We get asked a lot in our work if the Center will cover poverty in its exhibitions and programming.  The short answer is yes.  The topic is deeply personal though—some grew up in poverty here in the US, our nation of immigrants has vastly different perceptions of what constitutes poverty, and in recent years the impoverished in America have burgeoned to include previously unheard of categories like those with advanced degrees, homeowners, and professionals.  Poverty touches every aspect of our work.  It echoes and reverberates through every civil and human rights issue until it’s unclear what is root cause and what is effect.    

In this country we measure poverty based on a scale the Department of Health and Human Services publishes to define access to government services such as food assistance and Medicaid.  Poverty came in to the American civil rights conversation in the 1960s when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. started calling poverty more specifically in to his written and spoken words, and Robert F. Kennedy toured parts of the deep South and Kentucky, bearing witness to what was, at the time, rural poverty in areas still wracked by reconstruction, World War II, and had yet to make 20^th Century technological advances.  King and Kennedy began to publicly link access to education, life in poverty, race, and the draft for the Vietnam War together in their public statements and activities to mixed reaction among Americans.   Also in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson, heralded hero of the Civil Rights Act, launched the “War on Poverty” as part of his Great Society plan for America.  At that time, poverty hovered around 19%, and was considered intolerably high.  Faith, morality and economics have always created a firestorm around poverty eradication measures, and it was no different for Johnson.

Decades later, the 2010 Census revealed that we are in similarly dire straits, but new American poverty has a different face and holds within it untold victims of the Great Recession.  Within those figures  are subsets of poverty including the expected rural and urban, as well as new suburban poverty.  As ever, poverty touches the lives of people of color disproportionately, with near 40% of African American children growing up without needed resources.  The analysis of how and why this is the case is the work of many people’s lives.  You can learn more at www.census.gov or the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center, where they also explain how American poverty figures account (or fail to account) for inflation, cost of living, and healthcare spending—a phenomenon that is widely thought to suppress actual poverty rates. 

CNN Dialogues is taking this topic on for the next event with Today’s Other America: Living in Poverty.  I hope you will join us on April 18 at 7pm at the Rialto Center for the Arts at Georgia State University.  The event is free and features a panel of diverse points of view.  Please register, come out and bring your questions.

 

Have you seen the interactive timeline tool The Guardian recently posted  as a primer for the Arab Spring?  It’s an informative and beautiful tool, but the fact that the time frame started just 13 months ago gave me pause.  It’s not just The Guardian—the prevailing questions across the media are: where did this come from?, is this over? and how is it going to impact us?   It’s a bit like asking Great Britain if they have recovered from the American Revolution, or the American South if the Civil Rights Movement is over.  Answers like it was always coming,  it’s never over, and the impact is immeasurable are not settling--but one of the lessons from the Arab Spring is that there was too  high a premium on that which was comfortable rather than that which was consistent with our highest ideals.  Understanding how our trade and foreign policy objectives impact the human rights and basic operating systems of other nations is critical, and it is a hopeful sign that  young people in school today will learn fulsome lessons about a rich and varied region as despots and dictators begin to fade in to history—replaced by what is the question.

When I was coming of age, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iran/Iraq war,  the Israeli invasion of Lebanon stood out dramatically because for decades, the middle east was a place governed by regal elites and mysterious military men, keeping our oil flowing and our encounters with Islam, Arab culture, and the concerns of their societies apart from the American mainstream.  Over time globalization revealed a complex array of agreements and circumstances creating untold desperation and suffering in a huge part of the world home to millions of people, giving rise to a host of new problems and extreme consequences we barely guessed at in the 1970s and 80s.  Preserving the status quo, like so many other times in history, came at great cost, and was ultimately unsustainable because it was not consistent with human desires for self-determination.

To really understand the Arab Spring, you must go back further than 13 months—at least until the end of World War II and the imperialist allocations of land and power.  The real lessons come from observing how a seemingly sound policy decision at a moment in history, when made not fully embracing the dignity and agency of the other, plants the seeds of discord.  When that discord arrives, power grappling, silencing, and avoidance lead to bloodshed.  It’s true over and over in history, and if today’s headlines are an indication, it’s true again.   Flaming graphics and somber predictions aside, there is great opportunity in this moment.  A whole region of the world has shifted a perceived reality and now we are waiting to see how events emerge from the impulse to revolt, to the responsibility to rebuild something better.

These are the moments to use the Center, and I hope you will.  On February 9^th CNN Dialogues returns with a  discussion of the Arab Spring featuring a distinguished panel of journalists and activists joining us from the region.  Their lived experiences will enrich all of our perspectives, and the opportunity to pose direct questions is not available anywhere else.  Join us at Emory University’s Glenn Auditorium at 7pm, tickets are free and available here.

On December 14 at 7pm at Grady High School Theater, CNN Dialogues—our joint program with Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute and CNN—will turn its attention to LGBTQ issues. Soledad O’Brien will moderate our deep dive in to the question of whether more openness in society has led to more acceptance with panelists Robin Brand, LZ Granderson, Donna Rose, and Johnny Weir.

In 2010, for the first time, American public acceptance of gay relationships crossed the 50% mark, measuring 52% in the spring of that year according to Gallup. That was a 12% jump since 2001. See more about that data here.
What’s behind those numbers? And what of the 48% who identified gay relationships as “morally wrong”? Gallup’s numbers, and gay relationships, are just the beginning of a conversation. As with any shift in public opinion, the changes are attributable to the ways in which people see the issue playing out in their own lives, in the schools their children attend, in the benefits their colleagues can access, and in the personal stories of struggle in individual circles.

Schools are the incubator of what’s next, and parental involvement drives a lot of public opinion. In 2009, the National Education Association released a study of the status of LGBTQ issues in our public schools. At that point there had been a rash of bullying and violence among teens, a trend which continues more than two years later. In their report they cite students, regardless of identity or group, are victimized by discriminatory acts in their midst, the bullying and harassment LGBTQ students is linked to declining academic performance, increased truancy, homelessness, anxiety, depression, and suicide. Youth of color who are LGBTQ are at elevated risk of harassment and social, familial, or community estrangement. Concern about school violence and safety of future generations is a contributing factor to changing priorities about LGBTQ issues in our communities.

Changing definitions of the family structure and personal familiarity with different families have led to coalitions and alliances among groups for marriage equity, access to benefits and health insurance. The group Beyond Marriage sought to codify the case for a revised societal understanding of families and the rights and benefits afforded them. Their statement and petition brought single parent groups, unmarried couples, adoptive and foster families, and a variety of senior living arrangements to the same table as the LGBTQ groups fighting for marriage equality. You can read more about their point of view and political and social supporters here. The Human Rights Campaign has a variety of maps that show where the 50 states’ laws are on marriage, second parent adoption, benefits administration, hospital visitation and a host of other issues that affect people’s everyday lives.

For many people, LGBTQ openness and acceptance is a question of faith. The Pew Research Center’s Forum of Religion and Public Life compiled a brief summary of the 16 top religions in the US and their current position on homosexuality, marriage rights and their instructions to their clergy. You can read about your faith and others’ here.

I hope this quick overview begins to raise the issues of interest to you in a LGBTQ discussion, and that you will support our work bringing vital conversations to the community through CNN Dialogues. Please buy your tickets and plan to join us on December 14 at 7:00 pm.