Gender, Race and Identity

BY BEN MCGUIRE After Vikash Singh was prosecuted in Los Angeles for growing medical marijuana in 2014, he found that life with a conviction on his record was a “minefield” of legal hoops. He was a college-educated former teacher from a middle-class background who had served his community service sentence, but relevant experience was no […]

Crazy Rich Asians has shattered recent box office records. The film grossed an estimated $117 million in its first three weeks and features an all Asian cast — something that hasn’t happened since The Joy Luck Club debuted in 1993. It has also ignited a firestorm of Asian American pride and public discourse. The story […]

BY SIBELLA MATTHEWS In 2014, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families transferred a 16-year-old girl of color known as Angel to a maximum-security adult prison.[1] Guards supervised Angel as she showered and isolated her in solitary confinement for 22 hours per day. Her offense was “delinquency,” a crime that is not serious or violent […]

BY KHADIJAH TRIBBLE “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana […]

BY ALISON COLLINS AND BAR PELED The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has done very little over the years to prioritize women—not at its founding, not during its transition to a professional and international institution, and certainly not today. The administration’s failure to address the gender imbalance among the faculty and in the curriculum, as well […]

As I sat in the sold-out theater waiting to see Black Panther, Black families filled the room with a tingling excitement that didn’t abate until the closing credits. The boy sitting beside me squirmed in his seat, knocking popcorn into my lap with each wiggle. I couldn’t blame him one bit. Black pride in Black […]

BY BOB PAYNE “Jim” boards the plane in Denver. After a weekend of high-elevation hiking and brewery IPAs, he’s packed his checked bag with pot brownies, which his wife loves. Home in New Orleans, he drives straight from the airport to his office, the pot brownies still in his bag. The youth nonprofit he works […]

Are you thinking of running for office? Then check out these 10 tips from the International LGBTQ Leaders Conference. The International LGBTQ Leaders Conference brought over 500 LGBTQ elected officials, leaders and advocates from across the United States and the world to Washington, DC in December 2017. Everyone had a story to tell about what […]

Abstract: Prisons that have policies refusing to treat inmates suffering from gender dysphoria violate the inmates’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments rights against cruel and unusual punishment and discrimination. Examples of cruel and unusual punishment include prison officials’ failure to continue cancer treatment for inmates, deciding to offer cheaper and less effective treatments, and refusing medical […]

The authors of this article partnered with seven juvenile detention centers across the country to obtain an unprecedented snapshot of youth in custody to determine if lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning, gender nonconforming and transgender (LGBQ/GNCT) youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. Specifically, the authors were interested in understanding how disparate system practices impacted […]

For as long as I can remember, January 26 has been one of my favorite days of the year: Australia Day. Typically, I, and many other Aussies, spend the day with family and friends overloading BBQs with meat, carefully extracting beer and wine from ice-filled eskys, playing backyard cricket, and listening to Triple J’s Hottest […]

BY NAMRATA RAJU Chile, 2006: Jim wiped the blood from his eyes and gingerly picked his body off the ground. He had been idling down an empty street when, suddenly, several young men pounced on him and beat him to a pulp. “Why do you walk funny, you pansy?” they bellowed, between punches. India, 2010: […]