Opinion

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).

Count on Trump making another ritual declaration on the Martin Luther King holiday about how much he liked, admired, and thought Dr. King was such a great guy.

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.

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.

The Democrats have given Trump virtually the same playbook that he used to beat back the Mueller investigation. He won that fight, namely no charge of obstruction or anything else from Mueller, with his three-year relentless and ruthless ramming into the public and media lexicon the words and notions of “no collusion,” “witch hunt” and “hoax,” about the report

A story in the New York Times reports that the district attorney in Brooklyn, New York has blacklisted seven police officers whose work is so flawed and so lacking credibility that their testimony is precluded from criminal cases. The story indicates that this is a common practice, but the names of the offending police officers are usually not publicized.

Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked choice for Kentucky Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, just won big in that state’s election. Cameron is the first African American to hold statewide office in Kentucky in decades. He is a staunch protégé of McConnell’s.

On October 4, a bicameral group of Capitol Hill lawmakers wrote a letter to federal regulators, making clear the need for CRA to be strengthened — not weakened — under the guise of modernization. The letter also requests hearings on the issue in both the House Financial Services Committee and in the Senate Banking Committee.

In January 2019, when a jury brought back a guilty verdict against former Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke in the murder of Laquan McDonald, there were loud cheers that justice had been done; namely a white cop finally tried and convicted of the murder of an unarmed black man.

Some prosecutors may demand longer sentences for them to send a message, as one put it, that “prison is the only answer for entitlement and criminality.” That message will always crash hard against white privilege.

State and local officials across the country also reckon with limited resources to house the nation’s half million homeless and its accompanying persistent poverty.

When I read about bulletproof or bullet-resistant backpacks for small children—no matter how practical and protective the acquisitions might be against mass shootings—I was compelled to ask: “Where are we going?!?”