Category Archives: Social Injustice

Mother’s Day: When all life is sacred

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Human Behavior, Social Injustice

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Pregnant woman and baby die after Russian bombing in Mariupol – Ukraine – March 14, 2022
Photo Credit: AP News

We raise our fists in protest to the heavens and pass laws in defense of life flowering in the womb yet think nothing of sacrificing that life to the gods of war.

Only when all life is sacred will we enjoy peace on Earth.

This Mother’s Day, I pay tribute to mothers worldwide who have fled violence and war-torn zones to save their children.

Mother and children flee war-torn Ukraine
Photo Credit: NDTV
Syrian mother with five children in refugee camp in Iraq
Photo Credit: UNHCR/Andrew McConnell
Mother and children in war-torn Yemen
Photo Credit: Oxfam/Sami M Jassar
Mother with child in war-torn region of Ethiopia
Photo Credit: CNS/Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah
Somali mother and children arrive in refugee camp in Kenya
Photo Credit: UNICEF/Riccardo Gangale
Mothers from Central America arrive at US/Mexico border
Photo Credit: Time/John Moore
Myanmar Rohingya Muslim Mother & Child in Bangladesh refugee camp
Photo Credit: World Vision

Reflections on Our Collective Guilt

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin during trial for death of George Floyd
Photo Credit: KTIV Television

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

On Tuesday, April 20, I was relieved when the jury declared Derek Chauvin guilty on all three counts for the death of George Floyd. Would the Floyd family have obtained justice without national and international outcry? However, there was no justice for George Floyd. Trading with a twenty-dollar counterfeit bill was all it took for his summary execution by a knee chokehold. The CEOs on Wall Street, who took down both the US and global financial systems and destroyed the lives of millions of workers and mortgage holders, were too BIG even for a trial much less the death penalty.

Considering that the police continue to kill blacks without due process, I think it foolhardy to believe that Chauvin’s guilty verdict is any sign of progress towards police reform. While institutionalized systemic racism persists, police killings of black and brown bodies will persist.

How complicit and guilty are we as a nation in the training given to our police force that has no qualms in eliminating black and brown offenders, however trivial their alleged crime?

Our centuries old, racist, social-economic system extends way beyond policing. This entrenched system determines where we live, the schools our children attend, our access to a healthy diet, the health care we receive, our exposure to toxic air and water, and much more. We need to address these inequities in our policies and actions to Restore our Earth, not just for a few but for the 99 Percent.

For how long can we continue to enjoy the benefits of an unjust and inequitable system and not share collective guilt?

Thought for Today: “The city isn’t really for you.”

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Human Behavior, Social Injustice, Urban Violence

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Sarah Everard – London – United Kingdom
Photo Credit: YorkMix – UK

Rape myths are a key component of what we now call “rape culture.” “What were you wearing?” and “why didn’t you report it?” are two classic rape myth questions that “Me Too” survivors face. Rape myths also have a geography. This gets embedded into the mental map of safety and danger that every woman carries in her mind. “What were you doing in that neighbourhood? At that bar? Waiting alone for a bus?” “Why were you walking alone at night?” “Why did you take a shortcut?” We anticipate these questions and they shape our mental maps as much as any actual threat. These sexist myths serve to remind us that we’re expected to limit our freedom to walk, work, have fun, and take up space in the city. They say: The city isn’t really for you.

Excerpt from Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern, Verso, London/UK and New York/USA, 2020. First published in Canada in 2019 by Between the Lines, Toronto, Canada.

On Wednesday, March 3, 2021, after leaving a friend’s house around 9:00 p.m., 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard disappeared during her walk home in south London. Her remains were found seven days later in a large builder’s bag in a wooded area more than 50 miles from where she was last seen. The man charged with her kidnapping and murder is a 48-year-old Metropolitan Police officer.

Leslie Kern, an urban geographer, is an Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She has a doctorate in gender, feminist, and women’s studies from York University in Toronto. She does research on gender and cities, gentrification, and environmental justice. She is the author of Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship. Born in Toronto, Canada, she has also lived in London and New York City.

Thought for Today: If Black women were free…

14 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. […] If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Excerpt from “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” as fully published in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books, Chicago/Illinois, USA, 2017. Her book received the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.

The year 2017 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, which introduced to the world terms such as “interlocking oppression” and “identity politics.” The Combahee River Collective (CRC) was a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974, growing out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was named after Harriet Tubman’s 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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If you have ever achieved a goal or a dream, you know that the first step to success was in visualizing or verbalizing what you had hoped to achieve. To imagine a desirable future outcome is key to its realization. The animated short film A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair dares to imagine a better world in which no one is sacrificed; a world in which everyone is essential.

About a month into the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, Naomi Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, co-founders of The Leap, together with award-winning artist Molly Crabapple and Opal Tometi, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, started a conversation about the role of futurism when so much is at stake. They concurred that to defeat Trump was not enough to fend off naked authoritarianism in the White House. Many other intersecting crises, they noted, are bearing down on America and the world: climate collapse, surging white supremacy, or widespread famine.

In shaping their “Message from the Future,” they could not ignore our burning cities and forests, as well as the global pandemic. Moreover, they could not imagine achieving a safe and humane future without escalating and winning street battles and general strikes. Their call to repair a deep brokenness provided a framework for encompassing the interlocking crises in our social, economic, political, informational, and ecological spheres.

The protagonists of their futuristic animated film are rank-and-file organizers and activists. Disparate movements get on board: organized labor, Black liberation, climate, disabled, feminist, Indigenous, migrant, worker cooperatives, and more. Covid-19 acts as a catalyst for moving humanity forward. As Naomi Klein notes in her article of October 1, 2020, on the premier of the film: “In forcing all of us to confront the porousness of our own bodies in relationship to the vast web of other bodies that sustain us and the people we love—caregivers, farmers, supermarket clerks, street cleaners, and more—the coronavirus instantly exploded the cherished, market-manufactured myth of the individual as self-made island.”

I invite you to watch the animated short film (duration 8:57 minutes) A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair produced by The Intercept in partnership with The Leap.

Thought for Today: A Recipe for Murder

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.


James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, published by Vintage Books Edition, New York, USA, 1993 (pp 82-83). Originally published by The Dial Press, New York, USA, 1963.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) is an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986.

“Male and female He created them”

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Human Behavior, Social Injustice, United States

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Brett Kavanaugh sworn in to the US Supreme Court - 6 October 2018

Brett Kavanaugh sworn in to the U.S. Supreme Court – October 6, 2018
Photo Credit: The Press Democrat

 

Despite sexual assault allegations, on October 6, 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to the U.S. Supreme Court. His contentious nomination process before the male-dominated Senate Committee hammered home the gnawing reality: Women have yet to achieve equal footing with men under our legal system.

To achieve what may have been a lifelong ambition, Kavanaugh exposed his “two spirited daughters” to the public bashing of his integrity. Has he used the sexual allegations – which he has denied with tears and anger – as a teaching moment for his ten- and thirteen-year old daughters? Has he considered the possibility that his daughters could one day suffer the same trauma as his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford?

Ford did not tell her parents what had happened that summer day while she was out with trusted friends. Like so many of us born female, she kept the sexual assault a secret. Continue reading →

The Souls of Poor Folk: A National Call for Moral Revival

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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Poor Peoples Campaign - A National Call for Moral Revival 2018
Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
Photo Credit: Poor People’s Campaign

 

I’m finding it hard to stay abreast of all the upheaval triggered by our Twitter-in-Chief. His tweets and threats boggle my mind, create instability across our nation, and embolden our rivals and enemies overseas.

While our bombs turn the Middle East into rubble, people at the bottom rungs in America face their own hell. This month, the Institute for Policy Studies has published its empirical study, The Souls of Poor Folk, highlighting the complex issues that entangle our lives: systemic racism, persistent poverty, the war economy and militarism, and ecological devastation. Here are some of their key findings. Continue reading →

I come from a “shit-hole”

14 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in People, Social Injustice, United States

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Wahoo Bay Beach - Haiti
Wahoo Bay Beach – Haiti

 

It is so easy to disparage others when we are in a privileged position of wealth and power. In such positions, we can lose touch with our shared fragility as human beings. We can forget that the labor of millions of invisible human beings sustains our lives. Immersed in our comforts and luxuries, we can believe we belong to an invincible special breed.

In October 2017, I featured the work of the young immigrant Salvadoran poet, Javier Zamora, who holds a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now up for review by our Congress. Following that post, another Salvadoran immigrant, who blogs under the name Koyote the Blind, started following my blog. Our president’s disparaging remarks about his country has struck a deep wound.

Ruins of Tazumal - El Salvador
Ruins of Tazumal – pre-Columbian Mayan archeological site in Chalchuapa – El Salvador

 

In his blog post, “I come from a shit-hole,” on Thursday, January 11, he wrote:

I am Salvadoran, even if the term was imposed by Spain. I am American, even if the US thinks they own the name. I am güanaco, even if you think it’s an insult.

I am not Mexican. Mexicans call me “cerote”–a piece of turd.

Today, Trump agreed with them. Today, he said he didn’t understand why liberals want to bring people from those shit-hole countries.

I am a piece of turd from a shit-hole country in the backyard of Ronald Reagan.

Yet, I am here. And I come from the Land of the Jewel, Cuzcatlan, the last bastion of resistance.

I am here to stay, and to change this land, this entire continent, into what it truly is: the mother land in the process of awakening.

You may see in me a turd from a shit-hole country, but I see in you and me and all the true silver light of the empty mind, the freedom from the past, the glory of the New Sun that heralds the coming of the True Human Being. I am here to share that future with you, my reader, without hatred in my heart, without resentment, and without any names to hurl back at you.

You can read his complete post here.

Whether we live on the African continent, El Salvador, Haiti, Norway, or the United States of America, we are all human beings with short life spans in the grand scheme of death and rebirth of interconnected cycles of life on Planet Earth. What makes our insignificant lives meaningful is not our material trappings, but rather the way in which we touch the lives of others we meet along our journey. The greater our influence and power, the greater our responsibility to do good in the world.

Draining the Swamp

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Social Injustice, United States

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draining-toxic-lake-okeechobee-florida

Draining Toxic Lake Okeechobee – Florida – USA
Photo Credit: The Weather Channel (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

 

Metaphors are important tools in a writer’s word-box. “Draining the swamp” is a powerful metaphor put to excellent use by our President-elect during his campaign for our nation’s top post. He has promised to rid our government of entrenched cronies who only serve their own self-interests and those of their masters and facilitators. We-the-people can drown in the swamp for all they care.

As our President-elect begins draining the swamp, he has skimmed only the surface scum and dead leaves and, based on his latest selections for his cabinet and other top administration posts, has made room for more toxic detritus.

The swamp extends across America. In some places, it’s dense and putrid with the carcasses upon which we have built our nation. Are we ready to drain the swamp? Some among us want to make America white again. When was that? Was that after we had decimated the Native Indian populations who inhabited these lands thousands of years before the white man’s arrival? Their carcasses rest at the bottom of the swamp.

wounded-knee-massacre-north-dakota-29-december-1890

Wounded Knee Massacre – North Dakota – December 29, 1890
Photo Credit: Wikipedia

 

What about the African slaves and their descendants whose forced labor built this nation? Their carcasses form another layer in the bottom of the swamp.

lynching-in-omaha-nebraska-1919

Lynching of African American in Omaha – Nebraska – 1919
Photo Credit: Daily Kos

 

What about the successive waves of black, brown, white, and yellow immigrants who labored under inhumane conditions to fuel our industrial revolution? Their carcasses intermingle below the surface of the swamp.

triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-new-york-city-25-march-1911

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire – New York City – March 25, 1911
Photo Credit: NYU/STERN Center for Business & Human Rights

 

It’s easy to skim the surface of the swamp of toxic algae and decaying vegetation. Are we ready to go deeper? Are we ready to drain the swamp?

Are we ready to face our barbarity and callousness towards those we have deemed a threat, worthless, inferior, or dispensable?

Are we ready to ratify that all men and women are created equal and deserve the same treatment and opportunities for their growth and prosperity?

Are we ready to let go of our selfish desires and work together to save ourselves from becoming yet another layer of the swamp?

Draining the swamp will be tough and soul-searching work. It will test the human capacity for openness, forgiveness, sharing, kindness, compassion, and love. It will require a collective effort.

Are you ready to join me in draining the swamp?