Meet the Black Lawyer Who Refused to Cut His Locks to Make His Colleagues Feel Better

Marcus Shute Jr., a 34-year old lawyer from Nashville, raised a few eyebrows when he decided to grow his locks in 2002. But he still refuses to cut his hair in hopes to make a point that his personal appearance should not affect his professional career! In fact, Shute is a well sought-after lawyer and he runs his own law firm in Nashville, Tennessee.

“Many times during my matriculation through undergrad/law school and in my professional career I was told I would not be successful as an attorney if I didn’t cut my locs,” Shute said in an interview with The Shade Room.

Shute also said he had experienced being disregarded for promotion even though he technically deserved it just because he “did not fit the look.” At one time, he said a judge even mistook him as a client instead of a law student.

Despite that, he chose to be authentic and not to conform to the industry’s so-called standards. His experiences also inspired him to open his own law practice. He wanted most of his colleagues and clients to relate to him.

“The law industry, like any other industry, is a microcosm of the real world. It needs acceptance, inclusion, and diversity, but it needs to be more than empty lip-service and to be done in a meaningful way,” he said. “Less than 5 percent of attorneys are black. And even fewer are in a position to hire at their firm, one of the reasons I founded Shute Law.”

For more information about Shute Law, visit https://www.shutelaw.com

This article was originally written by BlackBusiness.com.

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Umbrella Academy delivers a rambunctious, touching second season

Another season, another apocalypse for the Umbrella Academy. | Netflix

The show finds the right mix of feelings and zippy superpowers in its stellar season two.

The dysfunctional family of seven ex-superheroes known as the Umbrella Academy have two things in common: They all were born on the same day, and they’re all working — some more consciously than others — through the trauma of their father’s abuse.

Beneath the end-of-the-world, blow-up-the-moon stuff, the first season of Netflix’s fizzy live-action adaptation of The Umbrella Academy, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s Eisner Award-winning comic book, had that emotional heart too. In season one, we met the Hargreeves kids, now adults, all puzzling out their lives when their dad, Reginald Hargreeves, dies. His death brings them all together, forcing them to confront unanswered questions about forgiveness, abuse, and family — questions they buried with time.

With their bad dad dead, finding closure should be easier for the kids. Or at least, that’s what they believed. Their hope is that any of their trauma or scars will die with the person who caused them. But complicating matters is that these superpowered humans have to stop the end-of-the-world event they inadvertently caused.

Despite having powers like superstrength, marksmanship, communing with the dead, and psychic manipulation, they failed. But instead of dying with the rest of humanity, they time traveled to go back before the apocalypse to try again to stop it. They now find themselves scattered in Dallas at the beginning of the 1960s.

That first season spent a lot of time laying all of this out, making some parts of it feel a little like a chore. But all that time spent on extreme exposition pays off in a flashier, more entertaining, tighter second chapter.

Season one of Umbrella Academy set the board, and season two plays the game.

There’s a lot more zapping and superpower-ing in season two, which should appease comic book fans who want to see superheroes do that kind of thing. But it also swings for something way more emotionally resonant, wanting to comment on the imperfect, human way we heal and the gulf between people wanting to change their ways and actually doing so. And in its best moments, The Umbrella Academy’s second season manages to balance both humanity and superheroics without sacrificing either.

The Umbrella Academy uses superpowers to tell a very human story about complicated relationships

Netflix

Allison, a.k.a. The Rumor, a.k.a. #3.

One of the core devices in Umbrella Academy is that the Hargreeves are each known by a number, assigned to them by their father: There’s Luther (#1), Diego (#2), Allison (#3), Klaus (#4), Five (#5), Ben (#6) and Vanya (#7). It’s like they’re players on a basketball team whose names you never learned. Or in the Academy’s case, the numbers are a way to differentiate the seven different superpowers they possess. The dark edge is that reducing your kids to a number is just one of several emotionally abusive things Reginald Hargreeves, the patriarch of the family, did.

Hargreeves developed his adopted children into a superhero team, putting them through relentless physical training, teaching them violence, pitting them against each other, and punishing them when they failed. They ultimately did fail when the world needed them most, resulting in Ben’s death and the disappearance of Five, hence the disbandment. And they failed again at the end of last season, as Vanya’s power manifested itself to destroy the moon before all of them, including Ben, decided they could save the world if they just time traveled.

Believing you can avert an armageddon that you and your siblings caused is in itself a slightly egotistical thing to do. But these are the Hargreeves, and they’re truly the only ones who can stop it.

After jumping through that portal, the adult Hargreeves kids are separated and spread out in various pockets of time before November 22, 1963 — the day President John F. Kennedy is shot in Dallas and around 26 years before they were all born. It also turns out that, although they’ve timed-hopped, there’s another cataclysmic event happening that they need to stop. But that’s very difficult to do when the siblings aren’t in the same place or even the same time.

As tantalizing as that mysterious, encroaching doomsday itself is, the best stuff about the second season is how we get there and how we get the Hargreeves siblings on the same page.

The time jump forces the siblings, for some brief moments, to live independently from one another. Time travel, for the siblings, is a forced immersive therapy of sorts. These brothers and sisters, their feelings, and their identities were so tightly tethered to one another. Now they’re forced to live as if the others, and their father, don’t exist.

Which means we see each of them try to heal their lifelong wounds in their own way.

Luther (Tom Hopper), with his superstrength, becomes a bodyguard by day and an underground fighter by night to dull the pain. Diego’s (David Castañeda) superhuman marksmanship is no use in the mental institution he’s stuck in, but he’s plotting every day to get out. Klaus (Robert Sheehan) drinks and drinks and somehow starts a cult. Five (Aidan Gallagher) is the only bridge to the others, thanks to his time-hopping powers.

And then there’s Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who can force people to do anything by preceding an action with the phrase “I heard a rumor” (such as, “I heard a rumor that you ate a cheesecake”), who’s unfortunately plunked down in 1961. Unlike her white siblings, Allison faces an added threat from their 1960s time traveling because of America’s segregation laws and rampant racism. White privilege, it seems, extends to time travel.

The central conceit in Allison’s story is that she could easily change the world around her by “I heard a rumor you weren’t a flagrant racist”-ing everyone around her, but she never says that. The show purposely doesn’t spell out exactly why she doesn’t, allowing you to come to your own conclusions about why the racism she’s facing is too overwhelming to be fixed. Or maybe the excuse is that she isn’t powerful enough to stop the racism. Or that racism is more complex than simple actions to be commanded one way or another.

Or maybe Allison’s afraid of how much she’s truly capable of.

In season one, Allison lost custody of her daughter when her ex-husband revealed that he caught Allison using her rumor power to make their daughter fall asleep. Even though Allison loves her daughter, she still used her powers to make her daughter do something against her will. Allison gets a stark lesson in the human consequence of her powers, something her father encouraged her to use and allowed her to ignore the fallout from.

We actually do see her use her powers in a “Whites Only” diner in a late-season episode. The diner’s manager has been a racist prick over and over again. She rumors the manager into serving her coffee. She’s so enraged with him, though, that she tells him to fill her cup until it spills over and over, scalding his hands raw and red. Skin sloughs off. He still pours. She can’t stop inflicting pain.

Allison could have easily just rumored the man to serve her and stop him when the coffee cup was full, saving him the burns. But she inflicts pain upon him because it feels square with the racism and injustice she’s been fighting in this timeline and because punishment and pain are what her father taught her.

What’s fascinating is that the show goes to great lengths to show that Allison isn’t a villainous person. This scene doesn’t happen until after Allison has refrained from using her powers against injustice for the majority of the season. Instead, her lapse shows us that being “good” or being healed isn’t a one-and-done fix. Healing and bettering yourself require constant work.

Netflix

Vanya, a.k.a. #7.

In that same vein, Allison and the Hargreeves siblings confront an ugly truth when they re-connect with Vanya (Ellen Page): They each had treated her as badly as their father had.

Before being teleported to the 1960s and before adult Vanya fully unleashed her power that brought a piece of the moon crashing down, the adult siblings locked her away in a padded room because they thought she was too dangerous. Instead of sticking up for her or protecting her from their father’s abuse when they were kids, they neglected her and treated her as the problem.

This is the kind of behavior you’d expect from people whose entire family life is training, punishment, and competition, but while it’s explainable, it’s not excusable. Ultimately, the siblings spend this season learning how to ask for forgiveness and being able to forgive each other.

This isn’t to say that everything in Umbrella Academy’s second season is ooey-gooey touchy-feely.

Since we know what everyone’s powers are now, the show loosens its grip on the exposition and allows for more of its signature, music-cued fight sequences and action scenes peppered throughout the season. This includes an explosive armageddon with all the siblings going full force — rumoring people until brains explode and faces melt, crumpling artillery shells with their bare hands, Kraken-like tentacles flinging soldiers around — that happens in the first seven minutes of the first episode.

But viewers already know by season two that Umbrella Academy is always ready to deliver spectacle. It’s just that this season, it’s finally ready to deliver everything else at that same level.

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Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI (1986) | Lynn Whitfield Howard E. Rollins, Jr. Richard Lawson
As one of the first female black FBI agents, Johnnie Gibson (Lynn Whitfield) undercover to trap a gun smuggler, Adam Prentice (Richard Lawson), but her growing emotional involvement in the case worries another undercover agent, T.C. Russell (Howard E. Rollins), in JOHNNIE MAE GIBSON: FBI. Directed by Bill Duke, this made-for-television movie was Lynn Whitfield's first starring role. Shared for historical purposes. I do not own the rights. ##### Reelblack's mission is to educate, elevate, entertain, enlighten, and empower through Black film. If there is content shared on this platform that you feel infringes on your intellectual property, please email me at Reelblack@mail.com and info@reelblack.com with details and it will be promptly removed.

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New Trump financial disclosure gives glimpse into pre-pandemic business income

Before the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the tourism and hospitality industries, President Donald Trump’s high-profile properties were humming along in 2019, according to an annual disclosure report released late Friday evening.

Trump National Doral Miami, the golf resort where the president had considered hosting this year’s G-7 gathering of world leaders before scrapping the plans, brought in the most money in 2019. It reported revenues of $77.2 million compared with nearly $76 million in 2018.

One of president’s other golf clubs in Bedminster, N.J., a frequent retreat for Trump during the summer, reported a nearly 13 percent increase in revenue in 2019. Other golf resorts owned by Trump, including in Jupiter, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C., saw their revenues rise as well last year.

The Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a prime meeting spot for administration officials and a source of controversy since opening in 2016, reported $40.5 million in revenue compared with the previous year’s income of $40.8 million.

However, revenues at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort Trump has frequented during the course of his presidency, dipped to $21.4 million in 2019, a drop of more than $1 million — or 5 percent — from $22.6 million in the previous year.

The disclosure indicates that Trump had a minimum income of more than $440 million.

The 78-page report, which is required to be reported every year under federal ethics rules, provides a glimpse into the president’s debts and how his properties are performing. Because the disclosure is for income generated in the previous year, it does not show the coronavirus’ impact on Trump’s properties and investments.

Trump's properties have not escaped the pandemic's deleterious effects, with many forced to close temporarily and lay off workers.

The disclosure was originally due in May, but the White House received two 45-day extensions as Trump addressed the coronavirus crisis. A White House memorandum released in April stated that there was “good cause” to grant the extension.

Ethics officials and watchdog groups have long raised concerns that Trump is profiting from his role as commander in chief.

The president, unlike his predecessors, has refused to release his tax returns, often claiming that he’s under audit. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court delivered a split-decision on Trump’s personal financial records, blocking congressional investigators from accessing the tax documents but rejecting his claim of “absolute” immunity.

Disclosures for Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, were also released Friday, showing the White House advisers reported at least $36 million in income.

Anita Kumar contributed to this report.

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Trump plans to ban TikTok in the U.S.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he plans to bar the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from operating in the United States, a move that comes as officials across Washington accuse the company of posing a national security risk.

“As far as TikTok is concerned we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters traveling with him from Tampa aboard Air Force One. He said he could take action against the company as soon as Saturday.

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has come under fire from lawmakers and government officials on both sides of the aisle over fears that it could turn over American users' information to the Chinese government. TikTok says it has not provided consumers’ personal information to Beijing and would not do so.

The president said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to ban TikTok in the United States.

“Well, I have that authority. I can do it with an executive order or that,” Trump said, referring to emergency economic powers.

Trump made clear he was not in favor of a deal to let a U.S. company buy TikTok’s American operations, following reports that Microsoft is in talks to do just that.

An administration official said earlier Friday that the administration would force ByteDance to divest ownership of TikTok through a ruling by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed earlier this week that TikTok has been under review by the inter-agency body, which evaluates whether foreign investments pose security risks. ByteDance acquired TikTok's precursor, Musical.ly, in 2017.

Mnuchin said Wednesday that he expected CFIUS to make a recommendation for action on TikTok this week.

After reports of a planned administration action against the company surfaced earlier Friday, TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza said in a statement, "While we do not comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in the long-term success of TikTok. Hundreds of millions of people come to TikTok for entertainment and connection, including our community of creators and artists who are building livelihoods from the platform."

Fox Business and other news outlets reported that tech giant Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, a move that would give the trillion dollar company a fresh footprint in the social media market. Microsoft declined comment on the reports.

The Trump administration plan to order ByteDance to sell off TikTok was previously reported by Bloomberg.

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

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