The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

On April 26, 2023, I had the pleasure of sharing some of the highlights of my upcoming book, A Culturally-Centered and Intersection Approach to Reproductive Justice: An Edited Collection . This book is co-edited by two Hofstra University Rhetoric & Public Advocacy and Rabinowitz Honors College alums, Sabrina Singh and Christina Mary Joseph. Much of the commonly understood history of reproductive justice movements has typically centered the experiences of white, cisgendered, and non-disabled women in the West. The less widely available information which includes women of color and women in the Global South tends to focus only on the abuses they have suffered without deeper interrogations into issues such as structures, barriers, or even agency. Globally, women of color are still more likely to face poverty and instability, which can pose a barrier to consistent contraceptive use, have the highest rate of unintended pregnancies, seek the highest numbers of abortions, and are still ...

Passed in California in 2019, The CROWN Act is an official law that forbids hair discrimination based on race by denying employment and educational opportunities. An acronym for ‘ C reating a R espectful and O pen W orld for N atural H air’, this law also prohibits bias based on hair texture and protective hairstyles such as braids, locs, twists and many other hairstyles. Currently, the CROWN Act has already been enacted in 19 states in the U.S. and is actively encouraging people around the country to notify their state legislators by signing petitions so the law can become nationwide. Though the Senate has enacted this law, it is still up to each state to adopt the law and make hair discrimination illegal. Due to this, more than half of the countries have still not passed the CROWN Act in their state. One of the most crucial hair discrimination cases recently is the story of Treyvion Grey, a Black high school senior from Texas who was recently suspended because his locs were too lo...

Artificial intelligence and software will one day be a problem for humanity but may enrich our minds as well. I’m sure you’ve heard of this idea before from the many works of fiction that explore this idea, some conspiracy theorist that you’ve encountered, or from your own mind because this has been an idea that you have pondered yourself. While this has been nothing more than an abstract concept for decades, modern technological advancements make the idea much more plausible especially when looking at it from the lens of race, culture, social justice. According to Merriam-Webster, racism is “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”. Racism is a racial issue that ChatGPT (a software developed by OpenAI) is guilty of inciting. ChatGPT has a filter that doesn’t allow its services to be used to produce biased results. However, a professor who focuses on psychology and...