Author: TheConversation

By Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University A revolution in charitable giving is underway due to the growth of donor-advised funds in the United States. Known widely as DAFs, these financial accounts are designated for charitable giving. Donors can get an immediate tax deduction by putting money or other assets into the accounts, and advise the accounts’ managers to give away the money at a later date. After years of concerns about how quickly the money reserved for charity gets distributed and whether donor-advised funds need to operate more transparently, proposed new federal regulations are now...

By Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University During the late 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War erupted across the country, college campuses emerged as places of more than intellectual debate over U.S foreign policy and the country’s deeply racist history. Unlike the protesters against the Israel-Hamas War, many of the college-age demonstrators back then faced the very real possibility of being drafted by the U.S. military and forced to serve in what they considered an unjust war. I was one of the fortunate young Black men who had a deferment that enabled me...

By Susanna Ashton, Professor of English, Clemson University In or around 1825, John Andrew Jackson was born enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to spend his life picking cotton. But instead of living a life as a slave, he escaped bondage and became an influential anti-slavery lecturer and writer. He also had a key role in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which historians have argued helped trigger the Civil War by its depiction of the subhuman treatment afforded Black men and women. As a scholar of the lives of enslaved people and their...

By Tracy Fessenden, Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed. Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential...

By Kevin A. Young, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst Signed into law 60 years ago, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in the U.S. based on “race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.” Yet, as a historian who studies social movements and political change, I think the law’s most important lesson for today’s movements is not its content but rather how it was achieved. As firsthand accounts from the era make clear, the movement won because it directly hurt the interests of white business owners. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 boycott of Birmingham businesses,...

By Oludolapo Makinde, Doctoral Candidate, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia While White women may speak of breaking through the “glass ceiling,” for many Black women, it is more like a “concrete ceiling.” Black women experience unique and formidable barriers in the workforce that are not only difficult to break, but also obscure their view of career advancement opportunities. A comprehensive study in 2020 exposed the harsh reality of Black representation on Canadian corporate boards: Out of 1,639 board positions across eight major Canadian cities, only 0.8 per cent were occupied by Black directors. According...