Portside

"Reproductive justice is my world view and my outlook," says Dr. Willie Parker, who left a successful career in obstetrics to provide abortions to mostly low-income women of color in the Deep South.

There is a reason why 70 percent of black teenagers, like those who died in Shreveport, and 60 percent of Hispanic teenagers can’t swim. But it isn’t due to some genetic disorder, as some actually believe. It is because of abject irrational racism and Jim Crow and its vestiges.

Lobbyists for America’s grandest fortunes may want to raise their rates. Capitol Hill is getting a gadfly who can really sting.

In Brooklyn, a new study shows that women face an underground labor market fraught with hidden risks.

The resolution isn’t a change in policy. But it strengthens the organization’s stance from 2010 and 2014 against charters.

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The disgraceful history of voter disenfranchisement is no secret. For more than a century, African Americans (and other marginalized groups) were restricted or evendisqualified from voting. Today these practices are formally outlawed, yet we still see patterns in voter turnout that indicate that voting discrimination is alive and well. Non-voters also tend to be younger, less educated, and less affluent than their voting counterparts.

The struggle for independence upset the “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”

Education disparities start early.

While there has recently been a push from advocates and policy -- makers alike to reexamine sentencing policy and practice, the negative impacts on former prisoners and people with felony convictions themselves and the economy as a whole will grow in scale unless the burgeoning reform trend continues and accelerates.