4realpeople

I am an African-American woman who has lived my life on the cusp of all of the most significant social, domestic and foreign policy movements of the past half-century. I was born in the middle of the baby boom. I am a personal witness to the March on Washington, the Black Power movement, the rise of feminism and then the first Earth Day. The war in Vietnam and Watergate unfolded before my very eyes. I watched Republicans demonize Jimmy Carter for attempting to bring compassion to government's treatment of the poor and the environment and having the audacity to speak out loud of the coming ideological war facing the nation. I watched as Ronald Regan eased the country into that war and what would become the ever-expanding, insidious and inhumane age of ultra-conservatism, fascism in the name of the Lord and the evolution of ever-present, state-sanctioned racism. My Master's thesis was an analysis of the deal with the Devil that Bill Clinton made as he "changed welfare as we know it" into a punitive, regressive inescapable trap that reinforced and re-institutionalized systemic support for the cycle of generational poverty for people of color. I watched as leadership at the federal state, and local levels colluded in the deconstruction of the domestic policy infrastructure of our government and shredded the safety net of job training, childcare, education, transportation, cash assistance for the poor in an unprecedented rending of the social contract of America with its people. "I am woman hear me roar." Willie Horton and Michael Brown. "I Am a Man" to "Black Lives Matter." These have been the hallmarks of my journey from a tiny town in rural Missouri where Jim Crow ruled to this place where today I work on behalf of urban and rural poverty-stricken and communities of color from the heart of one of the most powerful institutions in the world. I am still living public policy, but now, as we are on the cusp of the end of America as we have known it, I am speaking out loud; sharing my struggle to make sense of the world of increasing senselessness