The education of underprivileged children in under-resourced schools suffered greatly before COVID-19. For those students, particularly for those who have not had any academic learning since March, going back to school in the fall will be a monumental challenge.
The recent protests and renewed attention to racial justice have cast an important spotlight on these issues of racial equity. But it is past time for organizations to take these issues more seriously.
Black women, as a group, are not known for their conservatism. They are, in fact, more likely to vote Democratic and along progressive lines than Black men. So, Uprising and Blackout are worth thinking about in this context. Why are some Black women openly, even aggressively as in the cases of Owens and Diamond and Silk, identifying as conservative?
Seven Washington University in St. Louis scholars ruminate on race, COVID-19, police brutality, and America as the house of pain.
Because it is about our nation as much as it is about one city, and because Johnson frames it as “the two-hundred-year history of removal, racism, and resistance that flowed through the two minutes of confrontation on August 9, 2014”—the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, which touched off Black Lives Matter—the book is for all of us and for now.
The issue is not whether St. Louis merits a close examination in the context of the American racial tragedy. The issue is whether this is the careful and scrupulous examination we deserve.
Even the most experienced and knowledgeable readers of boxing history and the life and times of Muhammad Ali will learn many new things from this engagingly written and well-researched work.
Cara Robertson compellingly documents the known facts of the Borden case, and because she strategically avoids participating in a long tradition of sensationalizing the events of the murder and its aftermath, she is simultaneously able to tell the equally captivating story of the many ways that journalists, writers, and historians have shaped the mythology of Borden murders, beginning in the hours after the crime.
Both journalism and academe hinge on free and open research, questioning, exploration, yet at the highest levels, it is rare to hear, “Go dig around and see what you come up with” or “If you’re not sure about this, stay with it until you are.” Instead, you have to pretend confidence, because often, those with established power want their own world view reinforced, their plans bolstered, their agendas fulfilled, their budgets closed.
At the risk of sounding like a nun insisting that the children wear clean plaid uniforms because they will study harder, I find myself thinking that we are all somehow a little better when we know there are ways we should behave. Not in robotic conformity, but by acknowledging the needs of those around us and the gravity of our responsibility to them.