Race

Graffiti by railroad tracks

The Charlestown food truck controversy is erasing people.

By Justin Katz | March 22, 2022 |

Issuing his groveling hostage statement for expressing his professional opinion at a public meeting, Charlestown Emergency Management Agency Director Kevin Gallup may have saved himself from cancelation, but in doing so, he gave more of our shared ground of freedom away to the woke wave: “Like everyone, I have blind spots,” Gallup said. “I hope…

Assorted Patriot Front stickers

Simplistic moral panic is more dangerous to RI than white supremacists.

By Justin Katz | March 16, 2022 |

According to Jack Perry’s uncritical recitation of the Anti-Defamation League of New England’s warning about an increase in “white supremacist propaganda,” Rhode Island is seeing a dangerous increase.  By their own standards, though, the ADL and the Providence Journal are contributing to the threat.  Consider the last line of the article: “By using propaganda to spread…

A model house and key

Statistics come up short for charges of racism in housing.

By Justin Katz | March 11, 2022 |

A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society.  In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so.  In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools,…

Richard August, Jim McGwin, and Megan Reilly on State of the State

State of the State: Racism and “The Aaron Thomas Affair”

By Richard August | March 6, 2022 |

Host Richard August and guests Jim McGwin and Megan Reilly focus on two topics of concern involving the North Kingstown School Department.

A white student looks away

Is the Met School abusing students with anti-racism indoctrination?

By Justin Katz | February 28, 2022 |

South Kingstown parent advocate Nicole Solas has been, let’s say, having words with Met School special education teacher Emily Bowden.  The back-and-forth is mainly social media snark shooting, so we shouldn’t assume that Bowden’s bombast is evidence of the school’s operation, but she does facilitate an important point that isn’t often made in these arguments.…

American flag behind a barred window

Activists can do harm with sledgehammer ideology, especially when schools hire them as if they’re objective analysts.

By Justin Katz | February 14, 2022 |

Watchers of the mainstream narrative may be a little surprised that there hasn’t been much coverage of an incident on February 1 at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence during which a school resource officer (SRO) was caught on video being aggressive with a student.  These incidents are difficult to judge from video clips, and…

An old house next to a graveyard

How can anybody upset with discriminatory housing oppose total school choice?

By Justin Katz | February 10, 2022 |

Judy Schwalbach makes that connection explicit in a report on school choice policies and history in Washington, D.C.: During the 20th century, federally sanctioned housing “redlining” influenced the composition of neighborhoods in large cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. The term “redlining” came from the color-coded maps developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation…

Two different scales

The healthcare bureaucracy really is dragging us to the point of pitchforks.

By Justin Katz | February 1, 2022 |

Don’t miss the fact that this was published in The Atlantic by a senior fellow at the progressive Brookings Institution, Shadi Hamid: The racial disparities in COVID outcomes are a matter of record, but to suggest that race causes these negative outcomes is a classic case of mistaking correlation for causation. This is how facts,…

A wave engulfs a lighthouse

Letting racial wounds heal is a choice we have to make.

By Justin Katz | January 29, 2022 |

Going through links I’d flagged for comment, I came across a Fox News article by Danielle Wallace after Winsome Sears — “the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia’s history” — won her campaign for lieutenant governor: [She] attributed her victory to voters being sick of seeing Black and White people pitted against…

Photo of a raised fist with BLM on the wrist.

The systemic racism calls are coming from inside the house.

By Justin Katz | January 28, 2022 |

Having recently fallen into an argument about the overlaps between history, housing, and racism, I couldn’t do otherwise than take note of a GoLocalProv article headlined, “Black Homeownership in RI Is as Low as It Was in the 1960s.” In Rhode Island, just 6% of homes are owned by Black households. And, becoming a new…