Category: Selected Essays

The following binary couples are to be explored not through a lense of minority versus majority, terms that are now inherently wrought with stigma, but through the sifting of unequal power dynamics throughout cultures. In the day to day lives of countless humans, here is contrasted to there, we to they, and us to them. These deictics are both shaped by their environments and shape their environments.

According to Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, and Sarah Shannon’s piece “6 Million Lost Voters,” 1,686,318 Americans in Florida cannot vote due to disenfranchisement, 499,306 of those being African American.

Whereas a lackluster analysis would claim this stark discrepancy can be chalked up to changing Times (pun intended), a closer inquiry posits that this transition can be explored in an intently dissecting manner that has the capacity to both compliment and criticize the publication in question.

In order to aptly explicate the pathways through which immigration policy, rhetoric, and actions have played out across temporal and geographic boundaries, one must first understand the premier tools to utilize in that journey.

As walls continue to be built and immigrant women are simultaneously victimized and villainized, the world’s hope hinges on the ability to read, acknowledge, and act upon the following question raised by Jane Fonda and Karen Musalo in a New York Times Opinion Piece entitled “Her Husband Beat Her and Raped Her. Jeff Sessions Might Deport Her”

When considering the future of DACA, there are often three theoretical directions that policy makers engage with: Scrap it and remake completely, sustain aspects and evolve from where it stands now, or keep it as is.

There are a mere 57 countries that still retain the death penalty. Out of those, only four are considered “industrialized.” The United States is one of them. Even more, just 2% of counties in the U.S. have accounted for over 50% of the executions since 1976.

By employing social scientific and anecdotal evidence, this piece shows that the systemic jailing of black and brown people extends beyond criminal court to the very edges of the United States’ juvenile justice paradigm. In order to aptly make this assertion, however, one must not depend merely on opinion, although it does have merit.

Few published works correctly walk the thin line between too heartbreaking to read and just page-turning enough to compel the reader to the last page. Meda Chesney-Lind’s “Jailing ‘Bad’ Girls: Girls’ Violence and Trends in Female Incarceration,” masters that tightrope with finesse.

If all the world’s a stage and humans mere players, as Shakespeare so eloquently put, then women are front and center with tomatoes being thrown at them. In Shakespeare’s conception, “man” goes through seven ages before bidding the audience adieu. His verbiage entails a gradual emergence into a solidified entity existing in coordination with the other actors, growing betwixt them at “his” will. It is plainly glaring, in ways expounded upon below, that the life of womankind is less streamlined, and far more tumultuous.