I have worked with people younger than myself since fourth grade. One of the things that I have always found striking was how often I was told by a parent that a kid couldn't do something or didn't like something only to watch the kid prove her wrong within hours. Not always, but often enough. Kids learn quickly, quickly enough to surpass our awareness. I think it has happened most often with kids on the autism spectrum. Kids perform to expectations, and raising expectations has the power of changing behavior. Easy to say but sometimes difficult to do, especially in the face of a diagnosis like autism. So when I encounter a story like that of Jason McElwain I can't help but be touched. I'm a huge fan of stories of human potential. stories like this make me question the ways in which I limit myself. At the end of the report they assume it's his last game, but that just seems silly.
I was approached a few months ago around the idea of collaborating to make the progressive case for reparations. I've said before that while the idea of reparations is morally appealing I don't believe in them as an immediate political project. It's not clear to me that it's possible to build a coalition around a reparative justice focused on just 13% of the population. Encouraged by a recent Twitter conversation that included economists Sandy Darrity and Darrick Hamilton where they suggested that saying reparations will never happen is cynical I've begun trying to think of them as an eventuality and lay out the steps to reaching them. Doing this has made clear that our understanding of reparations as a form of compensation to the descendants of the enslaved is not the reparative justice that we think it to be. If we were living with the kind of understanding of justice that made reparations possible we would not be a nation where war, healthcare, education, and cr
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