Opinion Editorials
Older Op-Ed Articles
Wrongful convictions in New Jersey
In the past three decades, new questions about the integrity of the justice system have emerged as a series of convicted 'criminals' have proven their innocence.
The Innocence Project at the Cardoza Law School in New York, the National Registry of Exonerations, and other innocence advocacy groups have documented these exonerations and the dramatic impact DNA science is having on the criminal justice system.
May Day honors worker solidarity
May 1st is observed and celebrated worldwide as International Worker's Day, with 66 countries marking it as an official holiday outside the United States.
Across New Jersey, workers (employed in the formal and informal markets and the unemployed and underemployed) continue to organize for workers' rights, including the right to unionize.
Black Americans and the worldwide principles of democracy
Americans don’t often recognize authoritarianism at home because they don’t want to. They believe the U.S. is so exceptional that the checks and balances built into our system will protect our democratic values….Black Americans have never had a problem seeing the threat.
A right to abortion isn’t enough. There needs to be access.
While the right to abortion is threatened around the country, the most urgent crisis for New Jersey is lack of access. High costs, limited access to providers, discrimination, and countless other obstacles currently prevent people from getting the care they are entitled to under the law. That’s why the Reproductive Freedom Act can’t stop at simply declaring the right to abortion in New Jersey. It must expand access to care.
Fear, not
Fear not, White supremacy, your justice system was not broken. The verdict is not that Ahmaud Arbery's life mattered, for the pre-trial hearings and trial proceedings confirmed it mattered not. Rather, the verdict says that "Whiteness as power" matters. For only in instances, and I underscore instances, of egregious tortuous actions intersecting at a critical social moment for more than a majority of citizens and necessitating some measure of admission will the system give. Only in such rare moments will it be pushed to allow for an appearance of balance, of empathy, of regard, of humanity. The records by the same system tell us such.
Response to the Rittenhouse verdict
It is a reaffirmation that Whiteness as power is a thing that White-designated people will slaughter their own to maintain. The underpinnings and underbelly of America reared its head and walked out of the very annals of white supremacy into the sunshine of the morning that has never seen a sunset.
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