Building a New America with Jonathan Arias

According to a report published by UCLA's Civil Rights Project, New York has the most segregated schools in the United States. This is is a shocking statistic considering that New York is one of the most liberal states and because 'separate but equal' was dismantled 65 years ago. Why is this?
In this episode, Baruch College History Professor Clarence Taylor describes the interesting history behind the City's feeble attempts to integrate after Brown vs. Board of Education. To add to his explanation, professor Taylor discusses how the move to privatize schools and testing contribute to the problem. Finally, host Jonathan Arias askes for the ingredients to quality education and how we can improve the teaching professions.
Professor Taylor is professor emeritus of history at Baruch College in New York City and the author of 7 books including Black Religious Intellectuals: the fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century and Reds at the Blackboard: communism, civil rights, and the New York City teachers union

Professor Taylor is a native New Yorker having attended public schools in East New York and Canarsie. He began his career as a teacher in the New York City public school system before acquiring his Ph.D. in American History. His research is on modern civil rights and black power movements, African American religion and modern history of New York City.

The Constitution rests, in part, on the principles of both liberty and equality. Liberty is the ability to live free from government interference. It is the right to act independently within society. Equality, by contrast, is the right to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as all others, and to be treated equally by the government. These two principles—liberty and equality—are often in tension with each other.

Unlimited liberty often infringes on the rights and opportunities of others. Government imposed equality sometimes hampers the liberty of individuals for the sake of society as a whole. This inherent tension between liberty and equality in our Democracy is part of the American story.

One defining feature of our Democracy is the peaceful transfer of power to the next generation. Though labeled as peaceful, it's far from polite in practice. The sheer size of the Baby Boomer generation and their seeming longevity aided by Social Security and Medicare, is taxing the capacity of the Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z young folks whose incomes are taxed to provide these benefits. However, these are the young people who are also strapped with student debt of $1.52 trillion affecting over 44.2 million young people. And our workplaces are often controlled by older leaders who don’t want to retire, or we are working in a disruptive gig economy that lacks stability, benefits, and a long term plan. We are in the midst of a disruption that is once again exacerbating the tension between liberty and equality.

In this episode of BANA, we'll be discussing what Eyck Freymann and Professor Niall Ferguson label as the Coming Generation War. Published in the Atlantic, this is a fascinating article about the future of the United States.

In our current climate of heated political and racial debate, calls have been made to censor, and even punish, what is called 'hate speech.' The difficulty, however, is defining it. The First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but it is not an absolute right. Screaming 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre, as the classic example goes, is not protected under the First Amendment.
Even though the First Amendment protects most speech, 'hate speech' has strained the barriers of the classic American right. How should the law protect genuinely vulnerable individuals against hateful rhetoric from Neo Nazi's or other related groups? How should college campuses treat speakers that oppose substantively the ideology of the student body? How have these 'hate speech' laws been weaponized against genuine movements for civil rights? Why does a censored speaker become more popular after being banned?
In this episode, we got the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Constitutional Law expert and former ACLU President Nadine Strossen to understand the current state of Free Speech in America.
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Sasher Fisher and her organization Spark Microgrants help communities across Africa build communities from a grass-roots level. Moving away from the common, but ineffective, prescriptive model of community development, Spark implements the community-driven model which leaves the decision making power to community members. Helping communities only to organize, Spark provides a seed grant to initiate the community building process.
In this episode, Jonathan and Sasha discuss grass-roots democracy and what lessons Americans can learn from abroad.

If you viewed the mass demonstrations of 2020, you might have the impression that the majority of the country supports police reform.

If you thought so, you may want to think again.

Polls from the Pew Research Center indicate that, while approval for police has declined slightly over the past five years, Overall support for police still remains high

But despite this support, ....most people polled regardless of race – about 90% – agreed that police should be better trained in nonviolent alternatives to deadly force.

This leads us to the political slogan “Defund the police” ... a slogan that has been intensely debated over the past year. But how many people really know what it means?

Will defunding the police lead to chaos and disorder as some voters fear? And Is this fear being used by certain politicians to prevent serious reform?

On the other hand .... Does the slogan mean that funds should be diverted away from police departments and, instead, reallocated to non-policing forms of public safety?

Activists use the phrase with various intentions: some want modest reductions in police funding; others want a full divestment away from police – a full abolition. But what they all demand .... Is change.

As I think deeper on this topic, I’ve realized that Police reform extends beyond forcing officers to wear body cameras and preventing them from using chokeholds.

Reform requires that we examine societal ills at large and determine who exactly should resolve them.

From economic inequality to homelessness

from healthcare to mental health,

from education to public safety.

Whose responsibility is it to resolve these growing public needs?

Is it the police? Is it Government? Is it private business? Or a combination of all.

And as a former public defender with first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that along with an overhaul of our criminal legal system ....police across America desperately need top-to-bottom changes – changes to their internal cultures, their training and hiring practices, their unions, and how they are governed.

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into the movement for police reform.

In doing so, we explore some of the issues you may not have considered, .... that indeed may have a direct correlation to police reform and public safety.

Today I have the wonderful opportunity to speak to professor Alex Vitale again. We were fortunate to have Professor Vitale interviewed for our first episode when we launched the podcast 2 years ago. He’s a sociology professor and coordinator of the policing and social justice project at Brooklyn College.

He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He’s the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and also the author of the book The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have been published in The NY Times and the Washington Post. He’s also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.