Author: Balwant K
Local officials should go on the offense to protect important initiatives that have benefited all of us. In particular, they can enlist businesses that see the benefits of their own diversity initiatives. As the movement to ban programs and policies supporting diversity, equity and inclusion steamrolls through government, academia and even the private sector, DEI proponents are challenged as never before. But instead of overreacting to incidents like President Trump’s preposterous remark blaming the recent aircraft crash over the Potomac River on DEI hiring, proponents should refocus their efforts, particularly at the local level of government where these programs have…
They can call attention to important social causes, and they can invest in their communities. They might even hold public office themselves. Jerry “Iceman” Butler, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame crooner, founding member of the soul group the Impressions and long-serving member of the Cook County, Ill., Board of Commissioners, died on Feb. 20 at the age of 85. His death, along with the passing a week later of Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, political activist and onetime public schoolteacher Roberta Flack, led me to think about how important celebrities can be in the political process, not just for entertainers who use their names to…
Far too many Americans still don’t have access in their homes to the technology and affordable high-speed broadband they need to succeed in today’s economy. We need to think of it as a civil and human right. wenty years ago, many public officials, educators, and economic and workforce-development visionaries anticipated that because of the growth of personal computing and the development of the Internet, action was needed to avoid another large societal divide based on race, class and education. There was plenty of reason for concern: In 2000, only 23.5 percent of African Americans and 23.6 percent of Hispanics had…
Too little progress has been made to ensure that high-speed Internet is available to all. As the pandemic has demonstrated, far too many still don’t have what they need to function in a virtual world. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of so many Americans confirms a belief many of us held two decades ago: that someday broadband would be as essential to modern life as clean water and electricity. We made this prediction amid some snickering and heckling by academic and government types, but we believed, as I wrote in my book Civil Rights to…
It started out as a grassroots medium for community speech, but now it’s struggling to survive. It needs a new platform that blends the best of its past with today’s technology. It was a hot, steamy day in July 1980 when I started work as the director of public access television for Cable Atlanta, the company that had won the franchise battle to operate cable TV for the metropolitan area. City Councilman James Bond, the bespectacled, bearded younger brother of Julian Bond, had successfully led the fight to ensure that the city’s public access provisions were among the strongest in…
Its popularity is growing so fast that cities need to scramble to keep up with demand for facilities and to take advantage of its economic potential. They will also have to consider its racial and class implications. I was walking my dog on our daily path past the back courts of Atlanta’s Washington Park tennis center, a facility long known for its excellence in Black tennis. I observed players hitting a hard plastic ball with Ping-Pong-type paddles and clearly having fun. You may already have guessed that they were playing pickleball. Hardly anyone plays tennis there anymore. The sport is…