Rising Up With Sonali Rising Up With Sonali

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FEATURING CEDRIC DE LEON - Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) last week in a historic win for organized labor. Volkswagen is a German automaker and its Chattanooga plant was the only one in the entire company to not have union representation. It was also the first time a foreign-owned auto manufacturing factory in the southern United States unionized. UAW’s next union vote will take place at two Mercedes plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in mid-May.
Republican governors in Southern states have taken a hard line against UAW. The Governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas signed on to a letter referring to the UAW as, “special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”



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FEATURING SHANA L. REDMOND - Several elite college campuses such as those of Columbia University, New York University, Harvard and Yale were closed on Monday following major protest actions in support of Palestinian rights and against Israel’s on-going genocide in Gaza. This comes days after more than a 100 activists at an encampment were arrested at Columbia. 
Protesters have been vilified as antisemitic even though they include sizeable numbers of Jewish students. Many of those students joined in a seder at the Columbia encampment to mark Passover on Monday. Similar encampments have cropped up at college campuses across the United States. 
Meanwhile, news emerged of the discovery of a mass grave containing more than 300 bodies in southern Gaza, lending even greater credibility to genocide accusations against Israel. The United Nations reported that victims were found stripped naked with their hands tied. 



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FEATURING STEPHANIE ABRAHAM - April is Arab American Heritage month, a time of year meant to celebrate the history and culture of Americans who claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Such recognition was hard fought in light of the decades of demonization that Arab Americans faced after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
But in 2024 when Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza fueled by U.S. weapons, Arab Americans face a dilemma about how to celebrate their heritage—one that Stephanie Abraham writes about in YES! Magazine.



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FEATURING HARRY FEDER - Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology last week announced they would return to requiring SAT and ACT test scores as part of their admissions processes. Starting before the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had begun to drop test requirements. The pandemic lockdowns accelerated the trend and soon thousands of institutions had become test-free or test-optional, including all University of California schools. Now, elite universities like Harvard are backtracking, in spite of decades of research showing the SAT is biased against women, people of color, and low-income applicants. 



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FEATURING MARK DUMMETT - It has been nearly 40 years since the world’s worst industrial disaster claimed the lives of thousands of people and continues to impact more than half a million. Justice remains elusive for the survivors of the Bhopal disaster in India who are living with the impacts of an unprecedented chemical leak from a plant run by Union Carbide Corporation in 1984.
Dow Chemical, which owns Union Carbide, has refused to properly compensate victims and conduct a thorough clean up. Litigation is on-going in both India and the U.S. Amnesty International, which has been documenting the disaster for years, has just released a new report called Bhopal: 40 Years of Injustice. 



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FEATURING JOCELYN MCCALLA - Weeks of chaos and violence in Haiti may be coming to an end as an agreement for a transitional government is drawn up this week. Haiti’s political parties and numerous stakeholding civil society groups have coalesced around the idea of a 9-member council that will remain in power for 22 months before elections can be held for a new president. 
The current crisis peaked when violence broke out across Haiti, prompting Haitian President Ariel Henry to announce his resignation in response to pressure from the United States. He had been in Kenya, on the verge of authorizing a thousand Kenyan forces to deploy to Haiti to tackle political violence. Mr. Henry had taken over the presidency from Jovenel Moïse who was assassinated in 2021. 
Many Haitians are desperate to flee the violence but face hostile politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who has deployed National Guardsmen to the southern part of his state. 



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