the bastards' last stand

The US is one of 13 nations experiencing a growing maternal mortality rate since the international community set as one of the Millenium Development goals in 1990 to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters by the year 2015. Within that rate, Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to die than white women. To address this shocking disparity, Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has offered the Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies (CARE) Act. Senator Elizabeth Warren  has also offered her own ideas for addressing this racial disparity. The one-pager accompanying the CARE Act explains, researchers, medical professionals, and the public believed high rates of...maternal mortality in Black women could be traced to income, educational level, health care access, and even genetics. Today, however, there is [a] growing body of evidence...that racism and social discrimination faced by Black women throughout their lifetimes contribute to higher rates of maternal mortality and mo

On June 17 , in Washington, D.C., Reverend William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign hosted a presidential forum as a part of its 3 day event called the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress. In his discussions with each presidential candidate, Reverend Barber hewed to questions that focused tightly on the way that voter disenfranchisement, especially disenfranchisement of Black voters, helps to maintain poverty for people of all races .  He, in fact, took pains to note that the states most impacted by voter suppression also tend to be the states with the highest rates of overall poverty. To underline this insight, he consistently returned to the point that our nation’s 140 million low-wage workers and people in poverty, while disproportionately Black, is, in raw numbers, more white. Consistent with his efforts to take up a modern-day version of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s mission, Reverend Barber has taken on his messaging a s well, as when MLK said in 1968 : I don't