Hollowed-Out

I propose this as a metaphor for a large country whose institutions are being hollowed out.

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MLK: Waging Wars Abroad is Inconsistent with Insisting on Non-Violent Protest

Martin Luther King:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.

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Inconvenient Discrimination Against People from Asia

As reported by Renu Mukherjee at City Journal, "Inconvenient Discrimination: The American Psychological Association once acknowledged bias against Asian Americans in college admissions; today, it would rather not."

In 2012, the American Psychological Association (APA) published an online essay about discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions. Penned by a psychology graduate student named Yi-Chen (Jenny) Wu, the essay argued that such discrimination might make American teenagers of Asian origin hesitant to identify as such and thereby negatively affect their racial and ethnic identity development and mental health. At the time, the APA described the subject of Wu’s essay as a “relevant psychosocial and psychological health and well-being topic.”

A decade later, the organization no longer believes this.

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