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Conventional wisdom says that while some disparities remain, things have generally advanced for Black people in America and today they are advancing still. People like Obama and Oprah are held up as proof of this.

Take employment: Black people remain crowded into the lowest rungs of the ladder...that is, if they can find work at all. While many of the basic industries that once employed Black people have closed down, study after study shows employers to be more likely to hire a white person with a criminal record than a Black person without one, and 50% more likely to follow up on a resume with a “white-sounding” name than an identical resume with a “Black-sounding”2 name. In New York City, the rate of unemployment for Black men is fully 48%

Black infants face mortality rates comparable to those in the Third World country of Malaysia, and African-Americans generally are infected by HIV at rates that rival those in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall the disparities in healthcare are so great that one former U.S. Surgeon General recently wrote, “If we had eliminated disparities in health in the last century, there would have been 85,000 fewer black deaths overall in 2000.”5

Over the next 40 years, unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) were able to improve both the pay and working conditions of meat packing employees in the U.S. The UPWA was also known for its progressive ideals and its support of the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Developments such as improved distribution channels allowed meat packing companies to move out of urban, union-dominated centers and relocate to rural areas closer to livestock feedlots.

By the late 1990s, the meat packing industry had consolidated such that the top four firms accounted for approximately 50 percent of all U.S. poultry and pork production and 80 percent of all beef production.

But a study ordered in 2005 by Judge Nancy Gertner (D. Mass.) found that wealthier towns with few minority residents did a better job of keeping accurate residency lists than more diverse communities. The result: a higher percentage of jury summonses sent to minorities came back as undeliverable or went unanswered.

“The perception of fairness counts. A white jury may be fair, but a non-white defendant likely will think ‘the jurors can’t be fair because they don’t understand me.’”

California newspapers alternated between ignoring the strike or printing the growers' side until several strikers were killed by growers at a Pixley, California rally. The reporters and photographers who rushed to cover the strike generally reported that it was growers, not strikers, who were breaking labor and other laws.

In Fall 1931, migrants were arriving in the state at the rate of 1,200 to 1,500 a day, an annual rate of almost 500,000 (p109).

State and local actions aimed to keep needy migrants out of the state. The vagrancy laws of 1933 and 1937, under which many migrants were arrested and sometimes "lent" to farmers to work off their fines, were finally repealed in 1941 as unconstitutional (Edwards vs California). Similarly, the Los Angeles police operated 16 checkpoints on the California-Arizona border to turn back migrants "with no visible means of support" in February-March 1936 until the checkpoints were ruled unconstitutional. (Loftis, p126).

I work so my husband and I can support our three children. I was really excited when I started working at the Wal-Mart in Kingsville, Texas, in 1996. During orientation, they made it sound so wonderful, like you’re going to get this and that, and they’re really family-oriented. They painted a pretty picture—but it’s not.

The managers were always telling us we’d better not go into overtime. But if you actually clocked out when your shift was supposed to be over, it would be like asking to lose your job. I knew the hours I worked, and the overtime would not be in my check.

The natural process of growing up and becoming socialized is typically so full of disappointments and confusion that it's essential to have parents who can reliably offer us solace and calm us down when we've depleted our limited coping resources.

e're actually psychologically "enslaved" to our caretakers. And our home can't possibly be a sanctuary for us--a safe harbor where we can dependably feel supported and understood. Rather, it's a place where we're constantly struggling to secure the enduring parental connection that so frustratingly eludes us.

owever unintentionally, such parents can make us feel responsible for their happiness, such that we're prompted to take on the burden of their dependencies

Competition and low profit margins generate a corporate motive for maximum productivity, and deregulation has shredded health and safety standards.

A study by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS; now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) in 1997 found that one-fourth of the workers in seven meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska had “questionable” documents. The INS's Operation Vanguard in 1999 rounded up immigrants in slaughterhouses, bringing charges that employers and the government colluded to prevent workers from organizing unions.

company coughs up only between 10% and 20% of hourly store workers’ insurance premiums, while it picks up a generous 80% for most corporate employees and restaurant managers. Making matters worse, hourly workers not only shell out most of the cost of their McHealthcare — amounting to $710 in 2011 — but they’re entitled to coverage of only $2,000 a year. Corporate employees, on the other hand, have unlimited benefit allowances.

the Invisible Man felt that in order to reach his goals he had to have a white lifestyle and was insecure within his true culture. This hindered his goals because he was trying too hard, and once he accepted who he was and where he came from, including his culture and the foods that came with it, he could begin to grow and become the person he once wished to be.

He never realized that the brotherhood was bound for nowhere and they were just averting him from achieveing something greater. They treated him unequally such as any other negro in the civil rights movement or the Jews in the holocaust, he was an unheard voice.

In 2011 the world woke up once again to its naivety, this time for the misplaced trust in the infallibility of the Western democratic system.

that the crew of a ship will stop fighting over trivialities and work together once they realise the iceberg is ahead.

In 2011 they realised that this faith was misplaced.

These relationships are absolutely necessary for any of us to survive, learn, work, love, and procreate.

Some people seem "naturally" capable of loving. They form numerous intimate and caring relationships and, in doing so, get pleasure. Others are not so lucky. They feel no "pull" to form intimate relationships, find little pleasure in being with or close to others. They have few, if any, friends, and more distant, less emotional glue with family. In extreme cases an individual may have no intact emotional bond to any other person. They are self-absorbed, aloof, or may even present with classic neuropsychiatric signs of being schizoid or autistic.

In some cases, the abuse of children by their parents is barbaric, and it seems little wonder that anything but a fledgling serial killer would come from such horrible squalor.

Childhood abuse may not be the sole excuse for serial killers, but it is an undeniable factor in many of their backgrounds.

In looking to the parents for explanations, we see both horrifying mothers and fathers. The blame usually falls on the mother, who has been described as too domineering or too distant, too sexually active or too repressed. Perhaps the mother is blamed more because the father has often disappeared, therefore "unaccountable." When the father is implicated, it is usually for sadistic disciplinarian tactics, alcoholic rants, and overt anger toward women.

An understanding of personal choice is commonly based in a conception of rationality or rational choice

he central points of this theory are: (1) The human being is a rational actor, (2) Rationality involves an end/means calculation, (3) People (freely) choose all behavior, both conforming and deviant, based on their rational calculations, (4) The central element of calculation involves a cost benefit analysis: Pleasure versus Pain, (5) Choice, with all other conditions equal, will be directed towards the maximization of individual pleasure, (6) Choice can be controlled through the perception and understanding of the potential pain or punishment that will follow an act judged to be in violation of the social good, the social contract, (7) The state is responsible for maintaining order and preserving the common good through a system of laws (this system is the embodiment of the social contract), (8) The Swiftness, Severity, and Certainty of punishment are the key elements in understanding a law's ability to control human behavior.