Category: Inclusion

I could have never imaged an openly gay professional boxer. Then I found Orlando Cruz. This 31-year-old Puerto Rican featherweight is revving up to challenge Mexican boxer Jorge Pazos for the World Boxing Organization’s (WBO) Latino title. Cruz has a good chance at it. Their greatest fear is being beaten by Cruz. “I’ve been fighting…

October is National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month. With one incident of bullying every seven minutes, sadly, bullying is the most frequent form of violence school-aged children encounter. Their stories are unimaginably painful. In the 2011 documentary film, Bully, film director, Lee Hirsch, also the victim of bullying, gives us a window into the lives of five…

The campaign has successfully latched on to Warren’s claim of Native American roots as a rallying tool to deflect attention away from pressing issues facing Massachusetts residents, but also to attack, in a more insidious way, the hotly contested issue of affirmative action. Nonetheless, in a Boston.com article dated April 30, 2012, Noah Bierman reported…

Homophobia is part and parcel of male professional sports. Gay epithets are so pervasive among players that many players are sadly totally unaware of the weight and meaning of the terms. Homophobia can be addressed through sports “It didn’t have significance to the way that’s being interpreted right now,” Toronto Blue Jays shortstop, Yunel Escobar,…

Before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic National Party released its 2012 platform. Its theme – “Moving America Forward.” One of the major party planks in the platform is its full-throated support of marriage equality. The big worry is that African Americans might not come out to the polls in large numbers…

The 2012 London Summer Olympics begins July 27th. Many women who chose to participate in sports often went to great lengths to display traditional heterosexual cultural markers through their clothing, hairstyles and mannerisms. While we all know that homophobia in sports is the other “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” twenty-one openly LGBTQ athletes, two coaches and…

On July 10th, PBS’s “Frontline” aired the anxiously awaited documentary, “Endgame: AIDS in Black America.” The documentary opened with this sobering message: “Today in America, 152 people will become infected with H.I.V. Half of them will be black. Today in America, two-thirds of the new H.I.V. cases among women will be black. Today in America,…

And on the days we were together, time would glide… The African American celebrity gossip, news, popular culture and entertainment blog Bossip.com outed Latifah in September 2010 with photos of Latifah and gal pal and “personal trainer” Jeanette Jenkins in a tender embrace that was not intended for public viewing. When R&B soul diva Alicia…

-UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura [1] [The names in this commentary have been changed to protect identities.] FRIDAY, JUNE 27TH, WAS THE last day of school that year. And with school out, my middle-school cronies and I looked forward to a summer reprieve from rioting against Italian, Irish and Jewish public school kids for being bussed…