If you’ve ever taken a train through the less glamorous fringes of Paris, you’ve seen another side of the city, one that is a far departure from Hollywood fantasies. There’s a palpable gulf. Before reaching the glamorous eighth arrondissement and scenes that look straight out of Emily in Paris, one must traverse what the French […]
Tag: race
Why Identity is Important: How Exploring Ethnicity Can Help Fight Racial Divides
It feels like every other day we hear about a young black person who was murdered by police. In 2023, 1,160 black people were shot to death by law enforcement. African Americans are 12% of the population, but they were 24% of those killed in police shootings, which is a stark contrast when one considers […]
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 […]
Algorithmic Injustice
Algorithms in the justice system started off as a noble solution to a serious problem: the bias of judges. There are two distinct ways that judges can be biased — targeted bias, such as sexist and racist beliefs, and cognitive bias, ways in which our mental circuitry fails to work logically (such as how judges […]
How Portland’s “Right to Return” is Indeed Right to Return Housing to the Underrepresented
In his 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, author Mark Twain discussed a world run by the upper echelons of society, detailing the growing and domineering aristocracy apparent at the turn of the 19th-century where financiers and business magnates dominated the urban landscape and frail economy. Twain was one of the few […]
Barred from the Ballot Box: Felon Disenfranchisement in America
Six million American adults are legally ineligible to vote, members of a group whose ranks have roughly quintupled over the past 40 years. In Kentucky and Tennessee, this group now comprises more than a fifth of the African American population; in Florida, this group composes more than 10 percent of the adult population. But these […]
Thinking in Color: Disputing Identity Politics
On the 9th of November, 2016, in the wee hours of the morning, the news networks proclaimed Donald J. Trump the president-elect of the United States. From my vantage point, I watched hundreds of Berkeley students on Sproul Plaza collectively react in unmitigated horror as the man whom they reviled so personally claimed the highest […]
Detention or Detox: Deconstructing America’s New Face of Heroin
Austin, Indiana, in many ways, is remarkably unremarkable. A small, mostly white, non-Hispanic population nestled in the center of the state, Austin may be your quintessential small-midwestern town. Family-owned ranches interspersed with mobile homes and yard signs that read, “”No Trespassing,” “Private Property,” “Keep Out.” A lackluster main street and struggling small businesses typify the […]
A Coded Political Mantra
According to Malcolm X, “Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.” Since the outlaw of slavery, racial discrimination taken on many different forms, from physical abuse, to legal segregation, to dog whistle politics, with the last yet to be prohibited. Today, dog whistle politics, a type of political speech […]
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 […]