During the summers of the early 1960s, Saturday mornings began the same way for me. I’d take my mother’s shopping car, leave our two-bedroom apartment in the Vladeck low-income housing project on the lower east side of Manhattan. I scavenged for return deposit bottles by going through every trash can I walked by. Sometimes, because I was hungry, I would …
Equity: The Courage to be Unfair
Before I accepted a position at Charlotte Family Housing and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, I read Charlotte’s Leading on Opportunity report. I was immediately impressed by the earnest desire and unequivocal commitment of Charlotteans to change the city’s two and a half centuries of systemic discrimination and disenfranchisement of its citizens of color, starting with the Catawba Native Americans, …
Bootstraps – Economic Mobility Mythology and Injustice
It was a snowy afternoon in the winter of 1989; as I walked down one of the corridors leading to the classrooms and library of the New York State Police (NYSP) Academy, I approached the corner near the academy’s library a group of white state police officers talking about the ills of affirmative action. Before they noticed me, the captain, …