A rare tip of my hat to NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg

New York City Michael Bloomberg announced today that he and George Soros are dedicating $130 million to improved the lives and job opportunities of young blacks and Latinos in the city:

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.

I've criticized Bloomberg before for not understanding the extent of poverty and disadvantage that exists in his own city, but this new initiative certainly deserves praise. As the graph above indicates, young men of color (and particularly blacks and Latinos) are suffer greatly from economic disadvantage. The wide-ranging program will invest in job training, recidivism reduction, education, and family life.

In Arizona, "Pro-Life" means "Let's kick poor people off organ transplant waiting lists"

Well Arizona is at it again. The state is continually attempting to be the first in the nation to proactively fight the browning of America. First, it was a racist and xenophobic bill aimed at keeping people of color out of the state. Now they are trying a new method: letting people of color (and poor whites too) die. Okay, so that claim may be extreme, but it’s not far off. The state is cutting funding by taking 98 organ transplant-eligible patients off the waiting list.

Arizona decided to slash its 1.5 billion dollar deficit with a gigantic, err well measly 4.5 million annually, a whopping three-hundredths of one percent. Indeed a penny saved is a penny earned. Instead of responsive governing that protects the dignity and life of its people, Arizona Republicans who run on “pro-life” principles are willing to let people die for the sale-price of a bag of Hershey kisses-$1.97 per household.

What does this have to do with Arizona attacking communities of color?

Sexual Orientation, Sex Life, and Elena Kagan

Glenn Greenwald wrote the following today:

Perhaps it's naïveté, but I've been amazed by the outraged objections of many Good Liberals to the mere discussion of Elena Kagan's sexual orientation. Without realizing it, they've completely internalized one of the most pernicious myths long used to demand that gay people remain in the closet: namely, that to reveal one's sexual orientation is to divulge one's "sex life."

Well, he's got it part right, and part wrong. He explains:

Jan Brewer doubles down on state-sponsored racism in Arizona

Arizona Governor Jan "Papers Please" Brewer has enacted HB2281, which prohibits classes that teach about ethnic heritage.  So, for instance, a class about black inventors or Mexican authors would be prohibited.

Jan Brewer, making a name for herself.

More coverage at RaceWire.

A collection of resources on Elena Kagan

Here are a few thought-provoking pieces on Obama's latest SCOTUS nomination, Elena Kagan:

• Her record of hiring almost exclusively White Men at Harvard Law School:
• The Race-Based Case Against Elena Kagan - Coffee House Talks
• Kagan’s Harvard Hiring Record a Vision in White - RaceWire
• On Kagan's Minority Hiring Record - 538
• Why Did Dean Kagan Preside Over a Whitened Harvard Law School? - RacismReview
• Her political ideology:
• Elena Kagan Is a Progressive on Executive Power - Slate.com
• Obama’s Next Supreme Court Pick :: Moderate or Strong Liberal? - thinkculture
• Will Kagan Take Up Stevens's Fight for Checks on Executive Power? - The Nation
• Centrist Kagan Brings ‘Impeccable’ Record, Says Cornell Law Expert - Newswise
• Why the inscrutable Elena Kagan makes everyone nervous. - Slate.com
  
• Her readiness:
• Untried, Untested, and Ready - Slate.com
• The latest on Elena Kagan - Salon.com
• Elena Kagan's Pastel Career - Washington Post's PostPartisan

David Brooks: Moron or Liar?

David Brooks's op-ed this past Tuesday brought me to the edge of my seat (which is a cube skeleton made solely of edges). It's the latest installment in his long-running performance art piece, David Brooks: Moron or Liar? David's columns rivals the Cremaster cycle for beautiful incomprehensibility; he keeps threatening to prove something, only to whirl away from logic at the last instant like a toreador. "The Limits of Policy" dares to ask why brown people are poor. Dare we answer? Oh wait, David Brooks has the answer. They did it to themselves!

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?

The Appropriateness of Adjectival Nouns

Ok, so this is probably a slightly different subject from what many of my other posts will be, but I'm a huge linguistics nerd too, so I thought I'd kick it off with this, based on a discussion a few of us had a couple weeks ago.

So here's the main question: Is calling someone an "[adjective]" as a noun versus an "[adjective] person," inherently offensive labeling, or is this usage somewhat an accident of language? For example, we can all pretty much agree that calling someone a "schizophrenic" versus "a schizophrenic person" or "person with schizophrenia," is offensive, but is it always the case?