Blog

Thanks so much to everyone who was able to join us for the screening of the documentary film, Portraits of Professional CAREgivers: Their Passion. Their Pain. earlier today. It was exciting to see so many of you interested in this very important topic. After the film, the co-producers hosted a Q&A discussion, which was recorded and is available for anyone to listen to. Link is below: ...

Sometimes there’s nothing to do but take matters into our own hands. A reader who is both a mom and a sociologist decided to do just that. After discovering that one of her daughter’s books required some “subversion,” she decided to do a little editing. Here’s to one way of fighting the disempowering messages taught to little girls by capitalist icons... [For more of this story, written by Lisa Wade, go to ...

The Department of Justice announced last week a bundle of prison reforms aimed at easing the transition for ex-prisoners back into the outside world. The measures include the creation of a school district within the federal prison network, reforming halfway houses, and providing funds to ensure that every former inmate is issued a state ID upon re-entering society at large. If that last reform seems surprising, it shouldn’t be: Most people leaving prisons don’t have state identification,...

The road to Kakuma, in the northwestern corner of Kenya, is long and full of potholes. Occasionally, young boys spot our car approaching and quickly begin pouring dirt into these potholes, pretending to repair them — hoping we’ll give them some loose change for the favor. “Do they ever actually fix it?” I ask our driver, John. “No, not really.” But for the occasional four-wheel-drive vehicle belonging to one international agency or another, the road is empty. The only time the road does fill...

Note: Many survivors, activists and parents get lots of free information and research through the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM). While t he material they share and sell is geared towards clinicians, social workers and health providers, they make videos and articles available to anyone, for free, for at least time-limited periods of time. It's not totally free. You have to share your email about a million times and will be inundated with...

National experts on sexual harassment in K-12 schools have teamed up to create a new educational video about gender equality, intended to inform students that they have a legal right to attend a school where nobody is harassed because of their gender. The timing couldn’t be better, said Esther Warkov, cofounder of the nonprofit group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools , which produced the free video for use by schools, clubs and parent groups. President-elect Donald Trump, who boasted in a 2005...

At first, the playground at Officer Willie Wilkins Park looks pretty standard. There’s a slide to skid down, ramps to climb up, bridges to cross, and nooks to investigate. But there’s also something relatively unusual: words, and lots of them. Mixed in among the bright primary colors of the structure are white panels plastered with whimsical illustrations and phrases like “let’s talk about the sunshine” and “let’s talk about food.” They’re not a random addition; the panels are a deliberate...

In the brushfire wars since Donald Trump won the presidency, skirmishes over how to speak to his coalition of voters have consumed liberals. Leading the vanguard in those conversations is a collection of writers and thinkers of otherwise divergent views, united by the painful process of reexamining identity politics, social norms, and—most urgently—how to address racism in an election clearly influenced by it. Though earnest and perhaps necessary, their emphasis on the civil persuasion of...

Stark disparities in prisoners’ treatment are embedded into criminal-justice systems at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and have disproportionate, negative effects on men of color. A new analysis from the Association of State Correctional Administrators and Yale Law School provides a fresh trove of information with which to explore the racial dynamics in state and federal prisons—specifically through their findings on solitary confinement. “People of color are overrepresented in...

H ere’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?” [For more of this story, written...

The NRA and Charlton Heston gifted us the slogan, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” Replace “gun” with “privilege” and I can’t think of a better way to describe how Americans feel about our culture of privilege and the prospect of losing it. Privilege exists, not because of anything we have done or failed to do. Instead, privilege reflects how society assigns disparate value to all of us based on social identities and how we, consciously or unconsciously, assign...

Many Americans deny the existence of privilege even while we see it, hear it, and feel it tear us apart. To end the destruction, we need to recognize that having privilege harms the privileged, talk about it so we can get over it, and make the New Privilege a reality. The Privilege is Real People are uncomfortable talking about, even thinking about privilege — particularly their own. I mean avoid eye contact, short of breath uncomfortable. I see this as I work around the country training...