Our home is gone, but our community will rebuild
Say It Louder
Shimica Gaskins is a lawyer, activist and President and CEO of End Child Poverty California. She and her husband, also a lawyer, lost their home to wildfires on Tuesday, January 7, 2024.
I grew up in the small, tobacco-farming town of Lake City, South Carolina. My family’s roots in this country grew under enslavement. I knew my history. My father would walk us through the woods, and show us the land our great-great-grandfather owned, hundreds of acres post-Reconstruction. We would go to our family cemetery, where I could read the names of generations of Gaskins. I grew up in a town where people knew each other’s goodness, complexity, and history.
Altadena, all the way across the country, in the sprawl and chaos of Los Angeles, offered me this rootedness again.
Altadena, cuddled up against the San Gabriel Mountains.
Altadena, a place where Black and Mexican cowboys – the original cowboys – could still be seen riding their horses.
Altadena, where African drumming is heard on Saturdays while shopping for groceries. And if you’re drawn to the rhythm, the drummers will invite you in and make your children apprentices.
Altadena pulled me in and gave me a home.
Altadena has its own history of resistance, respite, liberation and hope for Black folks. As two Black attorneys (read nerds), we took pride that Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Altadena in the 1960s to take respite with his friend and attorney at-the-time, Clarence B. Jones.
Corporate DEI wasn’t perfect, but it made our country better
More Of This
Diversity initiatives, particularly the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that proliferated in corporate America over the past decade, have some shortcomings. But the rapid retrenchment of DEI is another indication that the United States is going backward only a few years after the widespread protests of George Floyd’s killing seemed to signal that the country was finally ready to truly address its long history of discrimination and inequality.
Over the past few months, so many companies, from Facebook to McDonald’s to Walmart, have announced that they are ending or scaling back their DEI efforts that it’s hard to keep track. What exactly these companies are curtailing varies widely. Some had set specific targets for the number of women and people of color they hoped to hire, while others simply had more general initiatives to make sure people of all identities felt comfortable in the workplace.
Read the rest on Washington Post >
Prominent California lawyer pushes back against anti-DEI and hate speech moderation
Speaking Of...
For most people angry at Meta or Mark Zuckerberg, the options for recourse are limited. You could delete your Facebook account or complain about the billionaire with like-minded friends. But Bay Area lawyer Mark Lemley has taken a far more noticeable approach: He fired the company as a client.
Lemley, a prominent intellectual property attorney and professor at Stanford Law School, was one of a gaggle of lawyers representing Meta in a legal battle over the tech giant’s alleged use of copyright texts for training artificial intelligence. It’s a high-profile case, pitting Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors against one of the world’s largest companies, and has the potential to create formative case law. But Lemley was too displeased with his client to continue.
Read the rest on SF Gate >
This Attorney General has a plan to bankrupt Planned Parenthood
Less Of This
Despite the crucial fact that federal money cannot be used for abortions, Republicans have been trying to cut off all sources of federal funding to Planned Parenthood since 2007. The money the health care organization receives through various government programs covers birth control, sexually transmitted infection testing, and cancer screenings, but archconservatives want to shut down the country’s largest abortion provider by excluding it from these programs. Donald Trump pledged to anti-abortion groups during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns that he would “defund” the organization. It’s possible that Republicans for the first time in years have a plausible path to this longtime goal and Trump might not even need to act.
Read the rest of the story on Slate >
