Stuff YOU Should Know
Peace & Justice Memorial Opens in Alabama
On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the accompanying Legacy Museum opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, to huge crowds. Located just a sixteen-minute walk from each other, the two sites share a vision: to educate people about racial injustice from the end of slavery to the present day.
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is housed in what was once a warehouse where enslaved people were held. The museum aims to chronicle what its founder refers to as the evolution of racial inequality: from enslavement, to lynchings, to Jim Crow laws, to segregation, to the problems of police violence and mass incarceration. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), 41 percent of death row inmates are black, and an estimated one out of every ten of these prisoners is innocent.
Just a short walk away, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice stands on six acres on a hillside overlooking the city. Here people can learn more about this nation’s history of racial inequality. The memorial uses art, writing, sculpture, and other media to help people understand and recognize the effects of racial terror. Included in the memorial are 800 hanging corten steel monuments, each engraved with the name of a U.S. county where a lynching has taken place, as well as with the name of the victim. In the park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments that are not engraved. They represent potential acts of racial injustice that have not yet (and hopefully, through the work of these organiztions) occurred.
What Do You Think? What does the field of unengraved monuments say about the state of racial injustice today? In your opinion, does this make the memorial more or less moving? Why?
Fast Food Slows Down
Having a summer job at a fast food restaurant used to be a rite of passage for teenagers. But that’s no longer the case. In fact, these days, many fast food chains are struggling to find enough employees.
There are several reasons for this. The first is the popularity of fast food restaurants: in recent years, their numbers have grown far more rapidly than the population of teenagers has. Second, many of today’s teenagers are looking for alternative employment options, such as starting their own lawn mowing or babysitting business, rather than work for low fast-food wages. Other factors include immigration reform–which threatens a large part of the fast food labor pool–and also the low unemployment rate overall, which makes it so that workers can be pickier about which jobs they choose to take.
So what can restaurant owners do to combat this? The most obvious option is to raise wages, to make fast food jobs more desirable. (Fast food workers on average make less than half as much per hour as other non-salaried workers.) Other employers have tried to entice workers in other ways, such as providing them with medical benefits or financial incentives if they stay in the job for a certain period of time. Still, others have invested in new technology, such as automated cash registers, that does the work that they used to pay employees to do.
But why should this matter to anyone who doesn’t own a fast food restaurant? Because cheap labor is an essential part of the fast-food business model. If employers have to pay more for labor, the price of food will go up as well.
What Do You Think? Would you ever be willing to take a job in the fast food industry? Why or why not?
Project Trumpmore!
Can you image President Trump’s face carved into this iceberg? Credit: Volodymyr Goinyk/Shutterstock
You may remember when, during his campaign for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump stated that climate change is a hoax started by the Chinese. Since becoming president, Trump has done much to worry environmental activists, such as appointing a climate change denier to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), opening national parks for drilling, and pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord.
Now, an environmental group in Finland is fighting back. They want to carve a giant sculpture of Trump’s face into an iceberg (similar to the way other presidential likenesses are displayed on Mount Rushmore). If climate change is really a hoax, they argue, then the sculpture will be around for thousands of years. And if climate change is real? Well, then we have a lot more to worry about then a melted sculpture.
According to the Trumpmore organizers’ mission statement, climate change is such a large and abstract idea that it lacks a specific, concrete symbol for people to rally behind. The Trumpmore sculpture could be such a symbol. These activists hope that, by spurring on a conversation about the sculpture, they can get more people talking about climate change as a concept . . . and where the people go, hopefully, the politicians won’t be far behind.
Dig Deeper If you are interested in finding out more about the project, visit projecttrumpmore.com. If you are interested, you can sign up to receive a newsletter with updates about how the project is progressing.
Stolen Artifacts Return Home
Last July, btw brought you the story of the owners of Hobby Lobby smuggling ancient artifacts into the country from Iraq. Now, after a long journey, the objects have finally made their way back to Iraq.
The artifacts include ancient cuneiform tablet, which date as far back as 2100 B.C. E. to 1600 B.C.E., and are thought to be legal documents from the ancient city of Mesopotamia. There are also small, decorated clay seals that were used to close documents. In December 2010, the artifacts were looted from their original sites. The owners of Hobby Lobby (the craft store chain), who are Christian, purchased the stolen artifacts from an unnamed dealer for $1.6 million.
The sacred items were then shipped into the United States in boxes marked “tile samples.” Several of the boxes were intercepted by Customs and Border Protection. When the federal government responded by bringing a legal suit against Hobby Lobby, the company agreed to give up the items and pay a $3 million fine. Also, for the next 18 months, any purchases of cultural property by the company will need to be reported and examined by an outside expert. The owners of Hobby Lobby claim that, because they are new to the world of antiques dealing, the purchase was an honest mistake.
Eventually, the artifacts will be returned to their new permanent home in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, where they will be more carefully studied and observed.