The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – known as the stimulus – is one of the largest public investments of our time, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into creating and saving jobs, repairing and building new infrastructure, and modernizing the health care system. But is it working? Tim Fernholz, writing for the American Prospect, [...]
Continue reading …Originally posted on Imagine 2050 Last September in Chicago I saw a play called “Amor de Lejos,” which is Spanish for “love from afar.” It was performed by a theater company of high school students and offered a few short, but vivid slices from the grueling lives of day laborers from Mexico and Central America [...]
Continue reading …Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University talks about crime and the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos in prison due to the allocation of resources; he also talks about prisoners having the right to vote and says we all should be [...]
Continue reading …Ben entered quiet and reserved in his usual manner, with a giant smile on his face, twirling his keys around his index finger. I knew he had some fantastic story to tell, and most likely it was from his day at work (he works with children at a childcare facility in downtown Columbus). So, I [...]
Continue reading …Originally posted on The Grio The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast and the ongoing economic recession have much in common. Then as now, communities already marginalized by race, poverty, and geography also the ones hardest hit. Then as now, we learned that there is no such thing as [...]
Continue reading …With the hectic schedules experienced in our home, dinner time in our home is time to talk. Often, we talk about the matters of our days. But one recent evening, our teenage son Brandon began talking about a speech on health care as a natural right that he had to present in his AP Government [...]
Continue reading …I’ve recently been thinking about concepts like priorities, standards, representation, and fairness—not in any in-depth kind of way, rather anecdotally and informally. The whole Roman Polanski situation, and all of his supporters, has really left me scratching my head or donning a furrowed brow or whatever the move is that makes you look like you’re [...]
Continue reading …The new Peter Jackson film, “District 9,” opened at the top of the US box office this past weekend. The film is a mock documentary covering the events surrounding the arrival of an alien spacecraft to planet earth. A spaceship mysteriously appears above Johannesburg, South Africa. After several months of intrigue, a group of astronauts [...]
Continue reading …Racial Profiling – Not Just for Middle-aged Elite University Professors Any More!
August 11, 2009 Comments OffOriginally published on Imagine 2050 Exhibit 1: Florida kindergartner (African American) acts up in class (kicking, scratching). School officials call the police, wisely concluding that dozens of adults can avail little against the unleashed fury of a six year-old. Arriving in the nick of time, law enforcement officers cuff the pint-sized perpetrator around the forearms, [...]
Continue reading …“During the campaign, [Obama] promised to nominate someone who’s got the heart and the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young, teenaged mom. The implication is that our judges today don’t have that. Do you realize how astounding that is? The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, to be [...]
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