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Category: American Society

  • The Subtle “Cousin to Racism”: Colorism Exposed in America’s Diverse Families

    A Q&A with Lori L. Tharps The answer to eradicating colorism is not colorblindness. What we need to do as a society is learn to appreciate the great diversity of human skin colors. It’s that easy and that hard. We love different colored flowers and different colored candies—why can’t we love different colored skin in…

  • Surfing and Indigeneity

    By Dina Gilio-Whitaker I am a person of Native American heritage, and I also happen to love surfing. I began board surfing as a young adult thirty-six years ago, but in reality I grew up riding waves as a kid born and raised in coastal Southern California. I spent lots of time on the beach,…

  • What Trump Vs. Clinton Means For Gun Control

    By Dennis A. Henigan For the first time since 2000, the Presidential election promises to be pivotal for the politics of gun control. Both for supporters of stronger gun laws, and for “gun rights” partisans, the stakes could not be higher. It was not long ago that the political death of gun control was accepted…

  • Prison Reform Misdirection: 5 Caveats About Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration

    By Kay Whitlock | The August 2016 announcement by the Obama administration that it will phase out or “substantially reduce” contracts with private prisons to house federal prisoners provides a master lesson in the political benefit of the magician’s art of misdirection. Hailed by many as a definitive step forward in criminal justice reform and…

  • A Lab of One’s Own: Improving Women’s Experiences in the Hard Sciences

    A Q&A with Eileen Pollack | Many science professors think that they treat their male and female students equally. But studies have shown that they actually encourage white male students in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, while subtly discouraging women. And society itself discourages women and minorities through the images and signals that our…

  • Powered By Girl: Digging Deep into Intergenerational Activist Work Between Women and Girls

    By Ashlyn Edwards Growing up, I was very awkward, very smart, and very un-feminist. If you had asked me at thirteen what I thought of feminism, I would have recited some hackneyed cultural stereotype about bra-burners and told you that gender equality was achieved when women won the right to vote—mostly because I had hardly…

  • The Great Sioux Nation and the Resistance to Colonial Land Grabbing

    By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz The first international relationship between the Sioux Nation and the US government was established in 1805 with a treaty of peace and friendship two years after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, which included the Sioux Nation among many other Indigenous nations. Other such treaties followed in 1815 and 1825. These…

  • Graduate Students and the Expansion of Trade Unionism

    By Bill Fletcher, Jr. Graduate students have been attempting to organize labor unions for decades. Until recently, those at private universities and colleges have been blocked from unionizing largely due to a Supreme Court decision from 1980, NLRB v Yeshiva University, that placed graduate students into the camp of managerial personnel and, therefore, ineligible for…

  • What Trump’s “Second Amendment People” Really Think About Armed Insurrection

    By Dennis A. Henigan The suggestion of politically-motivated violence against public officials is terrifying on its face, but it is certainly nothing new. Indeed, Trump’s comments are a specific application of the “insurrectionist” view of Second Amendment rights that has long been a core tenet of the ideology of the National Rifle Association and the…

  • The Drone of Political Theater: 2016’s DNC and RNC

    By José Orduña One convention featured the jingoistic speeches of retired generals, and ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, of protestors chanting “No more war!” being out shouted by people chanting “U-S-A!” The other convention was the Republicans’. As a Mexican immigrant naturalized as a US citizen in 2011, this is the second US general election for…