When discussing race, the conservative argument is best expressed by the famous words of Chief Justice John Roberts: “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Translation: America has done bad things in its history, but those bad things are gone now, so we should move past those horrors and look forward.
Conservatives believe that if blacks and Latinos simply work hard, get a good education and earn a good income, historical racial wealth gaps will disappear.
Recently, chilling videos surfaced online of young University of Oklahoma students, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, reciting a racially-charged chant. The story appeared surprising for numerous reasons. Among them, education is supposed to reduce racial resentment (or at least temper outward expressions of it), and young people, known as Millennials, are supposed to be uniquely tolerant. The incident offers an opportunity to reevaluate how we think about racism in America, and how we can fight it.
The median white household has $111,145 in wealth holdings, compared to $7,113 for the median black household and $8,348 for the median Latino household, according to a recent study called The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters. [...]
Last Year, Germany announced it was making its university system free. Given mounting college costs in America, ATTN: wanted to interview a higher education expert to learn whether any best practices could be applied domestically. We spoke with Mark Huelsman from the New York-based think tank Demos for answers. [...]
“Put some mustard on it.” That’s the advice that Chicago McDonald’s worker Brittney Berry allegedly received from her manager after suffering a scalding burn on her arm from the grill used to make eggs. And this was no minor burn – she was eventually taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and had to miss work for six months.
Last week, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer unveiled a new plan to regulate financial advisers, the first of its kind, that tries to protect the average investor from advisers who don’t have to put their clients’ best interests first.
Protesters are angry that the Oak Brook, Ill., company won't improve wages for employees at franchises, which make up 90% of McDonald's roughly 14,000 U.S. stores. Even for the 90,000 workers at company-owned stores who will see their paychecks increase to at least $1 above local hourly minimum wages starting July 1, the concession is too small.
A recent report titled “The Racial Wealth Gap” examined, in conjunction with other factors, the role education plays in the persistent wealth gap between minorities and their White counterparts in this country.
Last week, Massachusetts became the latest state to either settle or lose in litigation over complaints that it wasn’t providing adequate voter registration services at welfare offices.
The settlement is part of a broad effort by voting rights groups to reverse the decline in voter registrations at public assistance offices, which Congress intended to serve as a mechanism for signing up low-income voters. National voting rights groups argue that the decline in registrations is because of improper implementation by staff at government welfare offices. (...)
On Thursday, a day on which many New Yorkers were squinting in what seemed like the first full sunlight in months, New York Mayor de Blasio announced at Gracie Mansion that he, along with a number of other leading progressives, was putting forward a vision for how to address income inequality. Speaking first, de Blasio said that the group had come together to formulate a template for how best to conquer income inequality, which, he said, is worse today than it was at the height of the Great Depression.
Life happens. We have children to support. We lose jobs. Marriages fall apart. By the time we near our ‘Golden Years’ the nest-egg we may have envisioned may be a lot smaller than we thought and in many cases, not there at all due to heavy debt loads.
In an op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, University of Colorado law professor Paul F. Campos offered a provocative answer to the frequently asked question: why is college so expensive these days?
Having to register to vote is a practical barrier for some people, especially those who are poor and marginalized. So shifting that burden to the state leads to more people voting.
Late Tuesday, news broke that yet another unarmed American, a black man named Walter Scott, was killed by a white police officer. As with Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Rodney King nearly 25 years ago, the brutality was captured on video for the world to see. The New York Times put the damning evidence at the very top of its homepage and it quickly spread throughout social media networks provoking outrage, disgust, horror, grief. These reactions have come most vocally from black Americans.
Black Twitter is a force. It’s also not particularly well understood by those who aren’t a part of it. The term is used to describe a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, interconnectedness, and unique activity.
Middle class income stagnation, and the inequality that it causes, is the principal economic challenge for the nation — and finance is to blame for it.