Author
Our ‘thing-oriented’ society puts development ahead of human needs. We all suffer the consequences
It takes concentration not to see certain realities — the mother holding the handwritten sign at the traffic light; the man sleeping under a bridge; the tent cities on public right of ways. But we make the effort. In downtown Kansas City, developers plan an entertainment district with a Ferris wheel centerpiece. There’s also talk […]
On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, no one should settle for ‘a piece of freedom’
Some historians mark the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder as the end of the civil rights movement. Over an arc of 14 years — from the 1954 Brown Decision to King’s death in 1968 — the nation attempted to address its racial caste system. The same nation that launched a war on hunger and […]
Some 68 years after Brown v. Board, similar foes continue fighting progress | Opinion
During a 2014 symposium marking the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, a statement from one of the plaintiffs offered what today feels like prescient insight. Many of the Virginia plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, feared integration and would have preferred separate and actually equal. Many historians consider Brown one of the high court’s five […]
Does CRT make white students feel bad? Try being a Black student | Opinion
Patrick recalled the horror he felt as a small child integrating a suburban school district. He rode the bus to school early in the school year with an armed law enforcement officer standing near his seat. He often stared at the officer’s holstered gun. Through his window, Patrick saw crowds of angry faces, signs declaring […]
Grievance envy discounts the oppressed while denying them justice | Opinion
For decades, people have used the phrase “playing the race card” to shut down conversations about our nation’s racial caste system. What they likely didn’t realize was that the phrase offered a tacit admission that racial grievance, in many cases, had virtually no equal and virtually no response. There’s no trumping that card. But in […]
What Republicans need to know about critical race theory
The late historian John Henrik Clarke explained the dominant subculture’s preoccupation with manipulating history. Europeans “began manipulating history in the 15th century to justify the slave trade,” said Clarke, a pioneer in Pan-African studies, during an interview with Tony Brown on Brown’s eponymous show in the 1970s. Modern racism incubated during this period, Clarke said. […]