What Stand Your Ground Laws mean in America – How Race & Gender Affect Who Can Stand Their Ground – including women and people of color. An in depth look at armed citizenship from our nation’s founding until today.
Guest is Denice Labertew. She is a women’s rights advocate, professor, and former US envoy to foreign states – providing policy guidance to protect the rights of women and girls. Her work includes negotiating regulations in the Violence Against Women Act, and advocating for human rights at the recent UN Universal Periodic Review – on the US Treatment of migrant women and girls detained at the US/Mexican border.
Guest: Judith Herman, MD, formerly a full-time Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School; and co-founder former Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry, at Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including the groundbreaking book, Trauma and Recovery, The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
Discussion on the insidiousness and pervasiveness of domestic abuse – and the mistreatment of victims by the very people and institutions that should be protecting them. How these institutions have functioned for generations with impunity, including the Catholic Church, Hollywood, government and even the private sector. She explores what it is like for victims who suffer repeated abuse as well as institutional bias – where victims are treated with contempt by society, by the judicial system and even their own families.
Our discussion is on the International Bill of Rights – (3 parts) including: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948 after WWII, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. Specifically, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICESCR), is a “multilateral treaty” adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1966, and put in force in March 1976. Yet, the Trump State Department is weakening the rapport with both the international community, while exacerbating the international norms.
How Reconstruction was a new beginning for the formerly enslaved but the fight for equal justice had just begun – including the right to vote, be free of poll taxes, and the continuing struggle for women and notably black women to vote. Discussion of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, Fifteenth Amendment allowing ‘men’ to vote – and the long awaited Nineteenth Amendment allowing ‘white’ Women to Vote – Culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 taking away all impediments of voting to All Women and Men of Voting age and eliminating literacy tests and poll taxes to voting. Discussion of 19th century presidents who kept slaves during and while in office in the White House is also discussed.
June 19, 2020 – Today is a day of remembrance and reflection on how African-Americans were enslaved by those who we often exalt as founders of our nation and of our Constitution – but we rarely look to the darker side of American history – the enslavement of countless numbers…
Discussion on the Trump-era of public school education. How Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, a woman of privilege, who never attended public school – thinks she knows better what works than those entrenched in the system for years. Hear from Dr. Meira Levinson – former public school classroom teacher, now professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hear what she hears from educators in the field, the ethical dilemmas they face when children chant ‘build that wall’ and ‘lock her up’ and single out minority students in the classroom. Because they heard from the President – that gives it legitimacy in the eyes of children – putting educators in the role of referee, peacekeeper and ethics trainer. An eye opening discussion on changing role of educators in the Trump-era Democracy.
