Opinion

While the Founding Fathers feared the establishment of a tyrant in the presidency, at the same time they were concerned about the capacity of the average voters to make effective decisions. There was an expectation that the Senate would function as a body of well-educated, upper-class gentlemen.

As youth leaders with the Intergenerational Organizing Program at St. Stephen’s Youth Programs, we are concerned about recent news stories revealing that the Boston Public Schools (BPS) has shared student information with the Boston Police Department, which in turn shared this information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Black folk have a real dilemma building up over the 2020 elections like thunderclouds over the Midwestern plains.

The solemnity of an event often instills an appreciation of its significance. The formal procedure for transporting to the United States Senate the articles of impeachment of a U.S. president assured citizens of the power of the Constitution that has been guiding the republic since 1787.

Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists learned that economic equality was the most difficult goal to attain. Blacks and other racial minorities found it difficult to move forward because working class whites, who should have been their allies, had been deluded to believe that racial discrimination was to their advantage.

There’s no doubt Grafton Thomas committed a hate crime when he allegedly stabbed five people at a Hanukkah party in New York. He is an African American. There was a time when the two, a hate crime, and African American, were not only mutually exclusive but almost unthinkable. There was good reason. In the long vile, hideous history of racially motivated hate violence in America, African Americans have been the prime targets.

One of the most common features of right-wing populist and fascist movements is the demand for ethnic and/or racial purity. During the course of the 20th century we saw it in its most egregious forms in colonial and white minority regimes in the Global South, and in the Nazi-led persecution and, later, Holocaust against the Jews.

Since Trump wrote his six-page screed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, I have been thinking about an appropriately strong response, so I decided to write to Tom Perez, who is in charge of the Democratic National Committee, with the hope that he will express my outrage.

Conservatives tout that the Republican Party is the bastion of the nation’s economic strength as well as the pillar of support for America’s constitutional law. Under the Trump regime, neither assertion is quite true.

Trump spotted this tiny, and very dangerous, opening early on. He repeatedly bragged that there were a lot of blacks that liked and supported him. He drove that seemingly loopy notion home with well-placed photo-ops and meetings with a handful of high-profile black entertainers, athletes and preachers. He doubled down on this with the launch in 2019 of the group Black Voices for Trump.

As the enormous power of the presidency became more apparent to him, Trump began to believe that his authority was limitless, like that of an emperor. He seemed to believe that he was above the law.

The Boston Public Schools needs a new way of budgeting. Boston needs to guarantee a baseline quality of education at every one of its 127 schools with foundational school budgets, in addition to equity-based weighted student funding.