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Why Environmentalism is a Race Issue
When you think of “environmentalism,” where does your mind go first? Climate change? Solar power and wind energy? Rampant wildfires? The Green New Deal? These would all be accurate, but have you ever considered racism as being a vital part of this concept? Because it is. This is where environmental justice, and its subsidiary, environmental racism, come into play. What is Environmental Racism & Environmental Justice? Environmental racism means that environmental risks are not evenly distributed across groups of people, and that factors like age, poverty, race and minority status place some groups at higher risk for environmental disease. It…
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What is Democratic Socialism?
According to the book, Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey by Donald F. Busky, democratic socialism can be defined as combining the “ideas of liberal-democratic government with that of social ownership and control of the economy.” The author goes on to say that it is a “wing of the socialist movement that combines a belief in socially owned economy with that of political democracy.” The term “democratic socialism” is often used to distinguish those ideals from a more traditional view of socialism, which aligns itself more with communism than a democracy. Critics of this view democratic socialism as being a watered-down…
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A Guide to Understanding the History of Police Violence in the U.S.
In order to understand police brutality, we have to increase our holistic awareness and understanding of the systems that allow policy brutality to exist in the first place. In other words, we cannot effectively understand modern-day police violence without understanding the deeply rooted racial history in our country. Like many institutionalized concepts, this is a tangled web that goes back to the arrival of the first African slaves in America in 1619 (and in all honesty, before that as well, but that is beyond the scope of this particular list of resources). So in order to understand “police brutality” as…
