Holiday charity drives are in full swing as suddenly everyone seems to care about ‘the less fortunate.’ The food drive cans are dragged out to the checkstands in the supermarket, the newspaper profiles the woeful of our community, and the mail from charitable organisations stacks up in my post office box, clamouring for my funds […]
Category Archives: social justice
Foodies, Get Over Your Personal Responsibility Hangup
As anyone who’s known me for more than thirty seconds can tell you, I have a passion for food. I love food, I love exploring food, and I’m passionate about good food. I’m also serious about food reform, addressing the broken structures that lead to unhealthy food systems, and ensuring that everyone in society has […]
Punishing Felons After They’ve Served Their Time
For one of the starkest illustrations of the retributive model of justice adopted in the United States, look to the way we continue to punish felons after they’ve already served their sentences. In a curious state of affairs, despite the fact that the court officially deems time served once a sentence has been completed, people […]
Costumes, Costumes, Costumes
Oh homechickens. I wander through the aisles of the grocery store in the late hours, and I see baby pumpkins popping up on endcaps. Cobwebs infest the windows of downtown businesses, and everything appears to be turning black and orange—when businesses owned by white atheists aren’t putting up mockeries of Day of the Dead displays, […]
South Carolina On Track To Stop Segregating HIV+ Prisoners
One day when I was in second grade, I cut myself in class. I can’t remember how I did it; probably, it was a papercut from a book or a project I was working on. What I do remember is the brief spark of pain followed by the brightly-beading red blood, raising my hand patiently […]
Want Fries With That?
It’s a joke that people toss off without much thought when you tell them you have a degree in some area of liberal arts that people deem ‘worthless,’ typically because it’s difficult to find work in that area (especially in the given economy). People with English degrees, for example, especially if they’ve been silly enough […]
Speaking for, Speaking Over, Speaking With
Let’s talk about the Great White Saviour for a moment. You know the person I’m thinking of; the brave white individual who ventures into Darkest Africa or Soulless Asia to meet with The Natives and Understand Their Plight, converting them to the way of rightness (whiteness) and bringing news of their deplorable conditions to the […]
In the Fishbowl: Domestic Violence and Celebrities
Earlier this year, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson got into the news not with a new book or outstanding achievement, but because her husband viciously choked her in public during an argument. Unforgettably, several years ago, pop star Rihanna became front-page news because of an incident with her boyfriend, Chris Brown. Domestic violence happens in celebrity […]
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
Every time I encounter the words ‘last acceptable prejudice,’ my estimation of the person writing or speaking them declines by a factor of 1,000. I’m usually inclined to stop paying attention altogether, because this phrase is a clear indicator that the person in question isn’t worth my time, and is, in fact, someone I should […]
Give Yourself Permission to be Human
I encounter a lot of strange, offensive, strange comments in the course of my daily life, the micro (and macro) aggressions of living for so many people who live in a society dominated by certain social and political classes. And, like so many of us, I also feel the need to tell the stories of […]