永远都能连得上的跨年VPN。

In the days leading up to the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I've been having an interesting e-mail exchange with a good friend on the subjects of race, class, poverty, and bigotry.  Our conversation began with an e-mail from my friend describing a discussion about race after church one Sunday.  Below is an excerpt.

【中文字幕】如何爬墙（Warrior Fitness）_哔哩哔哩 (゜-゜)つロ ...:2021-8-2 · 翻墙 运动 爬墙 翻墙教程 街头健身 Howcast Warrior Fitness 战士健身 评论 首都机场不好看 发消息 You jump , I jump. 关注 3.2万 视频选集 1/2 相关推荐 07:28 ...

火狐浏览器（FireFox）怎么设置伕理-百度经验:2021-5-25 · 火狐浏览器（FireFox）怎么设置伕理,很多时候，我伔需要给浏览器设置一个伕理，方便调试和测试。下面我众Widow平台的火狐浏览器（FireFox）图文并茂的说明这个问题，希望能帮助到大家。

My friend's reflections prompted me bring a bit of focus to my own thoughts on race and class, enormous and elusive issues that they are.  Below is my reply.

The place where race, class, culture, economics, personal responsibility, and public policy intersect is thorny, rife with pitfalls, and full of forks in the road.  Too often in our conversations about these issues, particularly the ones that take place in political and media discourse, we witness the temptation to generalize and oversimplify this complex set of issues.  An orthodox materialist might argue that everything is reducible to dollars and cents, and that once we reduce class disparities – through jobs programs, for example, or employee-owned companies, or community-based economic opportunities – we'll also reduce the harmful effects of racism and other forms of bigotry.  Someone who is orthodox about race and ethnicity, on the other hand, might say that racism is the root of our social ills, and that only by addressing the legacy of slavery and the reality of racial bias can we hope to achieve economic equity and erase class distinctions.  A person who is orthodox about gender issues would probably point to misogyny, patriarchy, and/or homophobia
as the source of inequities and injustice in other areas.

When I think about these issues and how they relate to each other, I usually think of a Venn diagram – or a soup.  In a Venn diagram, you have areas within each sphere that can be viewed and analyzed on their own merits: race as race, economics as economics, and so on.  But there is a significant portion of the diagram where the circles overlap, and within that section one can't talk about race as separate from class, or personal responsibility as independent of public policy and institutionalized bigotry.  I like the soup metaphor because…well, mostly because I like soup.  It goes like this: when you taste a creamy vegetable soup – a potage, if you will – you might be able to discern the flavor of sage, and to distinguish it clearly from the taste of thyme and the taste of onions.  But if all of those things have been whirled together, it is pretty much impossible to delve into the bowl, separate the sage from the thyme, and lay them on the table side by side, where each can be observed independently of the other.  Each ingredient is distinct, but blended and interrelated with all the
others in such a way that it doesn't make a lot of sense to identify one and claim that it's the whole soup.

Personal responsibility, lifestyle choices, and upbringing are extremely important, as you point out.  Your own experience shows the ways in which a positive family environment and mature decision-making about things like education and finances can help a person permeate class barriers.  In my career I've worked for, advocated on behalf of, and funded some really high quality programs that seek to redress class and race inequities through employment assistance, adult education, substance abuse treatment, financial literacy training, etc.  But the best social program in the world can't do a thing for someone who will not make the tough choice to make a change.  You've got to climb the ladder yourself, and the best that any human service initiative can do is give you a hand over the edge once you've reached that last rung.  So while some of my more liberal friends might be uncomfortable with the "bootstraps" way of thinking, there's no denying that personal responsibility plays a huge role in overcoming the pernicious effects of bigotry.

While lifestyle choices and upbringing are important, it's also important to acknowledge that racism and poverty are pervasive, institutionalized, and generational.  If my parents were born into poverty and deprivation, and their parents were born into poverty and deprivation, the odds of my acquiring the resources needed to become financially independent are slimmer than they are for someone whose parents took him to open his first checking account at age 12 and who received a great deal of advice on sound money management.  This is not to say that being born into poverty and deprivation is determinative, by any means.  But it does play a significant role in someone's ability to succeed financially and otherwise combat the systemic problems of institutionalized racism and class bias.  If cabs stop for me and not for you, if a landlord rents to me and not to you, if Allison gets the job but Ayonnah doesn't*, and if the only meaningful variable in those scenarios is skin color or the perception of racial differences, then individual lifestyle choices alone are going to have a harder time breaking down those barriers.

The systemic and generational nature of racism and poverty has an impact on the sorts of lifestyle choices people make, the ways in which they raise their children, and the varying degrees of opportunity available to people who make healthy choices.  Take someone who lives in a poor rural or urban community who wishes to eat healthier.  If the only grocery options in the area are corner stores, convenience stores, fast food joints, or discount markets, then she doesn't have many opportunities to purchase nutritious food.  And even if there is a nearby farmers' market or mainstream supermarket, she may never have been taught how to cook more nutritious foods.  Personal choice is a key factor, but it is far from the only one.  In the same way, if someone loves to read, but doesn't have that passion reinforced by parents or teachers and has never been taught how to use the local library, his potential in that area may not be realized.  And in most cases that I'm aware of, a lack of investment in nutrition, public health, community development, and education has a strong correlation to race and socioeconomic status.

You asked "what sorts of community programs do work best to instill healthy values."  That's a difficult question, since most social programs don't address the issue of values or behavior, but rather access to services and products.  There are a lot of evidence-based interventions that have been demonstrated to have positive impacts on the community, but which don't get to the causes that underlie the problems they seek to ameliorate.

A number of promising examples exist, however.  Some types of fatherhood and community-based marriage promotion programs seem to work (see the National Practitioners' Network for Fathers and Families for more info) in keeping families together and instilling positive parenting behaviors, although they too tend to be regarded with squeamishness by many social liberals who view such initiatives as advancing a conservative social agenda.

There's also a growing movement to combat childhood obesity and promote nutrition, especially in impoverished urban and rural communities.  Some programs that I'm familiar with combine access to nutritious foodstuffs with education about healthy eating habits, in addition to policy reform efforts to keep sodas out of school vending machines, etc.  See the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website for more info.

Something for which I've developed staunch support fairly recently is the effort to promote sound financial practices among low-income consumers.  My interest in this field, which is variously called "asset building," "family economic success," and "financial education," grew out of my experience in workforce development, when I realized that a person could get a job, show up every day, and do good work for the rest of his life, but never escape poverty.  Financial prosperity depends on a whole lot more than earned income alone.  It also involves knowledge about how to manage one's money, education about financial products and opportunities, and protections from the types of predatory practices that unscrupulous financial services providers employ to take advantage of lower-income clients.  Through proper budgeting, homeownership and retirement counseling, access to low-interest loans, debt reduction, credit repair, consumer protections, etc., families can be better able to keep and grow the income they earn.  More information on this is available from the National Endowment for Financial Education.

There are many examples that touch on many other spheres of life, of course.  These are just the ones that came to mind first.  It should be noted that the key element in the success in all of these types of efforts is individual behavior change.  The old saying goes, "give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."  I actually don't agree with those premises.  I would change that to: give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day; teach him to fish, and he'll know how to fish; actually watch him pull out fish on his own, and only then you can be fairly confident that he'll eat for a lifetime."  In other words, tools and the knowledge to use them aren't enough.  In order to actually effect change, a person has to put those tools and knowledge to use.  I mean, I know all about the health risks of smoking and have the ability to change, but I continue to do it.  Until I make that behavioral change, all the information and resources in the world can't help me.

One of the attractive things about behavior-based models is that they actually give people the means to make positive changes that can combat the effects of institutionalized racism and discrimination.  In the asset development model, for instance, lower-income people are actually learning how to make capitalism work for them in some of the same ways that it works for more affluent people.  If you can't destroy the machine, you can at least get a little control of it.  I'm also a fan of slightly more radical methods, such as creating parallel economic structures that permit historically marginalized populations to gain control over the means of acquiring and disseminating wealth.  Stimulating the growth of viable minority-owned businesses is one way to achieve this, as is the formation of mutual assistance associations among immigrant and ethnic groups.

火狐浏览器_Firefox_68.0.1esr_冷眸软件库纯净中文绿色版 ...:2021-3-23 · 本站提供的 FireFox (火狐)浏览器美博园翻墙纯净绿色版，可众任意传播，版权归原作者或公司所有。Firefox_v68.0.1esr_美博园翻墙纯净中文绿色版，采用32位版本制作，此版兼容性好，x32、x64系统都可众完美使用本浏览器。

+++

*See the report "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discriminationchromegae下载_chromegae5.1 免费版下载 - 全方位下载:2021-6-14 · 本站提供chromegae下载。chromegae集成过滤广告插件，翻墙辅助插件等工具，强大辅助功能，帮助用户更好的体验互联网的乐趣，使用简单，操作方便，运行软件即可，有需要的不妨下载体验一 …

If Barack Obama fails to receive the Democratic presidential nomination – or if he does receive the nomination and is beaten by John McCain in the fall – it won't be because America isn't ready for
a black president.  As I've said in a previous post, I think that the notion that America isn't "ready" for an African-American president or a woman president is inane.  No, if there's something that America doesn't appear to be "ready" for, it's is an honest, in-depth discussion of race.

Earlier this week, Sen. Obama delivered what is being rightly hailed as one of the most significant speeches on race that has ever been delivered by a major political figure.  For many of us, the speech came as a welcome dose of eloquence and candor on a subject that too often is handled in the most superficial, divisive manner.  For those of us who support Sen. Obama's candidacy, it was only the most recent example of why we so strongly desire this man to become president.  As 手机火狐翻墙 the following day, in words that were (perhaps unwittingly) echoed by Governor Bill Richardson in today's endorsement of Sen. Obama, "at 11:00 on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race, as though they were adults."
 
Still, not everyone was swayed.  Glutton for punishment that I am, I've spent the past few days perusing the comments on blogs and news sites ranging from the Post and Times to God's Politics, and while much of the reaction to the speech was favorable, I read a lot of comments from Americans who continue to express chagrin over the speech and the controversy that precipitated it.  Some said that Sen. Obama did not go far enough in distancing himself from the inflammatory comments of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, while others questioned the existence of
institutionalized racism in 21st century America.  The comments that annoyed me the most were the ones from people who crowed over the failure of the Obama campaign's alleged goal of "transcending race."

Incidentally, I'm not even referring to the posters who are obvious nutcases, the fringe types who do nothing but write in all caps and incite flame wars.  I'm talking about people who for the most part framed their arguments reasonably, intelligently, and civilly, from principled conservatives to proud supporters of Hillary Clinton, from committed Christians to self-proclaimed atheists.

What frustrated me about reactions like these was that so many of them quickly shoved the discussion out of the realm of substance and subtlety and back into the harsh glare of generalization,
mischaracterization, and pedantry.  Sen. Obama has never expressed a desire to "transcend" race – another inane notion – and the issues he raised in his speech are far larger and more important than his relationship with Rev. Wright.  Need proof of institutionalized racism?  Take a look at the income disparity between white and black workers , as well as any number of other indicators that show correlations between inequity, lack of opportunity, and race.

For over a decade, I've lived and/or worked in a majority African-American city.  Much of that time has been spent working for nonprofit organizations on issues deeply intertwined with race, such as workforce development, ex-offender re-entry, and access to health care.  In boardrooms and neighborhood centers, prisons and churches, schools community clinics, I've participated in countless conversations in which race was either discussed overtly, or else was felt as a strong undercurrent in the discussions.  Some of those conversations have been quite heated.  Many of them featured remarks by African-Americans and white people alike that, excerpted and de-contextualized, would sound quite shocking, even abhorrent, to the average listener.  I've left such forums feeling angry, or proud, or ashamed, or hopeful, or, often, a mixture thereof.

I don't feel that my participation in such dialogues has made me more of an authority on race than anybody else, or that they've enabled me to "transcend" race in any way.  In fact, they've caused me to see racial fault lines all the more clearly, and to realize that mere good intentions are next to useless in dealing with issues of race in any meaningful fashion.  Once you come face to face with your own racial biases, it's sort of hard to go back to pretending that racism as a pervasive, pernicious force doesn't exist in our society – or within us.  Race in America cannot be "transcended," not by a speech, not by a million of them.  It's a reality that's deeply rooted in the
politics, policies, and cultural consciousness of this country, and once you learn to recognize it, it's hard to go on believing that it can be wished away.  And I'm willing to bet that any black legislator who attends a historically black church and who used to be a community organizer in a largely black city knows that all too well.

So if race and racism can't be transcended, what can we do about it? I think that asking questions is a good place to begin.  For example, instead of proclaiming that Barack Obama should have denounced Rev. Wright more vigorously, why not ask why he didn't?  Instead of labeling Trinity United Church of Christ as racist or un-American, why not ask about why one might hear rage coming from the pulpit of a black church?  For my liberal friends who bristle at any criticism of
affirmative action policies, instead of immediately painting the critics as racists, why not ask how we can address racial and other disparities in more sophisticated ways?

In an intelligent and straightforward post on the God's Politics blog, Brian McClaren offers us a way to get the conversation started, using Sen. Obama's speech as a starting point. 

The best case scenario would be for mixed groups to read and discuss
the speech together – gathering a group of friends from work or a
sports team or a neighborhood or church. Three questions would guide
this kind of dialogue:
What can we learn about America?
What can we learn about people of other races?
What can we learn about ourselves?

My favorite part of Sen. Obama's speech was when he admonished Rev. Wright not for expressing anger over racism in America, but for doing so in a way that gave in to hopelessness and bitterness.  And though my 10th grade English teacher warned her students to never close with a quote (or end a sentence with a preposition), that's what I'll end this post with.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about
racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as
if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made
it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the
land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and
poor, young and old – is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what
we know – what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true
genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the
audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Driving home from singing last night, I heard L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein and his mother on the public radio show 'On Point.'  They were discussing Stein's recent column on 'Obamaphilia,' in which Stein writes about how, concerned that his enthusiasm for the junior senator from Illinois was turning him into some "dreamer hippie loser,' he called his mom for a dose of feet-on-the-ground common sense.  Mr. Stein's mother, it should be noted, is an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton.

While Mom Stein (sorry, but I forgot her name and I can't find it anywhere) didn't dissuade her son -- or me, for that matter -- from supporting Barack Obama's candidacy, she did make the most cogent argument I've yet heard for why Sen. Clinton should get the Democratic nomination for the presidency this year.  Her reasoning went something like this: Obama's smart, he's inspiring, he's got good ideas, but he's still largely an unknown quantity.  The 2008 presidential election is the most important election of our time.  Given how much hangs in the balance, voters should choose a candidate who is not only experienced and battle-tested, but who brings a degree of certainty and reliability to her bid for the Oval Office.

I have to admit, that argument gave me pause.  I found it a lot more compelling than the 'experience vs. inexperience' line that has been failing to sway voters in the last eight or so primaries and caucuses.  And it is infinitely more persuasive than the canard about Clinton offering substance in contrast to Obama's empty rhetoric.  In fact, let's put that one to bed right now.  Here are Sen. Clinton's stances on the issues.  手机火狐翻墙 are Sen. Obama's stances on the issues.  If you can find seams between them that are wide enough to slip more than a piece of paper through, let me know.  Both candidates are thoughtful, substantive, detailed, and well-reasoned in their policy positions.  The message that Obama is all hat and no cowboy is a talking point, nothing more; it is a fiction.

No, what brought me up short about Mom Stein's argument is that, well, there is an awful lot riding on this election.  The economy is going down the tubes, we're fighting two wars, the rest of the world hates our guts, around 50 million of our fellow citizens lack health insurance, and lots of places around the globe are doing a spectacular job of blowing themselves up real good.  The world is, in short, a mess, and we need to be sure that the next U.S. president will help to fix it, or at least not screw it up more than it already is.  And let's face it, Hillary Clinton would probably do a pretty good job in that role.  Love her or hate her, one must admit that we know where she's coming from, we know what she stands for, and we have a fair sense of the sort of job she does.  Despite the baggage she carries, her credentials are solid and we know she's tough.  Hey, if she's been able to live with Bill for the past however many decades, she clearly doesn't lack for strength. 

I believe, in short, that Hillary Clinton would make a good president.  There's no question that she would make a better president than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., although that's damning with faint praise.  A lobotomized howler monkey would be a better president than George W. Bush, so I'm not sure that we want to set the bar that low.  Still, a Clinton administration would be like a Caribbean vacation compared to the cruise on the 'Titanic' that we've been on for the past eight years.  She would probably -- and don't get too upset by this -- do a better job than her husband did.

But here's where I part ways with Joel Stein's mom.  Electing a President Obama would not be as safe a bet as electing a President Clinton, but the prospective rewards are much higher.  In Barack Obama I see something that I simply do not see in Hillary Clinton: the potential for greatness.  Clinton would probably be a good president, but Obama could be a great one.  He could be the leader who repairs our frayed relationships with other countries and instills in Americans that sense of community, of unity in diversity, that our bruised nation has lacked for a long time now.  He could restore America's moral authority and make us proud of our democracy again.  I think most of us have the sense that Obama would, at the very least, make a fine president.  But, I say again, he could be great.  And he could make America great.

You don't win much if you don't risk much.  It is precisely because so much is at stake in this election that I don't want us to settle for the safe bet, for the all-too-familiar choice.  The proudest moments in U.S. history have come about when we took the big risks, when we broke with the old ways of thinking, when we pitted ourselves against the odds...and won big.  We can do it again.  We can be audacious again.  We can once again defy fear, defy conventional wisdom, defy mediocrity.  We can reach for greatness.

Yes, we can.       

Go vote, Maryland.