Category: No Hate In Our States - PACG - Progressive Action for the Common Good

Purchase banned books - No Hate In Our States

3/24/2023

Purchase banned books - No Hate In Our States

Civil Rights Forum

Stay at Homestead Mom (on Facebook)

Hooray for Barnes & Noble’s Banned Books section (kids edition)! Each of these books has been banned by various libraries, schools, and organizations. Several are on the American Library Association’s top 100 most banned and challenged books.

PACG has created purchase links from Barnes and Nobel for these books. Buy them for all of the kids in your life! (Click on the name of the book for more information about it and to find a purchase link.)

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Lorax
Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus
Melissa (previously published as GEORGE)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
A Wrinkle in Time
Winnie the Pooh
The Adventures of Captain Underpants
The Wizard of Oz
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Hop on Pop
Something Happened in Our Town
And Tango Makes Three

PACG Webmaster

Administration to crack down on migrant child labor - No Hate In Our States

3/21/2023

Administration to Crack Down on Migrant Child Labor

BIT by Boundless

The Boundless mission statement is: to empower every family to navigate the immigration system more confidently, rapidly, and affordably. Read from their March 3, 2023 email blast below:

The Biden administration announced Monday it would create a task force to crack down on the exploitation of child laborers in the United States following a surge in the illegal employment of migrant children.

Since 2018, the Labor Department has seen a 70% increase in the number of children working for companies big and small across the U.S. Last year, the department found 835 companies had exploited 3,800 minors.

According to a New York Times investigation published this week, many of these children are unaccompanied migrants who after entering the U.S. were released to relatives or other sponsors while their immigration cases work through the courts.

But as record numbers of these children arrived in the country in recent years, the Biden administration has pressured shelters to release them quickly to adults, raising the risk they will be trafficked or exploited.

The Times found that migrant children, some as young as 12, are working overnight shifts and toiling in dangerous conditions across industries, including in slaughterhouses, garment factories, and milk processing plants.

The maximum civil penalty for a child labor violation is $15,138 per child, “not high enough to be a deterrent for major profitable companies,” the administration said in a press release.

“Every child in this country, regardless of their circumstance, deserves protection and care as we would expect for our own child,” said Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Everyone from employers to local law enforcement and civic leaders must do their part to protect children.”

The White House said it would strengthen followup procedures once a child is released from a shelter, including check in calls and help registering for school. The administration will also audit its vetting process for sponsors “to ensure all necessary safeguards are in place without unnecessarily keeping children in government-funded, congregate care settings.”

PACG Webmaster

Watch "Split at the Root" on Netflix - No Hate In Our States

3/19/2023

Split at the Root documentary

No Hate In Our States

Split at the Root follows the emotional journey of mothers separated from their children at the U.S. border and the grassroots initiative that, against all odds, reunites those families.

When a Guatemalan mother seeking asylum was separated from her kids under the Zero Tolerance Policy, a Facebook post by a mom in Queens coalesced into a movement as thousands of like-minded women across the US refused to stand by quietly. Immigrant Families Together was born - a rapid response group committed to doing what the government couldn't - or wouldn't do: reunite parents with their children separated by the Zero Tolerance Policy.

Rosy's book is now available at: The Book of Rosy: A Mother's Story of Separation at the Border.

This highly rated documentary (8.8 on IMDB.com) is available on Netflix.

PACG Webmaster

"We Say Gay" student walkout - No Hate In Our States

3/5/2023

"We Say Gay" student walkout in Iowa

No Hate In Our States

Gender Equity Forum

PACG applauds the high school students in Bettendorf, IA and others across the state for supporting their friends with the "We Say Gay" student walkout. Here's an excerpt from Them:

Hundreds of Iowa students walked out of school as part of a “We Say Gay” protest to speak out against the state’s proposed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation on Wednesday.

The protest was organized by Iowa WTF and the Iowa Queer Student Alliance, both coalitions of high school student organizers. Organizers told the Des Moines Register that students at 47 schools across Iowa walked out on Wednesday. Thus far, at least 29 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced during this year’s legislative session, according to the legislative tracking of One Iowa Action. Those include bills that would force school employees to out trans students to their parents, bills that would ban mentions of gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms up to eighth grade, a resolution that would revise the Iowa constitution to effectively ban same-sex marriage, and more.

Read the complete article here.

Them is the award-winning authority on what LGBTQ+ means today — and tomorrow. From in-depth storytelling on the fight for LGBTQ+ rights to intimate profiles of queer cultural vanguards, it’s a platform for all of the bold, stylish, and rebellious ways that LGBTQ+ people are reshaping our world every day.

Sign up for their newsletter here.

Alta Price

Health care discrimination for queer people - No Hate In Our States

2/21/2023

Queer people face discrimination in health care - Here are the people changing that

No Hate In Our States

LGBTQ Nation

LGBTQ Nation is an online news magazine, reporting on issues relevant to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community.

Many barriers exist for queer people and health care discrimination causes serious harm to the LGBTQIA+ community. Happily, things are changing for the better. This article dives into a range of queer people inspired by their experiences to become health care advocates and providers. Read it here.

Dee VanThournout

Police policies that resulted in Tyre Nichols murder - No Hate In Our States

2/13/2023

“Broken Windows Policing” Gave Rise to SCORPION Unit That Killed Tyre Nichols

Truthout

Broken windows policing reflects racialized assumptions about what is disorder and which communities are disorderly.

From the Truthout website: Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues. Since our founding in 2001, we have anchored our work in principles of accuracy, transparency, and independence from the influence of corporate and political forces.

Read their article about the murder of Tyre Nichols.

PACG IT Specialist

3 things to know about Black History Month - No Hate In Our States

2/3/2023

It's Black History Month. Here are 3 things to know about the annual celebration

NPR's Black History Month 2023

1. It was Negro History Week before it was Black History Month.
2. There's a new theme every year. The theme this year is "Black Resistance."
3. Recent controversies over how race is taught echo a time when Black history is often ignored.

From NPR: February marks Black History Month, a tradition that got its start in the Jim Crow era and was officially recognized in 1976 as part of the nation's bicentennial celebrations. It aims to honor the contributions that African Americans have made and to recognize their sacrifices.

Here are three things to know about Black History Month:

It was Negro History Week before it was Black History Month
In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, the scholar often referred to as the "father of Black history," established Negro History Week to focus attention on Black contributions to civilization. According to the NAACP, Woodson — at the time only the second Black American after W.E.B. Du Bois to earn a doctorate from Harvard University — "fervently believed that Black people should be proud of their heritage and [that] all Americans should understand the largely overlooked achievements of Black Americans."

Woodson, the son of former enslaved people, famously said: "If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated."

Woodson chose a week in February because of Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was Feb. 12, and Frederick Douglass, who was born enslaved and did not know his actual birth date, but chose to celebrate it on Feb. 14.

"Those two people were central to helping to afford Black people the experience of freedom that they have now," says W. Marvin Dulaney, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which Woodson founded in 1915 and today is the official promoter of Black History Month.

In the decades after the Civil War and through the racial violence that erupted across the country in the years following World War I, there was a concerted effort to repress the teaching of Black history.
"In the South, they tried to suppress Black history or African American history in the public schools," Dulaney says, "particularly about things like Reconstruction and slavery, literally distorting the curriculum."

At the university level, Black studies programs were almost nonexistent, he says. "California was the first state to actually mandate Black history in 1951 for the public schools."

Largely as a result of the civil rights and Black consciousness movements of the 1960s, "you saw an uptick in Black history courses," says LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University at Buffalo.

Read the rest of the article here.

PACG Webmaster

Immigration paperwork takes too long! - No Hate In Our States

1/21/2023

USCIS taking longer than ever to review applications

Boundless Immigration

Boundless, an immigration law firm based in Seattle, Washington, offers an interesting email called bit by Boundless. Sign up for the newsletter here. The article below is from January 13, 2023:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is taking longer to review applications than ever before.

According to recent government data, 82% of forms now take longer for USCIS adjudicators to review. These longer review times are significantly contributing to USCIS’ massive application backlog — the forms that now take longer to review account for 86% of the current backlog.

One explanation for slower review times is that USCIS forms have significantly increased in length over time. More than 90% of forms have grown in length since their introduction, with page totals jumping from fewer than 200 pages in 2003 to more than 700 pages in 2023.

USCIS’ recent efforts to digitize the immigration process and encourage more online form filings are also counterintuitively making the application review process slower. For many adjudicators who are trained to review lengthy paper forms, it can be cumbersome to review those same forms and supporting documents digitally.

The consequences of USCIS’ review time inefficiencies are staggering. Estimates show that it will take nearly 10 million man-hours to work through the existing visa backlog — 3.3. million more hours than if adjudicators were reviewing at their previous speeds.

Read the entire newsletter here.

PACG Webmaster

"A Brief But Spectacular Take" on immigration podcast - No Hate In Our States

1/14/2023

A Brief But Spectacular Take on embracing immigration podcast

Online

Civil Rights Forum

From PBS Newshour: Devashish Basnet is a Rhodes Scholar studying refugee and migration patterns. A refugee himself, he left Nepal as a child when his family sought asylum in the United States. Basnet shares his Brief But Spectacular take on embracing immigration. Listen to this well-spoken expert here.

PACG Webmaster

Listen to the "Ultra" podcast - No Hate In Our States

1/6/2023

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra podcast

Charles Lindbergh addresses the America First Committee in October, 1941

Civil Rights Forum

From the Ultra podcast website: Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good. Justice Department prosecutors under crushing political pressure. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to… to cover their tracks.

Ultra is a wild and jaw-dropping look at a crazy part of US history that I bet you have never heard of. The 8-part podcast is as engaging as it is relevant. In addition to the verbal history, their website shares extra bonuses and documents like the image above. It's available where you get your podcasts or online here.

We must learn from the past to correct the injustices of today.

PACG Webmaster