News & Commentary

The 2019 Florida Legislative Session was the most dangerous and threatening to Floridians’ civil liberties and civil rights in over a decade.

In 1787, the Constitution considered Black people as three-fifths of a human being. Blacks voting was not an issue. Then the Civil War ended and Black men were elected to public office and gained property ownership rights during Reconstruction. America responded with Jim Crow.

If we legalize without mindfulness of the full ecosystem of the criminal legal system and how it impacts people, then corporate and industry-backed legalization efforts will lead us away from what is right and just.

When children of color are disproportionately identified as needing special education, there are particular risks involved. Children of color with disabilities are more likely to be educated in segregated settings, leaving them with fewer opportunities to interact with nondisabled peers.

We are concerned that the Florida First Step Act is less likely to benefit black and brown people and may exacerbate racial disparities in our prison population.

Actor Jussie Smollett did not deserve the mistreatment he said he experienced in Chicago in January, nor should anyone face mortal threat for living on their own terms.

Politicians and high-profile gun groups like the NRA routinely rally to support gun owners and the Second Amendment. But does this include all gun owners? The silence is deafening when it comes to people of color and their gun rights.

Six-year-olds never seem to run out of questions, and my son is no exception. But in August, CJ asked me a question that was harder than the rest: He wanted to know if there was something wrong with his hair.

Four years after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Americans are grappling with issues of race and disparity on the frankest terms since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.