Challenges to Social Inclusion in the US

In the NYT today, there's a story about a public school in Manhattan where 47 percent of the students are homeless.  Beyond providing education, the school supports of a variety of multilingual social and health services.  In the school closets, there are not only school supplies, but essentials like toothpaste and shoes.  The US faces a variety of challenges to social inclusion: racial inequalities and divisions, ethnic diversity, and the need for education and openness to understanding the history, context, and persistence of social divisions.  Reducing inequalities in the US is an important co-requisite to sustainable development, necessary for consensus building on environmental conservation, exploring environmental vulnerability in a meaningful way, and for learning the diversity of knowledge(s) (linguistic, cultural) about our relationship with/in the environment.

From Kevin Powell,
"So there is simply no way to have what my Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brother David Young dubs “courageous conversations” about race and racism in America if you refuse to hear me, if you refuse to read this essay to the very end, if you refuse to acknowledge that my history is your history, too. We are chained together like those slaves were chained together on those ships and those auction blocks. "