Public Affairs and Government

A year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Nicole Cooley saw the scale of destruction for the first time, as she drove from Florida to her hometown of New Orleans to visit her parents. “Everything was gone,” says Cooley, a professor of English at Queens College, recalling the ride with her husband and two daughters along Highway 90. “It was as if someone had erased all of the towns — from Mississippi to New Orleans.” Cooley, a poet and founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at the college, was so affected by what she witnessed, she devoted her next book of poems, “Breach,” (April 2010), to the tragedy and its aftermath. “I had to spend the next year working on this book about Katrina.”

They were the postwar working class of New York. Joining Doug in this episode is their chronicler, Joshua Freeman. Joshua is professor of history at Queens College. He is the author of "In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in NYC, 1933-1936" and co-author of "Who Built America." The "dean of New York labor historians" Prof. Freeman is a frequent commentator on organized labor and union politics. Prof. Freeman runs the new MA program in Labor Studies at the Murphy Center, CUNY. Ten years ago, Prof. Freeman published the award-winning social and labor history, "Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II." Doug and Prof. Freeman look over the postwar NY working class survey - what's happened to NY and its working class over the decade since the book was published - and take a look forward at possible and desirable futures.

Queens College sociologist Stephen Steinberg believes that it’s important to look beyond the historic election of the nation’s first African-American president and hope that his eloquent rhetoric will be turned into concrete results. “The bigger question is whether Obama’s election is merely a symbolic event or whether it will translate into policies that will advance the unfinished civil rights agenda,” said Prof. Steinberg, who was recently appointed Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies by Queens College, where he has taught since 1977. The author of several groundbreaking books, including “The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America,” and his latest work, “Race Relations: A Critique,” Prof. Steinberg’s studies on urban cultures and the role race plays in society have earned him the respect of colleagues worldwide

Not only are blacks and Latinos disproportionately charged with marijuana possession in New York City, the tactics used by the police are questionable, says Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center. In his report, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City,” Levine found that between 1997 and 2009 nearly nine out of ten people charged with possessing marijuana came from the two groups, the majority being African Americans, even though national surveys show whites to be the heaviest users. Levine points out that possession of seven-eighths of an ounce, or less, of the drug in New York is a violation, not a crime. “But if that marijuana is open to the public view–meaning someone had been told by the police to take it out of their pocket–then it becomes a crime. The cops are allowed to trick people.”