I am totally loving Tori Williams Douglas' podcast White Homework! It is exactly what I was looking for. Forget reading #WhiteFragility if you want to know how racism exists around you this is the podcast to listen to. She's authentic, knowledgeable, insightful, and manages it to do it with humor and passion at the same time! Her laugh is almost as contagious as Jill Angie on the Not Your Average Runner Podcast.
Anyway in one episode I listened to Tori says imagine what life would look like if we were going to restore justice. Would we give North America back to the Native Americans? Would we quit leaving our homes to our children? Almost all white people plan to inherit their home from their parents. Where would we go? If we didn't give our home to our children. What would it look like?
So after thinking about it for a short while, I thought most of all, we need to start by rethinking our incarceration system. We need to turn that upside down. IDK where I read it but someone said once we could put every prisoner through a Harvard education for the cost of keeping them in jail. IDK if that's true but it sure seems like if we took the money to incarcerate so many people and put that into our schools and communities we would see real change.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/04/30/2018-09062/annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-incarceration
https://www.scholarships.com/news/prison-incarceration-costs-more-than-harvard-university-tuition
To me the biggest problem in our country is pure ignorance.
I blame the media for much of it, but our schools are pretty bad too. When I tell colleagues that the average person on food stamps is on it for 6 months and gets $1.72 per person per meal, they say really, I didn't know that. I have worked side by side next to so many hardworking parents.
https://www.snaptohealth.org/snap/snap-frequently-asked-questions/
The other one, oh we can't change minimum wage and the only people who work for min wage are college kids or stupid people. Well when minimum wage is $7.75 or whatever it is, that means businesses can pay managers with college degrees $8.75.
When I worked at Head Start it drove me crazy that they had teachers who had no college education being a child's first experience with schools and dealing with parents who are already struggling.
I have said Head Start is segregation ever since I worked there. We need universal pre-school for every child everywhere, in our country, and everywhere in the world. We need to help every mother everywhere have access to healthy food, clean water and an education.
I am so sick of people telling me well why do they have so many children? Don't they know about birth control? Duh, of course they don't have access to birth control. We hardly have equal access to birth control in our country.
I hate people who say oh, people don't have health insurance because they are too lazy to get a real job or go to college. I'm so sick of Republicans that say I am not going to have my money that I work so hard for go to people to rip off the system and lay on their couch.
I have seen so many parents I have worked side by side with that work day shift and night shift so their kids have a parent home, barely see each other and still have no insurance option. Now some of that might have changed thanks to Obamacare.
Anyway my point today was...
