Political Resources
Justice
Also see: Beloved Community; Race; Gender
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
“[. . .] Recognizing that women have intersecting identities and are therefore impacted by a multitude of social justice and human rights issues, we have outlined a representative vision for a government that is based on the principles of liberty and justice for all. As Dr. King said, ‘We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.’ Our liberation is bound in each other’s.” [read more]
Recasting ‘Riots’ as Black Rebellions, Peniel E. Joseph.
"America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale University professor of law, history and African-American studies, and one of the country’s leading scholars of mass incarceration, offers a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America. Her book reconceptualizes the Black freedom struggle between the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Lives Matter 2.0 demonstrations that galvanized the nation, and much of the world, in 2020.
Through 10 crisply written and lucidly analytical chapters, Hinton reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath. She begins by challenging the common use of the term “riot” to describe the civil disturbances that threatened to shatter America at the time. Hinton reminds us that the racial massacres that formed an archipelago of Black suffering and death from Springfield, Ill., in 1908 to Chicago in 1919 and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, were riots instigated by whites, although they remain unlabeled as such.
Indeed, she argues, the violent clashes, often with the police, that have broken out in Black communities from the 1960s up to the present “can only be properly understood as rebellions” — part of “a sustained insurgency" [read more]
The Thriving World, the Wilting World, and You, Anand Giridharadas.
[NOTE: This explosive speech led to the fantastic book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.]
I gave the following speech at the Aspen Institute’s Action Forum, on July 29, 2015, in Aspen. The talk — on generosity versus justice — was to my fellow fellows in the Aspen Global Leadership Network. As a result, it contains some obscure jokes and references. After it popped up in David Brooks’s New York Times column and stirred an outpouring of discussion, sympathetic and critical, I decided to post the prepared text here on Medium. The video is also available here and below. Discuss!
“The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”
A Holistic Masterpiece, Wade Lee Hudson.
“A tour de force by Asoka Bandarage, Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society and the Economy is in sync with this website’s worldview. This excellent, well-written work presents a holistic framework that addresses both the whole person and the whole world. Published in 2013 with 68 pages of text and 17 pages of notes, this comprehensive essay, as described by its publisher, Palgrave Macmillan UK, offers:
An integrated analysis of the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and human well-being by investigating them as interconnected phenomena requiring a paradigmatic psychosocial transformation. She presents an incisive social science analysis and an alternative philosophical perspective on the needed transition from a worldview of domination to one of partnership.
The chapters are titled:
Environmental, Social, and Economic Collapse
Evolution of the Domination Paradigm
Ecological and Social Justice Movements
Ethical Path to Sustainability and Well-Being
[read more]
Creating Positive Community Information Exchange, Larry Walker,
“In 2001, Hector E. Garcia attended a St. Paul meeting between a Minnesota immigrant group and the INS (Immigration & Naturalization Services — federal agency charged with handling immigration matters, which was converted after 9/11 into three separate departments — CIS, ICE and CBO). The meeting was one of a series of tense interactions between INS and the immigrant community in person and through the media. Hector observed that community members left angrier than when they arrived and no solutions had been identified.
After the meeting, Hector suggested to Curt Aljets, District Director of INS, and to a Pastor who spoke for the community that it was possible to attain more constructive results from such meetings. Hector, at that time, was MN/Dakotas District Director for NCCJ (National Conference for Community & Justice). He offered to hold an interactive session with Mr. Aljets' staff. Out of that session, evolved a group decision to start the Twin Cities Immigrant Community Roundtable.
Then, Hector volunteered to organize and moderate the meetings. Aljets, his staff and the immigrant community accepted this generous offer and agreed to participate in designing the structure.
Two months later, the first TC Immigrant Community Roundtable was held. It would continue to meet on a quarterly basis for the next 12 years [. . .]”
The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means, Ezra Klein.
“After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”
Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.
That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle [. . .]” [read more]
The American Dream, Redefined, Wade Lee Hudson.
Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua is a valuable, challenging book. The American Dream, however, is more complicated than Chua acknowledges… The original dream, however, merely affirmed the gradual accumulation of modest wealth. Freelance writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase "American Dream" in his Epic of America which defined the term as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”
Later, however, the discovery of gold triggered the dream of instant wealth, which became a key feature of the American mind. The advent of mass advertising and the introduction of television aggravated hyper-competitive consumerism, materialism, cheating, corruption, and selfishness.
The desire for comfort and security evolved into a passion for obscene wealth. “To keep up with the Jones’” became “to get ahead” -- by any means necessary. The mantra “greed is good” became widely accepted. To climb social ladders and look down on those below became society’s driving force. Television programs like the top-rated “Survivor” -- where contestants progressively eliminate other contestants until one wins the million-dollar prize -- symbolize this competitive consumerism. In sports, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts but how you play the game” became “winning is everything.” [read more].
QUOTES
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.