Here’s your week in review, in haiku
1.
Oh, voter fatigue!
Midterms that will never end,
felons on speed-dial
2.
We are arresting
the daughters of company
founders now? Well, then.
3.
The forty-first left
this life lauded by many;
two in silent prayer
4.
Live from the Witch Hunt
Report: Lies, fake news, leaking!
Rage-tweeter-in-chief
5.
We risked losing you:
And starting a commotion.
Shouldn’t have fallen?
Have a buzzy and love-filled weekend.
On Point
| An undocumented worker at a Trump golf property speaks out |
| Victorina Morales is one of many undocumented workers who are cleaning cottages, maintaining lawns, even doing the President’s personal laundry, at his luxury golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. In this extraordinary story, she shares the harrowing details of how she came to the U.S. from Guatemala, obtained fraudulent papers, and went about making a life for her family with an extraordinary twist: She’s often cleaning on the sidelines while the president and his staff confer. She puts herself at risk for dismissal or worse by speaking out. "We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” she said. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.” |
| New York Times |
| YouTube fails to enforce its own policies until publicly shamed |
| The above headline was suggested by Celeste Ng herself after she was unable to get YouTube to take down an account that was impersonating her to post racist videos. The author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere reported the account, but was told by the company that the behavior did not meet the company’s “impersonation reporting guidelines.” Ng took to Twitter to force the company’s hand. “I don’t like shaming companies publicly, but you know what? Let’s make an example of this,” she tweeted. The offensive account was suspended yesterday. “All it took was reporting it, screenshots, publicly shaming you, and having my publisher start to look into it? And what about the people who don't have the resources to do that?” she tweeted. |
| Boston |
| A student is arrested protesting the return of Silent Sam |
| Maya Little, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been arrested and charged with inciting a riot and assaulting a police officer. Little had led a rally to protest the return of the Confederate monument, Silent Sam, to campus, this time in a building dedicated to UNC history. The monument had been torn down by protestors last August. Little says the charges are now typical of these encounters. "The only danger and violence present last night was once again caused by university police who came equipped to a student protest with riot gear and tear gas canisters." |
| NPR |
The Woke Leader
| Slow progress for diversity in medical education |
| Following a 2009 mandate that all medical schools must implement some form of diversity admission and retention guidelines, new research suggests the changes are working, albeit slowly. Researchers published a letter yesterday in the JAMA, that finds an uptick in non-white student enrollment in medical schools from 2012-2017. Though the progress is slow – white medical school enrollees were nearly 60% in 2017 – the move seems to have staved off part of the talent drain. From 2002 to 2012, the number of black and female students decreased each year, though Latinx and Asian students slowly increased. |
| NPR |
| Taking on the X in Latinx |
| Writer Daniel Hernandez does a deep dive into the origin of “Latinx” a term that has been widely embraced as a way to make the binary Latino/Latina more inclusive for people of all genders, and to stop making the "male" the default when talking about groups of people. There is a bigger issue to confront, he says. “One of the most stubborn aspects of America’s racial imagination is the insistence on having a term to separate and identify people of Latin American descent.” Most people prefer to identify themselves by their family’s country of origin anyway. The term Latin American, which later turned into the vaguely Spanishistic “Latino”, was invented by French colonists to distinguish various colonial efforts. So, why build on an already imperfect term? |
| Los Angeles Times |
| Isabel Wilkerson: Michele Obama’s memoir traces a path from the Jim Crow South to the White House |
| The acclaimed author of The Warmth of Other Suns, does a remarkable job explaining the deep importance of the former first lady’s memoir, Becoming. “Back in the ancestral homeland of Michelle Obama, the architects of Jim Crow took great pains to set down the boundaries and define the roles of anyone living in the pre-modern South,” she begins, reminding us of the violence and humiliation designed into the American caste system, one that sought to permanently brand African Americans as lesser and unequal. “It was with the weight of this history in her bones that Michelle Obama walked onto the world stage…” she says, and it is in the details of her life that this history comes alive, from the fragility of black middle-class ambition to the discipline it took to progress. “One of the great gifts of Obama’s book is her loving and frank bearing-witness to the lived experiences of the black working class, the invisible people who don’t make the evening news and whom not enough of us choose to see.” |
| New York Times |
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