Author Archives: Benjamin Todd Jealous

By Ben Jealous, Special to the AFRO Recently, I traveled from Baltimore, the city where my mother grew up, to Portland, Maine, where my dad did. It’s easy for many to see differences between one of the Blackest cities in America and the largest city in one of America’s whitest states. What always hits me […]

By Ben Jealous All of us suffered the week of July 2-8. Day after day, we saw the hottest average temperatures ever recorded on Earth. Now imagine if it had been 10 percent hotter where you live. That wasn’t hard to do for residents in urban neighborhoods where pavement, concrete and glass far surpass leafy […]

By Ben Jealous The interstates built in the 1950s and 1960s killed the vitality of the communities where people of color and the poor lived, from Overtown in Miami to the Hill District in Pittsburgh to the South and West Sides of Chicago. The disruption and segregation of those communities happened by design. The harm […]

By Ben Jealous The theme for the 53rd Earth Day last Saturday was a timely one: Invest in Our Planet. This country has just begun to do that through the infrastructure and clean energy packages that President Biden and Congress approved in 2021 and 2022. We will be spending more money transforming our economy in […]

By Ben Jealous If a public opinion poll done last month is right, more than half of you won’t know what I mean by the initials “ESG,” and fewer than one in 10 will understand what they mean for financial markets. But listening to some self-interested politicians, many of whom have ties to our dirtiest […]

By Ben Jealous This month in 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated leading a bold effort to teach America an urgent lesson: Racism is not just the boot on the neck of people of color, it is also the great wedge that divides Americans. And everyone who gets divided loses. On Dec. […]

By Ben Jealous ConocoPhillips needs more than the disastrous approval it won from the Biden administration last week to proceed with its Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope. It needs $8 to $10 billion to build 199 wells, hundreds of miles of road and pipelines, a processing plant, and an airstrip on 499 […]

By Ben Jealous Whether it’s protecting the planet or preserving our democracy, it can seem at times that our individual actions fall short against the biggest challenges. Let me tell you why that isn’t true. We tend to overlook that issues like these arise in the first place because of the sum of a lot […]

By Ben Jealous As we greet 2023, I’m feeling more than the typical seasonal optimism. America is primed once again for a historic achievement, call it our “Earth shot.” In the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States spent the current dollar equivalent of just under $300 billion on “landing a man on the moon […]

By Ben Jealous It strikes me that the days we’re living through represent a metaphor for our national dilemma. January 6th and the weight of history that date carries are in the rearview mirror, at least on the calendar. Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream still is on the horizon. America’s existential challenge is […]