The recent repeal of affirmative action has catalyzed national discussion about what policies most effectively advance racial equality for Black Americans. Affirmative action, while not reparations, was a social inclusion policy that sought to increase minority representation in universities where students of color may not have been accepted due to systemic discrimination. While affirmative action […]
Tag: black lives matter
Homeschooling: Fueling White Supremacy
The seventh most populous state of the union, Ohio, is so typical that it verges on the point of drab. But on the Buckeye State’s quiet streets teeming with suburban housing of seeming normalcy, there rests an underbelly of white supremacy. In the Winter of 2023, the Ohio Department of Education uncovered a bustling Neo-Nazi […]
What Can Biden Still Accomplish? Criminal Justice Reform.
Joe Biden walked out of his inauguration with promises for transformational reforms in almost every aspect of American government, but with brutally slim Congressional majorities to deliver such legislation. Today, the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) have passed into law and served as major victories for the Democratic Party. On the […]
Laundering Reputation: Gulf Countries and ‘Sportwashing’
In the wake of the George Floyd protests during mid-2020, Formula 1, the highest class of single-seater motorsport in the world, launched a campaign named “#WeRaceAsOne” that saw teams and drivers adorn their equipment with a rainbow logo, a show of solidarity for diversity and inclusion. Both Liberty Media and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile […]
A Diagnosis With No Cure: Missing White Woman Syndrome
Gabby Petito’s parents declared her missing on September 11, 2021. Within nine days, the name Gabby Petito had become a buzzphrase for news outlets and social media users alike. On TikTok alone, “#GabbyPetito” amassed over 794 million views. This kind of coverage placed Gabby’s case on a global stage at an unfathomable speed, and by […]
Can the Invisible Hand Guide Us to Racial Justice?
Daunte Wright was just a year older than me. He was a father, a recent graduate, a basketball fan, and most of all, beloved by his friends and family. On April 11, Wright was fatally shot by white police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop in which she claims she meant to taze him […]
For The Sake Of Our Asian Elders, Reject Anti-Blackness
Anti-Asian racism is surging, and it’s no secret as to why. Thanks to the bigoted lie that our community was responsible for bringing Covid-19 into America and the morally bankrupt leaders who doubled down on discrimination, hostility towards the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) peoples has run rampant. In the six months after the nationwide […]
No Seats at the Table: What the Dearth of Black Head Coaches in the NFL Tells Us About America
At the conclusion of the NFL’s season in 2020, there was hope that this hiring cycle for head coaches would be different. At the time, of the 32 teams in the country’s most popular sports league, only 3 had black head coaches; a startling number for a league whose players are overwhelmingly black. Following the […]
The Real Winner of the 2020 Election: Local Criminal Justice Reform
As our nation was fixated on the results of the Nov. 2020 presidential election, many Americans may not have paid much attention to local down-ballot elections concerning criminal justice and mass incarceration. Yet, voters delivered resounding and consequential verdicts on the criminal justice system, from electing progressive prosecutors and decriminalizing drugs, to addressing felony […]
The Anti-Blackness of Surveillance
This past summer was one of uproar and unrest, as hundreds of Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country due to outrage over our nation’s senseless police shootings of unarmed Black men and women. As these protests proliferated, police departments tried to repress them, and reports that authorities were using alarming surveillance techniques to […]
Prosecution of a Young BLM Activist
San Luis Obispo (SLO) is a city on the Central Coast of California, with a population of about 45,000 people. SLO is 84 percent white and 2.2 percent Black/African American. The median household income is $71,148 in the county. The county leans more liberal, with 48.9 percent voting Democrat and 40.9 percent voting Republican in […]
BLM Protests Challenge France’s Colorblindness
Justice Pour Adama As Assa Traoré, a French anti-racism activist of Malian descent, followed the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the United States, she saw in it the opportunity to seek justice for her brother and awaken a colorblind France to the […]
The Politics of The Yeehaw Agenda
Old Town Road was not born into a void. Lil Nas X’s genre-shattering fusion of trap and country influence was just one of the manifestations of the rising use of cowboy imagery and style on the internet and in popular culture outside of its traditional contexts. The name for this movement, coined by a pop […]
How the Government Started a Race War with Guns
Gun reform—suddenly the contention is palpable and explosive. The current hyperfocus is wholly attributable to the courageous and unyielding student survivors turned activists who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting. For those of us with a modicum of melanin in our skin, however, gun violence and the resultant fight to mitigate it […]
The Commodification of Activism
When Nike revealed Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback, to be the face of their new “Dream Crazy” marketing campaign, they drew a myriad of responses. Some took to social media to express their disbelief by burning all of their Nike gear, while others applauded the company for openly endorsing Kaepernick and his message. President […]
Are Protests Powerful? (It Depends)
Black Lives Matters protesters in Missouri stand together along a highway, with locked arms, chanting and holding signs that read “black lives matter” and “say their names.” But they are surrounded. From above, the buzzing of helicopters compete with the cries of the crowd. On the ground, S.W.A.T. officers appear and the police threaten arrest […]
Secret Police: California’s Law Enforcement Transparency Problem
On March 18th, Stephon Clark was shot and killed by police in his grandmother’s home. Two officers responding to a vandalism report chased Clark down into grandmother’s backyard and shot him twenty times, reportedly after mistaking his cell phone for a pistol. Several tenuous claims and accusations surround the incident, mostly regarding the extent of […]
Knock Knock, It’s Your Old Neighbor, White Supremacy
It’s hard to start an article that talks about Nazis. Nazis. In my short lifetime, I would hear “Nazi” in a history or government class. When I entered college, I heard it from freshmen in political science courses who decided that by asking the age-old question, “but what about the Nazis?” would show how smart […]
Racism Today versus Racism after 9/11
After the September 11 attacks in New York, the level of hate crimes against people who appeared Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim rose to extremely high levels. According to FBI data, there were 93 reports of anti-Muslim assaults in 2001, compared to 12 reports in 2000. While the number of reported hate crimes decreased over […]
A Dance with the Devl(in): Insight to the Fracturing of the Berkeley College Republicans and How It’s Still Dangerous
Note: The views in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the views of any organization in any official capacity. Even to outsiders, it is hard to miss the drama surrounding the Berkeley College Republicans that has drawn national attention by inviting controversial speakers and giving rise to protests that […]
To Discuss or to Protest? That is the Question
Berkeley’s campus atmosphere is ripe with tension from protests. Numerous campus events have been interrupted by the likes of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists who seek to convey their platforms through upheaval and disruption. While their message is certainly conveyed, it comes at the cost of an educational dialogue, […]
Liberty and Protest
There is a consistent tension between the “sovereign’s” First Amendment Rights to free speech and assembly and the state’s chronic apprehensiveness about the creation of a dynamic and potentially unstable security situation. In the aftermath of the Berkeley Black Live Matter Protests, I personally was drawn to the interesting phenomenon of violent crowd dispersal and […]
December Berkeley Protests: Where Do We Go From Here?
Traditionally, the start of Dead Week in Berkeley may be known more for competition among students for coveted study spaces in Main Stacks than for large-scale protest, but the weekend of December 6th proved to be an exception. That Saturday night, the first cries of “No justice! No peace! No racist police!” began to ring […]