Blog Stage Seven

A couple months ago I was happy to see Elizabeth Warren state that she thought Native Americans should be included in the conversation about whether minority groups should get reparations from the government. According to the article she is the only democrat who has entertained the idea, which is rather disappointing.
Few, if any, Americans know the real history of Native Americans in this country. We are fed a narrative since elementary school of a peaceful friendship between Pilgrims and Indians on Thanksgiving day, and then believe the stereotypes as we get older that most Native Americans are casino owners and alcoholics. We get annoyed when groups tell us to change football team logos and names because of their racist nature and tell Native Americans to "get over it."
But based on the history of violence that our own government has perpetrated on the Native American people I believe that changing football team names is the absolute LEAST we could do to make amends...I think we should be doing so much more.
To give a brief history...pretty much since the moment Europeans landed on American soil there has been violence committed against Native Americans. Whether that was by literally slaughtering tribes to take over their lands, forcing them to convert to christianity and forget their culture, or infecting them with diseases the damage done has been vast. I believe one could look back over that time period and justifiably say it was genocide. The shamefulness of it all is that it was done by the hands of our government, and there has been little if any reparations given to amend these atrocities. Many try to dismiss the need for the government to do anything by saying it was a "long time ago" but I see that as a lazy and frankly insulting excuse. The effects of those violent acts continue to harm Native Americans today. Their culture and traditions and languages are disappearing more and more. We continue to desecrate their lands by forcing oil pipelines through them.
It is time as a country to show our remorse and start valuing Native American lives. We can do that by demanding the government give tribes reparations. We can do this by demanding more laws to be passed that protect their lands. We can do this by demanding our schools to be more honest about our country's history in relation to Native Americans. We do them (and us) a disservice by sugar coating it.
I believe it can be done, and I look forward to see whether Elizabeth Warren sticks to her promise, and I hope many other politicians will follow her lead.

Blog Six

In the blog I am responding to the author argues that marijuana should not be made legal. Their argument is that marijuana is addictive and leads to other harder drugs...basically saying it is a "gate way drug." While this can be true, I have to disagree with their reasoning. I don't think there is substantial enough evidence to prove the marijuana leads to other drug use. It seems to be a logical fallacy because the studies mentioned are proving their point by saying because drug users also smoke marijuana that has to mean that marijuana is what started their use of drugs. What is more likely is that those people were going to use drugs whether they started with marijuana or not. There is usually a deeper reason as to why someone uses drugs (self-medicating for one), and it isn't as flippant as being the natural consequence of marijuana use. Most of all though, the writer is assuming that the reason people want to legalize weed is because they want everyone to do drugs. The push for legalizing marijuana has to do more with the blatant racism engrained in the laws and indeed the war on drugs itself. Black men and women make up 3/4 of the prison population for non-violent drugs offenses and yet white people use drugs just as much (if not more). Drug laws in short are a means to oppress black people and that is why marijuana use should be legal.

Blog Stage Five

As someone who grew up in a white suburbia bubble I took for granted the public schooling I was privileged to attend. I assumed that because I went to good schools then that must mean every public school was just as good. As I grew older and saw on the news that inner city schools were failing or doing poorly I naively assumed that had to be the result of the personal failings of the students. I definitely did not see it as a problem that the government had a hand in nor a problem that needed fixing by the government. It wasn't until I heard a segment on NPR's This American Life called "The Problem We All Live With" that I realized exactly what was wrong.

If you asked the average American today if they believed segregation still existed they most likely would say no or that it was done away with after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. While technically this is true, unfortunately statistics show us that it is not reality. If you were to look at a ranking of the schools doing the most poorly in this country you will see that almost all have something in common...the majority of students in these schools are poor minorities. In the same vain, if you were to look at a list of the best schools in the country you would see that their commonality is a majority of middle-class/upper class white students. Why is this?

To put it bluntly it is the result of a government that is still steeped in systemic racism. While there is a law on the books stating segregation is illegal in practice segregation is almost as bad as it was before the civil rights movement. According to an article written by Ian Millhiser called "American Schools Are More Segregated Now Than They Were In 1968..." the percentage of black students attending majority white schools has been on the decline since 1988. So what are the solutions?

First, I believe a solution to the problem is funding. The way public schools are set up to receive funding it is no wonder that the poorer inner city schools are failing. Schools cannot function well if they do not have the money to hire qualified teachers and staff. They cannot function if they don't have money for updated lesson plans and textbooks. They cannot function if their buildings are falling apart. The government needs to find a way in which all public schools get the same amount of funding. Unfortunately, with the current administration that won't be likely, but hopefully in the future the government will pay more attention to improving public education. If we continue to contact our politicians perhaps they will start taking notice as well.

The other solution, which the NPR podcast I mentioned above has suggested and seems the most common sense, is that we simply start integrating schools again. Studies have shown that when this happens all students involved start improving in school, even if they came from a lower rated school before integrating. The government needs to look for solutions to making this possible. A big part of that solution, I believe, is the government actively changing racist ideals and policies within itself, and asking itself why it believes poor minorities do not deserve the same benefits as wealthy white children.

Critique

The article I am critiquing today is written about a subject that has been in the news a lot lately since the passing of an abortion rights law in New York a few weeks ago. The law included legality for late term abortions, and it seemed like everyone had their opinion about the matter. Pro-life supporters saw it as atrocious murder and unnecessary. This article, though written almost two years before, was shared by many on my social network feeds in the hopes of shedding some light on just why late-term abortion is necessary. The author Natalia Megas starts off the article by referring to a statement given by Donald Trump about doctors ripping a child from a mother's womb just before birth. She goes on to give statistics as to why this statement just isn't true. Late term abortions are rare, and not only are they rare but when they are necessary it is not because the mother wants it to happen...it is usually because the child is not viable or the mother's life is at risk. The author then goes on to share the stories of three women who had to go through this exact thing. The stories are heartbreaking and hard to read, but after reading them you cannot deny that these women wanted these babies and aren't the stone cold murderers that some want you to believe.
I really appreciated the time the author took to write out these stories. This is an understandably sensitive and heated subject, but I think the purpose of the article does it's job in bringing awareness and compassion to the reality of late-term abortion and why it needs to be legal. I also appreciate that she gives plenty of statistics to back up her claim and thus making the article more credible. As someone who grew up being very black and white about this issue, it was stories like the ones shared here that really made me understand the bigger picture, and realize that most issues have gray areas.

Article Introduction

The article I am sharing is from slate.com and it addresses a proposal that house representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made about raising the tax rate on the wealthy. I picked this article because Ocasio-Cortez has been in the news a lot lately for her democratic socialist ideas, and I think she has had some unwarranted harsh criticism because of them. This article walks through what raising the tax rate to 70% on the rich would look like in America. I appreciate that they have economic experts weigh in on it as well to show readers that Ocasio-Cortez's proposal is not as radical as people have made it out to be, and in fact it would benefit the country as a whole.


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-70-percent-tax-plan-john-rawls.html

Hello

Hello, my name is Stephanie.