, Hinton's research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. She is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, which were both selected as New York Times Notable Books. Her articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The Boston Review.
Ijeoma Olua
https://ijeomaoluo.substack.com
Writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo was born in 1980 to a white mother, from Kansas, and a black Nigerian father. When she was two years old her father, a political scientist, returned to his village in Nigeria and slowly the communication died off. Ijeoma and her brother were “black nerds raised by a white woman in a poor white neighborhood." It was after Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in 2012 that Oluo began her career as a professional writer. Her older son was the same age as Martin at the time he was killed, and Oluo was taken aback by how silent by some in her community were in the face of such injustice.
Kendrick Sampson
Following the Murder of George Floyd, Sampson actively participated in and organized Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles. During the protests, police officers shot rubber bullets at him and assaulted him. In 2020, Sampson collaborated with JusticeLA to create a public service announcement #SuingToSaveLives about the health of people in Los Angeles County Jails amid the COVID-19 pandemic “I just feel grateful to be a part of something that was really transformational for Black storytelling,” Sampson said. “Black people are always depicted as either subhuman or superhuman. We have to either be demonized or criminalized or have to be a hidden figure or achieve something extraordinary while mediocre white people get their stories told all the time. I really loved the messy gray area that Issa was bold enough to push for, that we are human and that we have our flaws.”
Manisha Sinha
Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction.
Nikki Jones
https://africam.berkeley.edu/people/nikki-jones/
Following the Shooting of Philando Castile, Jones collaborated with Raymond on a three-year project to help police develop better communication methods. She also established the Justice Interaction Lab during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement with funding from the William T. Grant Foundation. Her third book, The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption, reflected on her recent research and focused on the victimization of young black men by urban gun violence.
Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey
Cheryl Dorsey is a retired Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant and author. Her published titles include an autobiography, Black and Blue, The Creation Of A Social Advocate and true crime biography "The Confidence Chronicles, The Greatest Crime Story [N]Ever Told."
Sgt. Dorsey spent two decades on the LAPD and during her career worked exclusively in patrol and specialized units in all four geographic Bureaus within the City of Los Angeles; South, Central, West and Valley. In addition to various patrol division assignments, Sgt. Dorsey was assigned to the infamous gang unit in Operations South Bureau; known as Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (C.R.A.S.H.) under the command of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.
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