October 2017

(Heather) McGhee is the president of Demos , a public policy organization that advocates for social change. As a black public figure, she's no stranger to receiving retorts from racially prejudiced individuals. However, the experience she had with the caller on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" was altogether different. After the caller announced himself as someone who is prejudiced, McGhee braced herself for a rant but was surprised to hear a simple ask instead. "What can I do to change?" asked...

Across the parking lot from a YMCA in Des Moines, about a dozen men sit on black plastic chairs in the basement of a former Catholic high school. This is a court-ordered class for domestic abusers, part of a new statewide curriculum for batterer intervention in Iowa. According to police reports, one man here kicked his wife several times in the stomach. Another threw a lamp at his girlfriend's head. Lucas Sampson - a man with the imposing appearance of a viking but the gentle demeanor of...

In 1928, the leaders of 15 countries committed to renouncing war as a tool for resolving international disputes. They enshrined this commitment in the Kellogg-Briand Pact (sometimes referred to as the Paris Peace Pact) and were later joined by 47 other countries. But war, of course, continued, and the pact is generally remembered as a well-meaning but ineffectual fantasy—when it is remembered at all. Now, Yale law professors Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, the authors of The...

It’s a problem that isn’t going away: the so-called “affordable” housing we’re building in many cities—by which we mean publicly subsidized housing that’s dedicated to low- and moderate-income households—is so expensive to build that we’ll never be able to build enough of it to make a dent in the housing affordability problem. The latest case in point is a new affordable housing development called Estrella Vista in Emeryville, California, (abutting Oakland and just across the bay from San...

The last time you handled a challenge well, were you called a credit to your race? When you go shopping, do store clerks watch you closely or follow you? Do you have trouble finding a hair salon nearby that knows how to style your hair? When you buy greeting cards and magazines, is it difficult to find ones with people the same race as you? If you answered no to these questions, you’re almost certainly white. There’s also a good chance you’ve never looked at your whiteness this way.

On Wednesday, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a report scrutinizing the management of private foster care providers, and skewering one especially notorious foster care agency. Stirred by news stories chronicling dozens of child deaths because of management of foster care services by The MENTOR Network , a national for-profit provider, Hatch and Wyden directed the Senate Finance Committee to study the matter. The ensuing report , entitled “An Examination of Foster...

This article was originally published by Everyday Feminism . It has been edited for YES! Magazine. No matter how long you’ve been politically conscious, you’ve probably figured out by now that activists are by no means perfect. Even while we’re trying to end oppression, we can sometimes make some harmful mistakes ourselves. So how do you address oppressive mistakes in your community? Say you’re at a social justice event that’s promising in some ways but problematic in others. What do you do?

On a recent morning in Atlanta, Georgia, Marian Davis and four volunteers set up folding chairs along a busy stretch of the Atlanta Beltline where people come to exercise, sightsee, and shop. Next to them, a sign advertised their services: “Free Listening.” Davis and her “listening team” are volunteers with a nonprofit called Sidewalk Talk , a community project that aims to dismantle loneliness, a growing public health crisis in American cities. By gathering on the street, they aim to use...

The judges’ citation for the winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning , is both unstinting in its praise and a challenge to readers: Stamped from the Beginning turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down. Ibram X. Kendi writes as a thoughtful cultural historian, aware that he is challenging deeply held, often progressive assumptions. Using a masterful voyage through the history of US political rhetoric, beginning with Cotton Mather...

This article was published by TalkPoverty.org . Officially, the United States ended debtors' prisons in 1833. Unofficially, as we saw in the Justice Department's report on racially biased policing in Ferguson, there is a system of fines and fees for minor crimes that often result in jail time for the poor, mostly black citizens who cannot afford to pay them. To provide more context on the issue, I talked with Peter Edelman, Georgetown University law professor and former staffer for Robert F.

The latest experiment in a universal basic income will be coming to Stockton, California, in the next year. With $1 million in funding from the tech industry–affiliated Economic-Security Project, the Stockton Economic-Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) will be the country’s first municipal pilot program. As currently envisioned, some number of people in Stockton will receive $500 per month. That’s not enough to cover all their expenses, but it could help people with rising housing costs,...

In the District, 47 percent of children and teens have experienced a traumatic event, such as the death or incarceration of a parent, witnessing or being a victim of violence, or living with someone who has been suicidal or who has a drug or alcohol problem, according to new federal data . In Maryland and in Virginia, the rate was 41 percent. The findings come from state-by-state survey data released Thursday from the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, which aims to take a first-ever...