By Donna M. Owens
Read the full article from Essence, here.
In a full-page ad in The New York Times, the group is celebrating nearly 100 current and former Black women political leaders. They run the gamut from Vice President Kamala Harris to the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Higher Heights is also challenging what they called “the shameless absence of Black women” in certain offices at the federal level and beyond.
By Meg O’Connor
Read the full article from The Appeal, here.
Under Hardy’s proposal, each city and county in Florida would be required to create a Public Safety Department by July 1, 2023. The department would have distinct operational divisions with different public safety functions, including law enforcement, traffic enforcement, crisis response and intervention, and emergency call answering and dispatch. The bill also seeks to hire civilian crisis responders.
By The Associated Press
Read the full article from NBC News, here.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Monday signed into law a Republican-backed bill that makes it harder to vote early, potentially eroding a key aspect of Democratic campaigns. Republicans in the House and Senate quickly approved the voting changes over the opposition of all Democratic legislators. Republicans said the new rules were needed to guard against voting fraud, though they noted Iowa has no history of election irregularities and that November’s election saw record turnout with no hint of problems in the state.
By Caitlin Dewey
Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.
“In New York, white residents have received a disproportionate share of vaccines in each of the state’s 10 regions and in all five counties of Western New York. That disparity is especially dramatic in Erie County: While white residents make up just over 81% of the population, they account for almost 91% of the newly vaccinated. Black residents, on the other hand, represent 5.7% of all vaccinated people (compared to 13.1% of the population), while Asian residents make up 2.5% of those vaccinated (3.6% of the population) and Hispanic residents make up 2.2% (4.5% of the population).”
By Ausra Mussett and Cameron Carver
“In the midst of all things dystopian—a global pandemic, a climate crisis and an ever-amplified outcry for racial justice—what is the use of designing a utopia?”
By Robin D.G. Kelley
Read the full article from Boston Review here.
“So when Harvard’s administrators tell Professor West that they cannot bring him up for tenure because it’s ‘too risky’ and he’s ‘too controversial,’ they completely undermine the point of tenure: to preserve and protect his freedom to speak truth to power, to expose injustice anywhere, to bring to bear his enormous critical faculties and prophetic voice to say those things we need to hear in order to advance knowledge and create a more just world. After all, neither his generous salary, nor the name on his endowed chair, nor all the effusive assurances from the administration will protect him from dismissal if, in the course of ‘offering ideas, views and analyses,’ he offends the powers that be or their donors.”
By Jalonda Hill
Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.
“The BPD’s history of disproportionately stopping Black drivers also counters the argument that police improve community safety. Stop receipt data from 2020 shows that 68% of receipts were issued to Black motorists, despite Black people making up roughly 37% of the city’s population. This apparent racism also drives the disproportionate and unjustified use of police force against unarmed people of color.”
By Jalonda Hill
Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.
“The BPD’s history of disproportionately stopping Black drivers also counters the argument that police improve community safety. Stop receipt data from 2020 shows that 68% of receipts were issued to Black motorists, despite Black people making up roughly 37% of the city’s population. This apparent racism also drives the disproportionate and unjustified use of police force against unarmed people of color.”
By David Graeber
Read the full essay from Jacobin here.
“[I]n reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings.”
By Danny Sjursen
Read the full article from In These Times here.
“The campaign will do little to further the United States’ objectives in the Middle East (in as much as they can even be articulated at this point), but it heralds something more dispiriting still: That nearly two decades into a regional war, Washington (perhaps willfully) does not understand the Syria-Iraq-Iran nexus, and that the Biden administration is following a failed blueprint in the Middle East…”