If this feels racist (it should), think about whether it's really that different from saying that a residency requirement in an 82% Black and Latinx city is keeping you from hiring qualified city government department heads.
And let me be clear: I'm not saying that supporting the change in Hartford residency rules = racist intent. I'm saying it is an embrace of a concept of talent and qualifications that is rooted in structurally racist gatekeeping.
If you believe all groups of people, including the people who live in Hartford, have a fundamentally equal distribution of intellect and talent, then to say that Hartford lacks enough qualified candidates is to recognize the difference between qualification and actual ability.
The scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould, when considering some discussion of analyzing Einstein's brain to find the root of his genius, said this:
That's the heart of the issue: we could be content with the measures we have for merit, and say that we can't find qualified candidates in Hartford, or recognize that those measures are flawed and seek out the merit we know lies undiscovered in our city.
I'd rather find the math wiz who never had a shot at going to MIT and get them the resources & training they need to be the finance manager for their own city than give the job to someone who lives out of town and has no investment in how their actions will be felt on the block.
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Here is an opinion piece about assaults against transit workers. It says the assaults are increasing and implies this is because homeless people are doing them and they have more access to buses because fares are free. But there is literally NO DATA... ctmirror.org/2023/02/26/ct-…
That is not to say that assaults on transit workers shouldn't worry us. They should! But this piece draws a lot of conclusions about the gravity of the problem and its causes with no factual support...
The piece repeatedly says these assaults are "increasing." Then it points to the number of assaults on Metro North workers in 2022:
Saw Avatar 2 with the 15-year-old. It was pretty, but imagine having a bazillion dollars to make your epic political statement movie and your politics haven't gained any nuance since you were a high school sophomore. That's this movie.
It's like, you invent a whole planet with fantastical landscapes and ten-foot-tall people, but basically it's just, "What if all the naive bullshit ill-informed white people believe about native people were just 100% true?"
Also, the totally made up forest-dwelling native people in the first movie are basically Algonquin, and then in the second movie they go meet the totally made-up tropical island-dwelling people and they are 100% Maori.
Many years ago I wrote an article that was, in part, about how most of the SCOTUS case law that has curtailed the 4th Amendment is fundamentally based on judges' instinctive sense that inherent Black criminality is a real thing and worthy of great caution. Now, ...
having recently read some SCOTUS caselaw on prosecutorial immunity, it becomes clear (unsurprisingly) that the same irrational fear underlies jurisprudence there. There is almost no SCOTUS caselaw on child welfare law, but the state appellate law I have read - which is a lot -
tends to have a very strong element of the same attitude, maybe extending beyond inherent Black criminality to inherent Black indolence and violence. And the thing is, it's so palpable to me, the way this unarticulated fear guides judicial reasoning - the violent skepticism...
My client on appeal, a mom of four, had been struggling to extract herself from a coercive relationship with an older man while her children were removed by the state child welfare agency. She obtained a voucher for housing appropriate to the size of her family. BUT...
the supportive housing rules say you can't apply based on kids who are in DCF care - you have to get them back first and then apply. But DCF and the juvenile court take the position that your kids can't be reunified until you have appropriate housing. Luckily, the application...
isn't at all clear about this, so my client applied for housing for all her kids because she thought that was what she was supposed to do, and that's how she got the voucher. Obviously, she told DCF about having the voucher to try to convince them to return her kids. Instead...
I wouldn't even say, conclusively, that they should prosecute his parents. I would say that they need to see what is happening at home. But potentially removing this child from his parents, without knowing more, won't necessarily improve the situation.
I know everyone wants to punish someone when a preventable tragedy happens, but I don't think we know enough yet to say that punishment is in order. Like, do we want to keep this child from harming himself or others, or do we want to make ourselves feel good?
OK, let me tell you a story. A child is born and both the mother and the baby test positive for cocaine. So DCF removes the child from the hospital. Eventually, the child is returned to both parents under a period of agency supervision. 1/27
2. Part of the supervision is that the mother has to take drug tests. When some of her tests come back positive, DCF tells the parents, "You have to live apart and the child has to live with the father. The mother can't have unsupervised contact." The family immediately complies.
3. DCF never gets information that the family isn't complying, but three days later, they show up with cops to remove the child again. They go to the mom's apartment and say, "Where's your kid?" She says, "I don't know. Go next door to dad's building and see if they're there."