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Black Kid Nearly Arrested Trying to Cash Scholarship Check
This series of tweets exemplifies the uphill battle poor people of color have to climb to overcome inequality. The student was attending the first week of a 13 month boot camp. At lunch he went to a check cashing store (with a fee of 10 percent!) to cash the scholarship check he received as student in the course. The employee at the check-cashing place thought his money order was fake and held it and his ID while she called the cops, who proceeded to harass and threaten him until his teacher showed up to defend him.
Scholarships are a great start to offering people of color a hand up, but the systematic challenges they face: poverty, being unbanked, untrusted and harassed by law enforcement are all too typical.
Tools like twitter and other social media platforms make it easy to share everyday stories of inequality. Awareness is the first step toward systematic change.
Jen Boynton is the former Editor-in-Chief of TriplePundit. She has an MBA in Sustainable Management from the Presidio Graduate School and has helped organizations including SAP, PwC and Fair Trade USA with their sustainability communications messaging. She is based in San Diego, California. When she's not at work, she volunteers as a CASA (court appointed special advocate) for children in the foster care system. She enjoys losing fights with toddlers and eating toast scraps. She lives with her family in sunny San Diego.
