ALERT Collective Blog

  The following is the third and final part of a series of articles briefly summarizing the left and right in this country and this state. In this article we will focus on the modern and statewide political shifts.  In 1992, after a long twelve years of Neo-Conservative control of the Federal Government, Bill Clinton led the charge in rebranding the Democratic Party and redefined the party as more closely aligned to the center. The Clinton administration adopted policies to match. This center move did not do much to stop the growing divide between the two parties, however, and partisanship grew more acrimonious in the Clinton administration than ever before.  The Republican leadership under Newt Gingrich provided staunch opposition to Democratic initiatives and in 2000, an extremely close election recount was ended by the Supreme Court in favor of the Republican nominee George W. Bush . Following the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration foc...

  Research has shown that the trend of schools adopting “zero-tolerance” policies and incorporating school resource officers (SROs) has helped facilitate the school-to-prison pipeline – a system where youth are funneled from public schools directly into the criminal justice system. Intertwining school discipline with the criminal justice system not only increases the number of suspensions and arrests that occur in schools, but it puts more students into the pipeline for misdemeanors like “ disorderly conduct ”. Furthermore, these policies often end up targeting children with learning disabilities or children with histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect , who may not receive the specialized educational or counseling services they need. These policies also disproportionally affect students of color , who are more likely to be arrested or punished than their white classmates and receive harsher punishments for similar offenses. One way that many communities battle against this t...

  The first recorded celebration of Columbus Day occurred in 1792, when the New York City political organization Tammany Hall commemorated the 300 th anniversary of Columbus’ landing on a Caribbean island. Celebrating this “discovery of America” gained popularity throughout the 1800s, particularly among Italian-Americans who, facing the violently anti-Italian xenophobia of the day, were eager to make a positive connection to U.S. history. In 1891, after 11 Italian-Americans were horrifically murdered by a lynch mob in New Orleans, President Benjamin Harrison designated October 21, 1892 a “general holiday” in celebration of the 400 th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in an attempt to assuage the angered Italian government. In 1937, in response to intense lobbying from the Catholic fraternal service order Knights of Columbus, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a national holiday. The U.S. Congress added Columbus Day as an official federal holiday in 1968,...

  **This is a topic that is challenging to write about because the language surrounding it is evolving so quickly. This is just a very broad overview, and it is possible this information may be dated by the time you are reading it. In recent years there has been a distinct uptick in the popularity of gender reveal parties. At these parties expectant parents, family members, and friends find out the “gender” of the baby that is on the way. If you haven’t been invited to one yourself, you have probably seen some of the news stories of gender reveal parties gone wrong , most famously the party that led to the Sawmill Fire in Arizona in 2017. Aside from the potential dangers of using explosives at a family gathering, gender reveal parties have prompted discussion because a baby’s gender can’t be revealed before it’s born, and even its sex is not necessarily wholly represented in an ultrasound image.  In our day-to-day lives people often use the terms sex and gender interchangeab...

Voter suppression has taken many forms throughout U.S. history – from the poll taxes and literacy tests of the late 1800s and early 1900s, to the ID requirements, roll purges , and intentional misinformation of today. After the Fifteenth Amendment granted African American men the right to vote, many state and city governments – particularly in the South – resorted to voter suppression tactics to keep Black people away from the polls. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 aimed to curb this suppression and increase the number of voters in areas of known discrimination. To achieve this goal, the act included provisions to outlaw literacy tests and other requirements intended to discriminate against a minority population. It also includes a provision ( Section 5 ) that requires certain jurisdictions to receive pre-approval from the federal government before making any change related to voting in order to confirm that proposed changes do not have a discriminatory effect. The Voting Rights Act o...