The Classroom Race Gap Nobody Is Talking About

For student performance — and well-being — the lack of nonwhite teachers is taking a toll.

John Alcox used to wait outside his kindergarten building before the bell rang. One morning, two older white students emerged from around the corner, yelling a slur at him. “We don’t want you here,” they said. He retorted before the boys slapped his lunch box out of his hand and pushed him to the ground. As the bell rang, the two ran off, and Alcox rose, brushing the dirt off his jacket.

For years, Alcox didn’t tell anyone about this encounter. In kindergarten, he didn’t see many people at school who looked like him: He was one of three Black students in the class at the predominantly white Park Circle Elementary in North Charleston, South Carolina. Ms. Amaker, in second grade, was the only Black teacher Alcox had between kindergarten and seventh grade.

People always talk about all the BAD things steroids can do, but what about the good things they do? Like: believing you can stop a subway train!

UFC Light Heavyweight champion Jon “Bones” Jones got them via “tainted” supplements, was suspended and had his life upended for a period of time. Sylvester Stallone got busted for trying to sneak them into Australia a few years ago. And there are lists of baseball and football players getting popped on the regular for performance-enhancing drug use. Which brings us to an important question.

WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END?!?!

Specifically, when will people back the hell up and leave we who have actually used steroids the hell alone? Alone to imagine that we could stop speeding cars and subway trains. Alone enough to dream that being 300 pounds is still too small.

For the first time in decades, an American political party could have a full debate on the Jewish state.

Sitting onstage during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference last March, Sen. Kamala Harris dropped an anecdote about her own unlikely brush with Zionism as a Jamaican-Indian American girl growing up in Oakland. “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies,” the California senator told the audience, according to a participant who tweeted about it. “I went around with a [Jewish National Fund] box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.”

That meant-to-endear aside wasn’t surprising. Harris had related the same anecdote at the AIPAC summit the previous year. The difference? In 2017, she had made a public speech. Last year, though, Harris wasn’t exactly eager to broadcast her presence before the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby. She spoke not in a marquee event, but in an “off record” speech, not listed on the conference website or advertised by organizers, and not acknowledged by her team until participants revealed her presence.