race

A year after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, The New York Times published a front-page article about racism in the St. Louis area. What it doesn’t address is …

There is a lot to be processed and mourned, celebrated and condemned about what has happened in Baltimore recently, starting with the death of Freddie Gray (although, of course, that […]

There is a Time article—“The Real Problem When It Comes to Diversity and Asian-Americans“—that has been making the rounds on the Internet. As a card-carrying member of the Model Minority Myth Busters club, I am sympathetic with author Jack Linshi’s piece in that it seeks to discredit model minority mythology. However, there are a couple […]

Shortly after the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the bill enacting redress and reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans, there was an editorial cartoon in my local newspaper. There were two Native Americans.  One was reading a newspaper. The newspaper had a headline that read “Japanese Americans to get $20,000 each.” […]

How do you ensure that the jobs a new development is supposed to bring to a community actually go to underrepresented populations?

Outside my house, two young African-American boys, maybe 9 or 10, scoot by on skateboards. One is carrying something on a leaf and stops to show me a giant slug. We chat about it a bit; I tell him that I looked up what kind of slug that was recently but now don’t remember. He […]

“This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it.” —Justin Herman, former executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1970 The land Herman was referring […]

The same factors that created ghettos of race and poverty operated to maintain them, even when subsidy might have provided a way out.