Still stunned from attending the movie premiere of Emanuel about the mass murder at a Charleston, South Carolina church which took place four years ago last night. What hit my heart the hardest was how it suddenly showed me the pattern: these nine Black churchgoers were coldly, deliberately, and heartlessly ripped away from the husbands, […]
“Race-conscious policies are just reverse racism.” “Talking about race is what keeps us separated.” Really? As the brilliant Ibram X. Kendi points out in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, generation after generation of white people in power in the U.S. were TOTALLY FINE with race-conscious policies that explicitly […]
“With liberty and equity for all?” Doesn’t stir the heart in quite the same way as “justice for all,” does it? So why have I been using equity and justice like they’re synonyms when I talk about racial issues? Well, because I hadn’t yet read PRE’s introduction to Grantmaking with a Racial Justice Lens. Yesterday […]
SCENE: A couple of weeks ago at a national conference. I’m doing the slow crowd-waddle out of the plenary ballroom with hundreds of my fellow philanthropy professionals when I find myself next to a silverhaired Old-Timer whom I’ve known since I joined the field six years ago. ME: Wow, kind of amazing that they’re trying […]
On the scroll: my name, as a founding Steering Committee member for the LA County Center for Financial Empowerment. Not on the scroll: the names of 42,000 Angelenos who opened checking accounts via our BankOn initiative, thousands more who claimed their fair share of $15 million in EITC tax refunds through our Free Tax Prep […]
Woohoo, I’m on spring break in Florida! Time for me to go wild and flash you with my three key takeaways from last month’s SPARCC webinar on Making the Case for Racial Equity with Dwayne Marsh, about how to show government officials the need for systemic change. 1. Racial equity is the business of government, […]
Greetings from midair. Today I’m flying to visit my mom in Florida. She’s a snowbird these days, living not far from where we would visit my grandparents and various other aged relatives every winter, not to mention a certain Mouse. So I used to think I knew something about the state. “Florida is IN the […]
I have so much to learn. I’ve spent decades reading voraciously, even compulsively… sneaking out of bed to huddle by the nightlight devouring the Chronicles of Narnia (sorry, Mom), getting my B.A. in Russian history and literature, becoming mildly obsessed with the personal narratives of South Pole explorers, reading Harry Potter side-by-side in English and […]
My aunt still teases me about the first time she met me, before she got engaged to my uncle. Apparently, three-year-old me arrived at a family party in Boston, in the depths of winter, in a full-on hissy fit because my mother forgot my patent leather party shoes so I was doomed to wear ugly […]
Black History Month? Turns out it’s My History Month too. Today I learned that my family and I owe a debt of gratitude to Jan Ernst Matzeliger, the African-American inventor of the Automatic Shoe Lasting Machine. Quoting from an old publication by Compton College that I happened to see today: “His machine created new jobs, […]