Emphasis on the word your. If you’re not familiar with Frederick Douglass’s speech entitled What, to a Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?, you should be. You can read the text here. The Fourth of July is a few weeks away, but you can bookmark the speech and come back to it. Or you can do what I’m doing now. Think about the relevance of Douglass’s speech in light of …
Social Justice
It doesn’t take any real level of scholarship to understand Mississippi has struggled with equity since it was granted statehood more than two centuries ago. That trend has continued with the state’s latest—and honestly feeble—attempt to address the disproportionate economic and social toll the COVID-19 pandemic is exacting on Black Mississippians, who represent nearly 40 percent of the state’s population. It’s important to keep that number in mind. Forty …
Let me start with a few disclaimers. As a leadership team, we chose not to accept an invitation from another agency to submit a joint bid to provide creative and media placement support for the Mississippi Lottery. Even if we had chosen to participate, we recognize we may not have been awarded the contract. That’s the nature of the request for proposal process. I am not writing this to …
Inspiration is the good friend who sends the unexpected but perfectly timed text message or DM. This morning I noticed a police car idling in the parking lot. My lived experience and recent history urged caution and concern. Curiosity (and chores – I had to sweep the front steps) urged me to investigate. What I saw was as striking as it was inspiring. The officer ( I wish I …
What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true. These are the words of Gareth Cook, shared at the end of his recent article on accomplished economist Raj Chetty in the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic. Cook explores the corners of Chetty’s version of …
“…by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context.” – Theodore Gioia Theodore Gioia makes a very salient point in this article about the use of classical music in commercial advertising from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Before I journey further into this idea, I encourage you to read the article, which although veers significantly midstream, presents a rather appalling picture of …
It seems like a new study comes out every day about something. Theories are posited. Hypotheses are proven or disproven. Claims are made, then retracted. It can all be a bit confusing. However, over the past fifteen years, one piece of data has remained persistently and painfully true. There is a huge chasm in exposure and opportunity for children based purely upon their socioeconomic status. A recent episode of Innovation …
“And we appeal to the friends of progress and to our citizens of the several states to continue their efforts to the various legislatures until every state can boast of having a free school system, with no distinction in dissemination of knowledge to its inhabitants on account of race, color, sex, creed or previous condition.” And nearly 15 decades later, the friends of progress and citizens of several states are …
A few weeks ago, we had a brief discussion about the our moral obligation to people who work with us as employees or contractors. I had a similar conversation at the end of last year with the head of a larger agency, and a few weeks before that I had the same conversation with my accountant. Because it’s important. Last month, I read an article on The Intercept detailing the …
As I scrolled through my personal Twitter feed this past weekend, I scrolled upon a post of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. The post included the above picture of Bezos sitting at a desk with one computer in a makeshift office on which the walls hung an airbrushed “Amazon.com” banner. The text attached to the picture read, “Jeff Bezos 1999. Next time you want to give up, think of this.” …