Award-winning columnist, writer, speaker and editor
As part of a stunt to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies, the governors of Texas and Arizona have been sending bus-loads of migrants to DC and New York without any support. Immigrant advocate groups are scrambling to take care of these people, who were vulnerable well before being used as political props.
Guest: Murad Awawdeh, executive director at New York Immigration Coalition and NYIC Action
One tragedy replaces another in the headlines—that’s just how things go.
The Texas state Legislature isn’t scheduled to convene until January 2023, when the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde will no longer be fresh in people’s minds, and the momentum for changing Texas’ gun laws will be long gone. One state senator, however, won’t accept that.
Guest: Roland Gutierrez, Democratic Texas state Senator for District 19, which includes Uvalde.
When I visited Monticello, the home of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, it was certainly impressive. But there was so much information shared by the friendly tour guide about the great man’s genius that a lot was left out about just who was making the Virginia plantation turn a profit. Who was building the furniture and brewing the beer? Who was doing the planting?
When I asked the kindly woman for more details on the lived experiences of the enslaved men, women and children at Monticello, her attitude grew decidedly chilly. And when I asked about Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson’s children, beginning when she was a young teen and Jefferson was in his 40s, well, the docent’s face lost what little color it had and her rehearsed spiel descended into an unintelligible word salad. Then she changed the subject.
Blessedly, if I were to visit Monticello today, there is an exhibit devoted to Hemings, acknowledging the woman, known in Jefferson’s time but disappeared or downplayed by histories, at least until historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s books and other scholarship fueled conversations that DNA testing confirmed.
It wasn’t just embarrassed guides at Monticello that misled for so long. Anyone relying on other cultural interpretations would have been clueless. In 2000, I wrote about a CBS offering, “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal,” which portrayed the relationship between a man of power and privilege and the woman he owned as straight out of a romance novel, complete with swelling chords and actor Sam Neill as Jefferson in a Fabio-style wig, locks blowing in a wind machine-generated breeze.
Disturbing, if a ratings grabber.
History, what is taught in the classroom, is vital if we are to understand the present. Right now, the country is embroiled in a contentious discussion over how much truth about systemic racism to allow in classrooms, with, unfortunately, little consideration of how and why promoting “fairy tale” history can damage schoolchildren of all ages and races.
But education extends past hours sitting at a school-room desk. Let’s face it, a lot of folks absorb what we see on TV or in the movies as kind of true. We half-listen to a museum guide without questioning the motives of the people who crafted monuments and museums that shape memories of the dead.
Ronald Reagan, considered a secular saint before, during and after his two presidential terms by many in the Republican Party, an actor-turned-politician who also served as California’s governor, was famous for his stated disdain of the thing he spent much of his life doing: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Of course, his administration’s tax cuts were plenty helpful for high earners, but it certainly made for a catchy sound bite. And it became a guiding philosophy for his, and now Trump’s, Republican Party.
And that brings us to the culmination of the effort to paint any government acting competently with a dash of compassion as evil — Texas, the Lone Star State that went it alone. We all saw how that worked out. When a cold snap broke the state, exposing glaring failures in everything from its independent energy grid to its power and water systems, the state’s leaders were either ghosts — escaping to Mexico for a vacation, in the case of Sen. Ted Cruz, or to Utah, where state Attorney General Ken Paxton traveled — or defiant apologists.
The recent extreme climate event in Texas slammed many cities and towns throughout the state, but — as is the case in many natural disasters — communities of color were most affected. This has been a trend in the country, with many of these communities still feeling the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey – as well as man-made disasters such as the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. What is the cause of the disproportionate impact, and what policies can reverse this pattern?
Chrishelle Palay and Justin Onwenu join this episode of Equal Time. Palay runs the HOME Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable recovery from natural disasters, while Onwenu is an environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club and an appointee to the DNC’s Environment and Climate Crisis Council. With host Mary C. Curtis, each discusses the issue of environmental injustice not only in Texas, but across the country, and why long-standing inequities demand grassroots activism and change in local, state and federal policies.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Another grim milestone nearing, as the U.S. prepares to reach 500,000 COVID deaths.
The latest as health officials stress the battle is far from over and remind the public to remain vigilant.
And a week of no power for many in the Lone Star State.
While Texas is the only state to have its own power grid, what are the vulnerabilities for North Carolina and the rest of the country?
Our political contributor Mary C. Curtis gives us her take in the video above.
George W. Bush used to joke about it, his mediocre record at Yale, his less-than-diligent efforts throughout his educational career. So many laughed along at every bit of the persona he played into – the incurious certainty, the attempts to pronounce “nuclear” and the confident attitude throughout it all. But few questioned his right to take that place at Yale, another at Harvard and the privileged path that led to the White House.
That is how America has always worked, with the rich and the ones with the last names that matter usually stepping to the front of the line. It’s a system that has overwhelmingly benefited whites and males and, to look at the boards of Fortune 500 companies, still does.
Yet, you don’t see the righteous indignation or a spate of lawsuits to rid higher education of the curse of legacies. Voices are rarely raised to demand that elite colleges and universities take the thumb off the scale for families with a fat checkbook or a name on a campus building. There is not a suggestion that “they” don’t belong.
When Abigail Fisher was refused admittance at the University of Texas, she didn’t think that because she didn’t earn her way into the top 10 percent of her high school class — a bar that in Texas would have gained her automatic admission – that just maybe she should have studied harder.
