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Scale of Reparations Dr. Walter Greason BK Nation 18 June 2014 Last weekend, the T. Thomas Fortune symposium hosted dozens of regional leaders in a discussion about ways to provide new funding sources for historic sites. The previous week, a coalition of lobbyists and educators came together to propose new ways to publicly finance historic preservation…

Education has become the problem.  Maybe it always was. No, there was a brief moment after the Second World War when the federal government aggressively subsidized college attendance for millions of soldiers to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.  The GI Bill essentially created the upper middle class on the foundations of the New Deal…

Memorial Day is more than parades and barbeques.  The solemn reflection on the men and women who have given their lives for freedom deserves the highest priority.  Among this honor roll, the countless nonviolent activists who confronted authorities and suffered in anonymity deserve special attention.  Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic magazine advanced this recognition substantially with his recent…

The Billboard Music Awards celebrate the superficial value of celebrity in global, consumer society.  Fashion, light shows, and loud sounds persuade young adults that fame and wealth function in response to the party life.  As a result, every recent generation – from X to Millennial – believes that lives of diligence, education, and patience are forms of…

Perhaps no private industry has created more African American millionaires since 1980 than the National Basketball Association.  In an era when programs like Affirmative Action came under increasing assault and fewer people understood the persistence of historic discrimination in employment, contracting, and education, David Stern built an enterprise that paid black men billions of dollars and…

Children around the world need opportunities today.  Too often, their parents and communities have no idea how to provide them.  A whirlpool of infinite information has swallowed nations whole, leaving confused populations that struggle to understand the emerging structures for life in the twenty-first century.  How can families adapt more effectively to these changes? In New Jersey, the…

Ending the Wars Dr. Walter Greason Norristown Times Herald 29 April 2014 Baby Boomer mythology lionizes a “Greatest Generation” that never asked for the title.  The shadow of this rhetoric is only beginning to recede as people raised by cable television and the Internet begin to assert themselves.  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s incomparable presidency is the first lesson…

Left-wing activists proclaim a long legacy of political accomplishments – child labor protections, public education, workplace safety controls, collective bargaining, and the weekend, just for starters.  These industrial reforms are the basis of American middle class prosperity.  The idea of a safe workplace, a healthy salary, and limited working hours allow for the recreational lifestyle millions of…

A few years ago, students in a media literacy course developed a “Tournament of the Twentieth Century” – a bracket game that compared the most resonant media images of the last century to determine the most effective icon.  Batman eventually triumphed over Franklin Roosevelt, Adolph Hitler, and Elvis Presley.  The activity helps the students critically…

You don’t know what you don’t know. YDKWYDK.  Bill Maher recently poked fun at a new documentary film about Donald Rumsfeld titled “The Unknown Knowns.”  Rumsfeld used the confusing explanation, “There are known knowns.  These are the things we know.  There are known unknowns. These are the things we know we don’t know.  Then, there are the unknown unknowns.  These are…