Social justice

Social justice

I was surrounded by commuters. Nobody intervened. I had been travelling alone and was checking my route home in a passageway, when suddenly I felt someone looming over me. I'd looked up to find a man standing inches from my face, staring down at me. He was motionless, and looking me dead in the eye. I froze - I thought I was about to be mugged.

Santa Clara County officials announced Wednesday a sweeping civil enforcement action against a Milpitas-based home care business, alleging its owners perpetrated a complex scheme to exploit immigrant caregivers. At a Nov. 12 press conference in San José, LoPresti said the lawsuit sends a "clear and simple" message to employers. "We will hold accountable employers who seek to profit by violating the law and exploiting vulnerable immigrant workers," LoPresti said. "We will be sure that they face their day in court."

In an email yesterday, Assistant District Attorney David Angel said the DA's Office is troubled by the ACLU lawsuit because it seeks "thousands upon thousands" of private records that identify Santa Clara County individuals who have been charged with a crime. "We have provided the ACLU, and many others, with tremendous quantities of de-identified and aggregate data," Angel said. "We remain convinced that, especially in today's environment, people have a right to privacy concerning their records."

The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, which is supposed to protect students from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, age and disability status, isn't what it once was. The Trump administration laid off nearly half the staff in March, shuttered seven of its 12 regional offices, shifted the hollowed-out agency's focus to new priorities (including keeping transgender women out of women's sports) and then reportedly terminated more employees amid the ongoing shutdown.

Oakland Critical Mass is a monthly group bike ride that takes place every first Friday of the month, which starts at 8 pm at the BikeLink bike lockers at 14th and Broadway, and ends at 23rd and Telegraph where Oakland Art Murmur is underway. Critical Mass is argued to be a political-protest for bikers' rights, but it's also a fun social ride that takes over the streets.

All of them are Indigenous Q'eqchi' Maya women from the municipality of Coban located in Alta Verapaz, Northern Guatemala and they work on a banana plantation in the Mexican state of Chiapas. All of them found jobs there after hearing an announcement: Get on the truck, you're going to work in Mexico! They weren't forced to come, but they were completely disoriented upon moving countries. In May of 2025, almost a month after their arrival, none of them were exactly sure of where they were.

The particular problem that I'm worried about is wokeness, because the reason why I think the great feminization thesis is important to talk about is because I see a lot of people walking around right now thinking that wokeness is over. They say the vibe shift is here. We don't need to worry about it anymore. But I'm saying that if it's the result of structural forces and demographic feminization, then we cannot be so complacent because wokeness is here to stay.

Authentic is more than a critique of the empty promise of being authentic at work. It is an invitation to question the structural realities of what it takes to be a person at work. To begin, we must take seriously the health and wellbeing of workers most impacted by harmful policies, performative practices, and opportunistic rhetoric about representation and inclusion.

The spectacle was almost too on the nose: Here was the nexus of women's (limited) history within the executive branch, once home to Jacqueline Kennedy's Rose Garden and Laura Bush's restored movie theater, now totally demolished. Donald Trump has made clear his wishes to put a new ballroom in the East Wing's place. But his planned additions to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also include the installation of an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon for America's 250th birthday celebration.

And yet, this fall, I found myself checking the balance on my Bridge Card (Michigan's version of SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) as the federal government shut down and the USDA warned that benefits for November would not be going out, affecting 1.4 million Michiganders, or about 42 million people nationwide. (That amounts to roughly 1 in 8 people.) My last deposit came on October 17 and I won't be waiting to see whether I'll eat next month.

When blind Union City resident Lisamaria Martinez sought help from the Clerk-Recorder's office staff to file paperwork for her new business in 2019, she was repeatedly denied assistance violating the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), a federal jury ruled. CRO staff members refused to assist Martinez with signing a fictitious business name form in 2019, stating that only the business owner could complete the legal paperwork, according to court documents.

Alan Artale, stepfather to Leanne Marie Hausberg, a 14-year-old biracial Native American girl, did what every American is told to do when their child goes missing. He immediately reported Hausberg's disappearance to the New York City police department. But 26 years later, speaking at the family's neighbourhood park in Brooklyn, New York, he says their response at the time felt dismissive.

Millions of pounds a month are lost by UK shops and businesses because they are not accessible to people with disabilities, according to an awareness campaign. Purple Tuesday, which says a "mindset change" is needed, is urging retailers to consider new ways of improving inclusion such as adapting sensory experiences for neurodivergent people. Some 16 million people in the UK have a disability, and 90% of disabled people found their shopping experience was affected by a lack of accessibility, according to the Business Disability Forum.

"She was humiliated and physically confronted while still inside the stall, pulling up her pants, and forced to show ID to 'prove' her sex," Victor wrote in an since-deleted Google review. "'Even after verifying she is a woman, we were both ejected from the event entirely, while shaken, crying, and publicly shamed.'"

NDN has had to cut our budget by nearly half and has had to reduce the size of our staff by 40. And that's been hard.

"The problem is, [TERFs] are getting crazier and more extreme," she said. "If you admit 'trans women don't belong in women's sports,' they agree, but call you a man the whole time. If you admit, 'I understand I am a biological man, but this is how I want to live my life and talking about me like this is degrading,' they scream about free speech."

Sr Stan was a powerful voice for compassion, equality, and systemic change throughout her life,

At first, the renderings looked like progress for the majority-Black town: glass-and-concrete buildings promising jobs, innovation, and a future rooted in Big Tech. But the fine print told a different story: a complex that would level 700 acres of forest, swallow nearly 2 million gallons of water a day, and draw enough electricity to power a city the size of Seattle. What officials pitched as transformation began to feel, to Simelton, like extraction.

This centuries-old symbol of hate and racial violence evokes deep emotion and has no place in our community,

In the early years, my leadership was marked by urgency: an attempt to right personal wrongs and push against the injustice I had witnessed. Over time, that urgency matured into collective vision. Together with our staff, board, and community, we transformed Sakhi from an organization serving mostly cisgender heterosexual women into one that welcomes all survivors of violence. We redefined our work away from "empowerment"-a word that implies survivors are powerless-and instead built around survivor power and survivor leadership.

On a sunny afternoon in Harlem, judges, political figures and community organizers gathered to present the late Franklin H. Williams with a gift for his 108th birthday: the dedication of a street corner just outside the housing complex where he spent much of his life one built in response to segregation he'd help to dismantle in his storied career as a civil rights attorney and diplomat.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to "Movement Memos," a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I'm your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we're talking about what it takes to stay human and protect each other in fascistic times - how we build networks of care, defend our neighbors, grieve, and make space for joy. We'll be hearing from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer, and academic.

As another record for the number of homeless people in our country is broken, there are grounds for fearing we may be coming dangerously close to accepting the situation as a problem we cannot solve.

He told BBC London: "I went to the driver and ask 'please can I have my bank card?' "He said 'get out, I don't like Jewish people you look like a Mossad agent'. I said 'why you say that?' So I was shocked."

STATEN ISLAND, NY - The Staten Island Branch of the NAACP will mark its 100th anniversary with a Freedom Fund Luncheon on Saturday, Nov. 8 at Nicotra's Ballroom in the Hilton Garden Inn. The milestone event will run from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and will honor individuals and institutions that have contributed to the borough's legacy of equity and justice over the past century. The celebration aims to recognize a century of service, leadership, and progress while looking ahead to the next 100 years.