Opinion

With spring training approaching, is it time for Roxbury to end its curse on the Boston Red Sox, forgiving but not forgetting the team’s racist history?

This is the Trump era. That means that there are legions of managers and employees of big and little firms who see absolutely nothing wrong in eyeing black patrons in businesses as interlopers and even potential criminals.

There are about 3,500 Boston public school students who have no fixed address. As incredible as it sounds, 6 percent of Boston’s 56,000 students are homeless. They might live temporarily in a run-down motel, move from shelter to shelter, stay in substandard housing or “couch surf” from house to house.

It’s the Trump-GOP tax law’s first anniversary and the wealthy are celebrating like it was Christmas all year, which it basically was for them. Working families, on the other hand, are less festive this holiday season: they weren’t invited to the party but are expected to pay for it.

Democracy isn’t perfect, but disenfranchisement is far worse. It’s past time for Boston to return to an elected school committee.

Federal prosecutors in New York brand Trump “Individual-1.” They say he made illegal hush money payments and had illegal dealings with Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign through his indicted attorney, Michael Cohen. In a client-attorney contract and relationship, attorneys are strictly prohibited from taking any action on their client’s behalf without their permission, agreement and direction. Yet, Trump’s legal mouthpiece so far is the one who has taken the fall for Trump’s crimes.

Now archived in libraries and stored as memorabilia of a time past, the Green Book has passed into history, but structural racism has not. A persistent, truth-seeking set of questions will manifest the evidence of its existence today time and time again.

Violence has been a common strategy of whites to impede black economic progress. In addition to economic attacks on black towns, racial discrimination against individual black entrepreneurs has made it difficult for blacks to prosper in private enterprise.

Social acceptance of racial diversity has been retarded by the mistaken belief that so-called African Americans belong to one coherent racial group. In fact, black opinions are heterogeneous.

The present system does not work. With Jeff Sessions no longer serving as attorney general, perhaps astute politicians will see that severe punishment for minor offenses does not solve the crime problem.

The long, often bloody history of America is littered with groups that have imposed a kind of white frontier vigilantism on blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other pariah groups.

Whatever happened to the American Dream of owning a home and giving your children a better life than you experienced as a child? Is this ‘dream’ being deferred or denied? The stark reality is that between the rising cost of college and the equally rising costs of homeownership, much of the country that works for a living is in a financial catch-22.