On Friday, a jury found Dwight DeLee guilty of manslaughter in the first degree as a hate crime for killing Lateisha Green. This is the first hate crime conviction for the killing of a transgender person in New York state, and only the second such conviction in the United States. Though the trial is concluded and Lateisha’s family feels justice has been served, transgender people around the world face extremely high rates of discrimination and violence. Posts at Transgriot, Questioning Transphobia, and Feministe address the issues of pronoun usage, the lack of protection for trans people under New York hate crime laws, and the ongoing threat of violence to transgender people.
Blog
July 19, 2009 - 9:00pm
Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the recent Philanthropy and Rural America conference in Little Rock, AR
“You have to create hope. People want to know that their tomorrows will be different than their yesterdays.” — Bill Clinton, July 14, 2009, Little Rock, AR
Former President Bill Clinton presented a clear agenda for change for rural America during his talk at the Philanthropy and Rural America conference, held last week at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.
June 25, 2009 - 9:00pm
By Darius Kemp
What would you do if you were pushed down? Hopefully, you would get back up. It is this basic philosophy of life that parents, teachers, and staff at Nettelhorst Elementary School in Chicago are teaching their students.
The book “How to Walk to School” illustrates Nettelhorst’s transformation from an under-performing, struggling urban school into one of the best schools in Chicago.
However, this past year Nettelhorst had an issue with homophobia and anti-gay bullying of a teacher and students with same-sex parents. The Chicago Sun Times reports that,“One substitute teacher, who is also a Nettelhorst parent, was called a faggot. A first-grader was singled out by classmates — a group of 6-year-olds just couldn’t believe someone could have two dads.”
June 22, 2009 - 9:00pm
The Working Group was excited to host this weekend in Oakland, California, a small group of scholars from across the state to advise us on our Not In Our Town work supported by the California Council for the Humanities. The group included Yolanda Moses, anthropology professor and special assistant to the Chancellor for Excellence and Diversity at UC Riverside, and one of the shapers of the American Anthropological Association’s “Race Are We So Different” traveling museum exhibit; Alberto Pulido, director and professor of Ethnic Studies and chair of the President’s Advisory Board on Inclusion and Diversity at the University of San Diego; and David Brundage, who teaches the history of social movements in the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater.
June 11, 2009 - 9:00pm
By Brian Lau
It’s my last day at The Working Group and after nine months of meetings in school after school, agonizing over emails and blog posts, and making the hour-and-a-half commute from Sunnyvale to Oakland, I think I’ve earned the right to get a little nostalgic.
And what a crazily wonderful nine months it has been. Since mid-September, I’ve been working at The Working Group as a Not In Our Town/Not In Our School organizer through an organization called Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that places young adults in different nonprofits and provides them with different training opportunities and service projects. And with the end of our Public Allies year just around the corner, I wanted to reflect on what I gained from this experience.