Liz Posner

Fashion Retailer Zara Has a Dubious Solution to Prevent Racist and Culturally Appropriated Products

This can’t end well. A recent New York Times article that explained how fast fashion brands are trying to avoid making insensitive and offensive material revealed that mega-retailer Zara has a new plan for combating racism, thievery and cultural appropriation in its designs. To avoid future gaffes, Zara told the Times it will rely on an algorithm to "scan designs for insensitive or offensive features."

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Georgia Town's Meeting on Confederate Pride Quickly Devolves Into Racist Spectacle

Local council members of Griffin, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, held a meeting last week to declare April Confederate History Month and April 26 as Confederate Memorial Day for the city. But the in-favor vote by the majority-white council was not nearly the most offensive moment of the meeting, as the Washington Post reports.

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Maybe White People Shouldn't Take Drugs From Indigenous Cultures

White people love to try drugs from other cultures. Just think of the scene in Zoolander when Hansel recounts a story to Derek about hallucinating that he’s falling off a mountain, and suddenly remembers he’s been “smoking peyote for six straight days.” Other iconic white guys in cinema have famously partaken: Tony Soprano, the stars of “Young Guns.” Ben Stiller experiments with ayahuasca in While We’re Young in an attempt to spice up his love life with his wife. There are enough examples of these scenes to say there is a trope in television and film of sending a reserved character on a spiritual awakening by having them experiment with psychedelic drugs. In other cases, it is a way to solidify a character’s New Age kookiness, as in the case of Hansel or Lily Tomlin’s character in Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie.” But while these scenes can be humorous, they also normalize and publicize the use of drugs that white people arguably don’t have a right to. 

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5 Other Financial Gender Gaps We Need to Solve Besides the Pay Gap

The gender wage gap gets a lot of attention, and for good reason. At the current snail's pace by which it’s closing worldwide, the World Economic Forum says it will take about 200 years to close the pay gap. But there are other financial imbalances holding many women back and keeping them from economic independence.

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Women: Watch Out for This Ominous Sign on Your Dinner Date

In January, at the tail end of a storm of accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in Hollywood, Babe.net published an account by “Grace,” a woman who went on a date with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari and later described it as the "worst date of her life." Many critics of the article derided one detail in the article that must have seemed important enough to the writer to include: "After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. 'It was white,' she said. 'I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.'”

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4 Key Personality Traits Trump Supporters Share With Their Beloved Leader

Surprise, surprise: members of the #MAGA set are a lot like Trump himself. We already know that many of Trump's supporters are prejudiced, authoritarian, and selfish. Now, a new study shows that Trump voters have even more in common with the president than already thought.

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Corporations Do Damage to Poor Women with Their Global Philanthropy

Big corporations are guilty of exploiting Women’s History Month, originally meant to celebrate a labor movement ushered in by impoverished female sweatshop workers. These corporations issue shallow acknowledgments of women who have broken glass ceilings, all the while doing damage to poor women through their exploitive business practices. In her new book, The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development, Kathryn Moeller, an assistant professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains how Fortune 500 companies cause even more damage through the charitable programs they launch in order to “give back.”

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Fired VA Head David Shulkin Issues a Dire Warning on His Way Out the Door

Donald Trump did the inevitable Wednesday night and dismissed embattled Veteran Affairs Secretary David Shulkin. The former Obama official has been replaced by the president's personal physician, Admiral Ronny Jackson, who has no qualifiable leadership experience and raised millions of eyebrows last year after publicly proclaiming that Trump was “in excellent health.” But Shulkin refused to go quietly, warning the country that the chaos in the White House could harm veterans for years to come.

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Red and Blue Voters Alike Could Rally Around This Radical Job Growth Idea

Economists warn we are on the brink of another economic bust. Considering the Great Recession doubled the American unemployment rate from 5 percent to 10 percent in two years, now is the time to prepare for this looming employment crisis with meaningful policy.

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Quiz: Can You Guess the Race of a Mass Murder Suspect Based on the Headline About Him?

Major media outlets have very different ways of describing white Christian suspects and near-Eastern Muslim suspects. It gets tiring constantly pointing out the racist implications of the way these networks describe violent attacks. When Muslims kill, headlines point out the suspects’ religion and prematurely suggest connections to major Islamic fundamentalist networks while using coded, racist language. White, non-Muslim killers, on the other hand, are often described as “troubled” or “lone wolves.”

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This May Be the Most Pathetic Proposal to Prevent School Shootings Yet

Florida’s Broward school district, which oversees the Parkland school where a former student murdered 17 people in February, has announced it has a new plan to keep its schools safe. When students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High return from spring break next week, they’ll be required to ditch their regular Jansports and carry their books and supplies in school-issued, transparent backpacks, the Miami Herald reports.

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France Puts the U.S. to Shame with Its Proposed New Legislation Defending Women

A new bill being considered by the French parliament makes a bold move to fight sexual harassment, hitting men where it hurts the most—in their wallets.

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Why Mandatory Drug Tests at Work Are Fundamentally Racist

Mandatory drug testing is not only an annoying, expensive waste of company and employee time; a new Detox.net survey shows that their impact and implementation can also be racist.

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Even Affluent Black Boys Aren’t Safe From the Poverty Trap

A new report from the Equality of Opportunity Project (EOP) reveals jarring data about the barriers to wealth placed in front of African Americans. The study says wealthy black boys are unlikely to grow into wealthy black men, despite their financially privileged families.

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27 Women Who Have Accused Donald Trump of Sexual Misconduct

“Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!” the president claimed on Twitter in early 2016, after several news organizations published accounts that he had harassed and belittled women throughout his career. After hearing him boast in his own words about “grabbing women by the pussy” a few months later, it became easy to see how the scores of women who have come forward with stories of abuse by Trump fit into a sinister pattern. With his online bullying and sexual harassment of prominent women, Trump has made it clear to the general public that his claims of respecting women are counterfeit.

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White Supremacists Are No Longer Just Spreading Their Hate Online

The rise of far-right extremism on the shadowy corners of the internet is a legitimate concern for those who value tolerance, peace and progress. Now a new study from the ADL’s Center for Extremism reports that radical white nationalist organizations are not content simply to congregate online; increasingly, they are spewing their hatred in traditional, highly visible public banners.

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We Should Demand Corporate Media Take These 6 Steps to Stop Gun Violence

Students across the country are fighting back against the NRA’s grip on American politics. Beyond Parkland, Florida, young people are staging walkouts and preparing for the upcoming March for Our Lives, which is expected to draw a crowd of 500,000 to Washington to protest gun violence and demand gun control. While their activism is noble, they might be better off using their spotlight to fight for more actionable change. Despite all the impassioned congressional debates in state capitols across the country, politicians have enacted only marginal change to keep guns out of dangerous hands. Meanwhile, our gun lobby-backed leaders continue to suggest absurd solutions to the epidemic of gun violence, such as arming teachers.

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4 of the Biggest Myths About the Gender Pay Gap

The existence of the gender pay gap is a well-documented fact. Respected institutions from the Pew Research Center to the Senate Joint Economic Committee confirm that American women make about 77 cents to the average man’s dollar. For women of color, the disparity is even steeper. Yet conservatives and anti-feminists insist the research is flawed or that it ignores social factors separating men and women. At the current rate at which women's pay is improving, the World Economic Forum says it will take 200 years to close the gender pay gap worldwide.

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These 3 Women Could Change the California Justice System for Good

District attorneys can play a major role in reducing (or amplifying) race-based incarceration in America’s largest cities. Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King announced in February that he is launching a political action committee to help elect reform-minded DA candidates and draw national attention to the issue. “No position in America, no single individual has a bigger impact on the criminal justice system—including police brutality, but the whole crisis of mass incarceration in general—than your local district attorney,” King said. “They are the gatekeepers of America’s justice system.”

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Donald Trump's Racism Was on Full Display at the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant

A new book excerpted in Mother Jones that delves into the details of Donald Trump’s visit to Moscow in 2013 to oversee the Miss Universe pageant includes a slew of disgusting new revelations about the president. One in particular puts his well-documented racism on full display.

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Just a Few Weeks in Prison Can Impair a Person’s Mind

Going to prison is bad for your health. Prison reformers have known for years that incarceration can lead to depression and suicide. A number of physical problems are related to overcrowding and inadequate health care, not to mention the enduring financial consequences and trauma of social ostracization following a prisoner's release.

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These Cities Saw the Most Immigration Raids During Trump's First Year in Office

Raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have increased drastically since Donald Trump moved into the White House. Across the country, 2017 saw 30 percent more ICE arrests than the previous year. A number of these high-profile arrests are particularly despicable, from news that ICE seized a woman after she reported her husband for domestic abuse, to the arrest of a handicapped girl just out of surgery.

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The Other Huge Gender Inequality in Hollywood That No One Is Talking About

We've been hearing about sexism in Hollywood for years. But most of these conversations usually focus around the lack of female directors and producers, or other instances of gender inequality in the industry. Most recently, #MeToo and #TimesUp have showcased a trend of rampant sexual abuse by male executives against female actors.

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Melania Trump Immigrated to the U.S. Under Very Fishy Circumstances

At last, the White House has shared a bit of the mystery behind Melania Trump’s immigration to the U.S. The Washington Post reports that in 2001, Melania received a highly coveted EB-1 visa, generally reserved for renowned leaders in the arts, sciences and business world. Hmm....

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One of Trump's Most Devious Tactics to Try to Silence His Critics

Every week seems to bring a new target for Trump’s wrath. He simply can’t let anything go. But when his grievances against his enemies are too severe simply to attack them in a series of hateful tweets, you can count on Trump to take it to the next level: the courtroom.

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Millennials Face a Major Financial Hurdle That Has Nothing to Do With Student Debt

If you thought student debt is the reason a growing number of millennials have nothing saved, think again. A new report from the Resolution Foundation, a British think tank, finds that people in their 20s and 30s are earning significantly less than they did a generation ago.

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Even After Gun Violence Occurs, the Government Often Fails Survivors

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week claimed 17 lives and resulted in 14 gunshot injuries. As a heightened national conversation around gun control unfolds, we should stay focused on ensuring that the injured students and faculty are adequately provided for. But as a new report by the Trace reveals, in addition to doing a lousy job of preventing gun violence, state governments are doing a poor job of caring for the victims of mass shootings when they occur.

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4 Crazy Ideas Conservatives Proposed This Week for Preventing Gun Violence (Instead of Gun Control)

There a few potential solutions that could deter mass shootings in the U.S. We need legislation; it’s too easy to buy automatic weapons built for warfare. We also need to rework the deeply rooted psychological problems that prompt men to take up arms; our culture of hypermasculinity fosters in some young men a tendency for violence (an alarming pattern of misogyny and domestic violence can be found among recent mass killers). We could also fix the way the media covers shootings, which has been proven to encourage copy-cat killers to seek their own 15 minutes of fame.

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The Right Wing Has Falsely Accused Activists of Being 'Paid Protesters' for 50 Years

Right-wing conspiracy theorists are raging against a bunch of teenagers. Even Donald Trump Jr. liked one such tweet on Twitter, and a since-fired aide of Florida State Rep. Shawn Harrison has claimed that the student activists decrying lax gun regulations that allowed a massacre to take place at their high school are actually “actors that travel to various crisis when they happen.” The impact of these outrageous accusations can’t be dismissed; one video claiming 17-year-old David Hogg is a paid actor was the number-one top trending link on YouTube Wednesday and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times before YouTube removed it. As right-winger conspiracy theorists continue to spread their lies, it’s worth noting that the right has used this tactic repeatedly at other divisive moments in history.

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These 5 States Have Seen the Most Rapid Increases in Homelessness Over the Past Decade

Homelessness increased in the U.S. in 2017 for the first time since 2010, and advocates for homeless people are alarmed. Ten city and county governments have declared states of emergency since 2015 in response; meanwhile, Department of Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson shows ongoing disinterest in supporting local governments’ efforts. While cities like Los Angeles are facing a well-publicized crisis as they struggle to find long-term solutions, California is surprisingly not even one of the states with the five fastest increases in homelessness, according to a new survey compiled by Credit Loan.

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Republicans Aren't Going to Pass Gun Control Laws Any Time Soon, But the Media's Role in Gun Violence Can Be Fixed Now

So far in 2018, the U.S. has seen nearly one mass shooting per day. People are dying out there, so let’s be pragmatic. As long as the NRA has its moneyed grip on Republican elected officials, it’s nearly impossible for gun control legislation to pass. Even the last time Democrats controlled the House from 2009 to 2011, they couldn’t summon the political power to pass smart gun laws. By no means should we end our demand for such legislation. But at the same time, let’s consider other ways to deter future violence. A good way to start is by implementing higher journalistic standards for the way the media talk about mass shootings.

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