Category / 2018 / Bodies / Home / Justice / Social Justice
-
![]()
Who Will Take Care of the Homeless?
Dr. Matthew Desmond, critically acclaimed sociology professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Evicted, stands before an audience of educated, middle-aged men and women in a Washington D.C. bookstore, giving a heartbreaking, impassioned speech about the worst inequalities and injustices of housing. He fervently pleads, “Do we believe that housing is a fundamental…
-
![]()
Boundless Bodies: Toxic Chemicals in Everyday Places
A woman loses both her legs in the aftermath of tampon-induced Toxic Shock Syndrome. A child suffers brain damage years after innocently biting a lead-painted toy. A man spends nineteen days on a ventilator after waterproofing his boots. We hear these stories on the news, but quickly tune them out. Our apathetic attitudes seem rational.…
-
![]()
Food Deserts: Where Nutrition Meets Inequality
What is a food desert? The 2008 Farm Bill defines a food desert as an “area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an area composed of predominantly lower income neighborhoods and communities.” According to the USDA, to qualify as a “low-access community,” at least 500 people and/or…
-
![]()
My Love Story With Judaism (And Bacon)
My classmates in high school knew the $4.29 Bacon Double Cheeseburger as the centerpiece of my infamous Friday lunch. When my friends would spot me in fourth period with greasy fingers holding a crumpled Burger King bag, they’d shake their heads and groan. They knew I had consumed my favorite meal yet again. The tradition…
-
![]()
What Black Women Bring to Food Justice
To Bobbie Sykes, the farm-to-table movement is not new; it’s something that’s coming back around. Bobbie, a 66-year old Black woman, moved to St. Louis with her family when she was four years old and returned to her native Mississippi every summer growing up. There, on her grandmother’s farm, she grew to love fresh vegetables.…
-
![]()
Immigration: A Thanksgiving Tradition
2.4 billion pounds of sweet potatoes. 254 million turkeys. 659,340 tons of green beans. 7,600,000 barrels of cranberries. These are the average annual production quantities for some of America’s favorite Thanksgiving foods. Although these figures account for a year of production, a whopping 20% of the above totals go toward the Thanksgiving feast each year.…
-
![]()
Deconstructing the Harvey Experience
I’ll start with a few statistics. Over the course of six days from August 24th to the 30th, Hurricane Harvey dumped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of water onto the area from the tip of Texas to Louisiana. As observed by Vox, that’s approximately 1 million gallons of water for every inhabitant of the state…
