Healing Race
In this episode, Todd and Andre continue their conversation about the role of racial identity in our country’s racial challenges. How strongly do white Americans identify with being white? Are the motivations for white Americans to identify as white the same as and as strong as the motivations for Black Americans to identify as Black?
UNITE is a national initiative to ease divisions, prevent violence, and solve problems. UNITE designed the Dignity Index, an eight-point scale that measures the level of contempt or dignity in a selected passage of speech. Lower scores (1-4) reflect a lack of dignity and the presence of contempt, with the lowest score (1) showing the most contempt. The higher scores (5-8) reflect language grounded in dignity, with the highest score (8) showing the most dignity.
In September 2022, a team from the University of Utah that included the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, the David Eccles School of Business, and the Hinckley Institute of Politics joined the project UNITE effort to pilot the Dignity Index in Utah. With a team of 22 student coders from politically and ideologically diverse backgrounds, the Utah pilot tested using the Dignity Index in coding passages in Utah political campaigns.
"We're in a doom loop of toxic politics," says political reform scholar Lee Drutman. In this new video from Unite America, Drutman's doom loop theory is explained and we unpack how the doom loop threatens the very fabric of our nation.
How did we get here? What are the impacts of the doom loop? And most importantly, how do we get out?
Open Primaries is building a coalition of diverse Americans to enact open primaries in all 50 states.
Why do we need open primaries? Millions of independent voters - the fastest growing segment of the electorate - are excluded from voting in closed partisan primaries. Voters want to be able to choose from among all the candidates. Closed partisan primaries don't allow that.
Throughout US history, judges, scholars, and citizens have argued about how to go about interpreting the US Constitution. The current Supreme Court has embraced a methodology called “originalism” or “original public meaning.” But what exactly is “originalism”? What is its backstory? How does it differ from other approaches to interpretation? Are there good arguments for and against it? How does the Court’s focus on this one methodology shape its decisions and affect our lives? Three distinguished authorities will help us understand originalism and its discontents in this presentation from the Network for Responsible Public Policy.
