Portside

Honoring King's vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones - housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy - he fought for until the day he was taken from us. What does honoring that vision mean today?

If, as Cornel West says, 'justice is what love looks like in public,' then Freedom Square is an embodiment of practicing justice....With grace, imagination and courage, Freedom Square offers a glimpse into a new future and is boldly showing the world how to make Black lives matter.

The reason for today's powerful and persistent insistence that Black lives matter is based on the irrefutable evidence throughout American history that Black lives have never mattered. Black lives that were enslaved for 250 years never much mattered beyond the kind of economic concern held for livestock. Black lives that suffered a hundred years of brutal segregation and discrimination following slavery's abolition never mattered until Black people raised their voices...

U.S. law did not even address the issue of separating public restrooms by sex until the end of the 19th century.

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This is not a problem that journalists or panel organizers can solve on their own. It has to be shared by the vast institutions that help create this problem in the first place, and are perhaps also better positioned to correct it.

If you’re no longer drawing lines on population but you’re selectively using criteria like age, that hits [the Hispanic] community very hard. Put aside the whole citizenship issue. The largest group of people who would be subtracted from the apportionment base would be children, and because [Hispanics] have disproportionately so many more children than the Anglo population has, that starts shifting seats all by itself, before you start to even consider citizenship.

My recent Nobel peace prize win for my contributions in Tunisia shows that giving working people a say is the best path toward a more equal and just world