WASHINGTON
Kristen Clarke was looking for a new athletic challenge during her junior year in high school. Girls’ basketball didn’t interest her because she couldn’t dribble. Girls’ ice hockey? She didn’t skate. Volleyball didn’t seem intense enough.
Then she recalled how hard the boys’ wrestling team worked out. They ran until they sweated off enough pounds to make a weight class. They lifted weights. They left practice exhausted. So, in an audacious move for the early 1990s, Clarke joined the boys’ team.
“They were giving it everything. If she was going to do a winter sport, she said, ‘might as well do the most difficult one,’” recalled Window Snyder, a friend and classmate of Clarke’s at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. “I don’t think she ever even thought about it being a boys’ sport. That is who she was. Whatever she was doing had to be challenging.”
Racism is the idea that one racial group is inferior or superior to another, and has the social power to carry out and benefit from systemic discrimination. This applies to most, if not all, institutions in this country, including public media. Anti-Blackness and white supremacy shape both the institutional policies and practices of society and shape the cultural beliefs and values that support racist policies and practices.
White supremacy is the political and socio-economic system that allows white people both at a collective and individual level to enjoy structural advantage and rights that other racial and ethnic groups do not.
Robert A. DeLeo of Winthrop, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1990 and went on to serve as Speaker of the House for 12 years, delivered his farewell address in the House Chambers at the Statehouse in Boston Tuesday afternoon.
The speech marked the end of a legendary political career for Winthrop’s favorite son who served as a Winthrop Town Meeting member and a member of the Board of Selectmen before running successfully for a Winthrop-Revere seat in the House. Seventy-year-old Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who served for nearly 30 years in the House, and a dozen as Speaker, delivered his farewell remarks on December 29, at the House of Representatives Chamber at the State House .