Connecting to the Real World: “The Future in My Arms” +
News Articles on Social Responsibility
Common Core Standards: RI.2 Determine a central idea of a text; provide a summary of the text. RI.6 Determine an author’s point
of view in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view.
Directions: Read the four news articles below thinking about the main idea of “The Future in My
Arms”, Danticat’s perspective on adult’s responsibility for children and community, and the essential
questions posed (What does a community owe its young people? Does it take village to raise a
child?).
Compare Danticat’s perspective on this topic to those who are the subject(s) of each article. Do they
share the same ideas? Do the authors of the article make use of rhetorical questions to help
communicate their perspectives? Answer the “After Reading Questions” when you have read all four
articles.
For each article, monitor your reading by:
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Predict what will happen next
Question the event described and why they are important
Reread passages that you do not understand or find confusing
Summarize what you have just read by paraphrasing the central ideas in your own words.
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Text #1: From the Los Angeles Times found @
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/26/entertainment/la-et-ms-jay-z-on-social-responsibility-mypresence-is-charity-20130726
Jay Z on social responsibility: 'My presence is charity'
July 26, 2013|By August Brown
Jay Z, whose "Magna Carta Holy Grail" retains its grip atop the… (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles…)
Kanye West may believe he is a god, but somehow Jay Z just upped him in the ontological battle over each's
greatness.
This particular flame war started in 2012, when singer and longtime civil rights activist Harry Belafonte told the
Hollywood Reporter that "I think one of the great abuses of this modern time is that we should have had such highprofile artists, powerful celebrities," he said. "But they have turned their back on social responsibility. That goes
for Jay-Z and Beyoncé, for example. Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking. I really think he is black."
In a new clip from a long interview with Rap Radar's Elliott Wilson, the newly un-hyphenated Jay Z was clearly
stung by Belafonte's remarks. But Jay's reply was even more remarkable:
"I’m offended by that because first of all, and this is going to sound arrogant, but my presence is charity. Just who I
am," he said. "Just like Obama’s is. Obama provides hope. Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a
nation, and outside of America is enough."
Well, you can't say he didn't warn us that he was about to sound arrogant.
There's a chance he might have stumbled over a larger idea about his own laudable success story providing hope to
marginalized people. And to his credit, he has been outspoken in the wake of Trayvon Martin's killing and the
subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman.
But for an artist so clearly gifted with language to suggest that his mere existence in the world is on par with
charitable work? Yeesh.
Perhaps he's a little self-conscious that he needs cellphone companies and a contemporary art-world coterie to
bolster the narrative of his new album?
Text #2: From the Los Angeles Times found @
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/05/local/la-me-schools-aspen-20130305
Students learning lessons in social responsibility
World-renowned inventors, explorers and artists encourage student teams participating in the Aspen
Challenge to develop solutions to social problems.
March 05, 2013|By Dalina Castellanos, Los Angeles Times
The team from Fairfax High School finishes an exercise as part of the Aspen… (Lawrence K. Ho, Los Angeles…)
Taking a cue from TOMS Shoes — in which the company donates a pair of shoes to needy children for every pair
bought — the social entrepreneurship class at Environmental Charter School in Lawndale recently came up with
ways to do something similar with such everyday items as T-shirts and socks.
What if we make the hoodie reversible to reduce the need to buy more than one," asked Mohamad El Hajj Younes,
17. "And for every one sold, another would be donated to a shelter in the county where they purchased it."
His classmates huddled in groups to develop "for-purpose" business plans, instead of the traditional for-profit and
nonprofit models.
The 13-year-old independently run charter designs its courses with a focus on environmental sustainability.
Teachers Brandie Cobb and Brent Freeman adapted the economics class curriculum to weave in lessons about civic
responsibility.
"Students are surrounded by social issues and are looking for ways to address them," Cobb said.
Other schools have also adopted such social awareness programs. The Los Angeles Unified School District is
participating in the Aspen Challenge, a competition for 20 high schools in which the winner will attend the Aspen
Ideas Festival in Colorado.
World-renowned inventors, explorers and artists, including oceanographer David Gallo and actress Anna Deavere
Smith, spoke to those teams recently to encourage them to develop solutions to social problems.
"Social awareness is built almost without exception through experience," said L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy. "You
have to experience an event… that triggers the ability to understand social awareness and then scaffold on previous
knowledge."
The students brainstormed over such questions as: How can dance and art resolve conflicts and change communities
and can underutilized school resources be used on non-school days to create a nutritional revolution?
"Walking around our campus, people are in their comfort zones," said Janet Shin, a junior on the John Marshall
High School team. "They're not engaged and it reflects how they participate in the community."
The idea behind programs like the social entrepreneurship class and the Aspen Challenge is to take students out of
that comfort zone, to encourage them to engage with their communities and the world outside school.
The key is to address students "as if they are people who are going to create change," said Fréda Antoine, the Fairfax
High School environmental science teacher and team coach. She said the opportunity gives her students and others
a level of accountability not usually awarded to them at school.
"They are the ones who will ultimately inherit the Earth and they need to learn to be responsible," she said.
The Aspen Challenge was created in part by the Bezos Family Foundation, established by Mike and Jackie Bezos,
parents of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, to make education an interactive experience.
"Our belief is that you necessarily don't own your education unless you put it into action, so we're focusing on the
youth voice," said Jackie Bezos. "We're bringing them in at a younger age to be co-creators of solutions."
Environmental charter student Kiera Adams had never heard of the term "social entrepreneurship," but now the 17year-old hopes to one day work for a company with a community awareness policy. She and two team members won
a class competition to turn an easily disposable item into a reusable gift by turning a whoopee cushion into a
birthday balloon.
"I've become impassioned about our community and finding ways to fix social injustices we all face," she said. "If
items are available that help people, it makes me want to buy that item and help humanity in a way."
Text #3 From The Los Angeles Times found online
@http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/06/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20111106
Corporations need a social conscience
The late economist Milton Friedman in 1970 belittled talk of corporate social responsibility as 'pure and
unadulterated socialism.' But the world — and companies' influence — has changed since then.
November 06, 2011|Michael Hiltzik
American corporations plainly are smarting from the accusation that they've abandoned their sense of social
responsibility in pursuit of higher profits.
You can tell that by the defensive indignation with which the business community has greeted President Obama's
rhetorical attacks on "millionaires and billionaires." And by Bank of America's defensiveness in spinning the
cancellation of its $5 debit card fee as rather an act of consumer altruism. ("We have listened to our customers very
closely," a spokesman said.)
Then there are the CEO statements collected by Harvard Business Review for an online forum titled The CEO's Role
in Fixing the System, some of which carry the whiff of the heebie-jeebies experienced by ancient regime dandies
facing down a torch-bearing mob of Jacobins.
For example, Raymond Gilmartin, the former chairman and CEO of Merck, acknowledged in the forum that
corporate behavior in the economic slump had "deepened a widespread public distrust of corporations and
capitalism." He proposed that CEOs and boards start acting "as agents of society, rather than shareholders."
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz used the same forum to promote his public campaign urging CEOs to step up job
creation efforts across the board.
There are many reasons why corporate social responsibility is on the table these days. One is that the sharp rise in
business profits since the 2008 crash hasn't produced a commensurately sharp rise in hiring. Occupy Wall Street
and its coast-to-coast offspring have catalyzed public disaffection with the gulf between the banking industry's
health and its millions of home foreclosures.
Philanthropy experts say corporate giving has ticked up recently, possibly in response to signs of public discontent.
One in four major companies surveyed by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, which has current or
former top executives from 22 major companies on its board, have increased their giving by 25% or more since
2007. (On the other hand, 21% of the surveyed companies cut their giving by 25% or more.)
"We're seeing a whole new approach in corporate responsibility," Charles Moore, the committee's executive director,
told me. Corporations are integrating philanthropy into their business strategies, say, by supporting charitable
programs serving their suppliers, customers or markets — PepsiCo paying to train the Mexican farmers who provide
it with its corn syrup or Novartis delivering health education in rural India to residents who might end up buying its
drugs.
The question always is whether companies undertake these ventures because they're the right thing to do or because
they want to look altruistic for marketing purposes. In other words, are improved profits a collateral benefit or the
main point?
Some might say that it doesn't matter, as long as you end up with less penurious farmers or healthier peasants. But
the danger is that if it's seen chiefly as a PR device, then corporate giving — currently a minuscule one-tenth of 1% of
revenue among major corporations, according to the committee's latest survey — will be first on the chopping block
in economic downturns.
Moreover, the giving-for-giving's-sake model always runs up against the notion that the only constituency that
counts in corporate management is the shareholder. The modern dean of this school was the late eminent economist
Milton Friedman, who in a 1970 article belittled talk of corporate social responsibility as "pure and unadulterated
socialism."
Friedman called corporate social responsibility a "fundamentally subversive doctrine." He conceded that some
putatively socially beneficial actions such as improving local schools might have indirect benefits for a corporation —
make it easier to recruit employees, for instance — but for the most part he scorned that rationale as "hypocritical
window dressing."
Friedman maintained that society would benefit as a whole only if managements focused on increasing profits
"within the rules of the game," which meant without deception or fraud.
That would provide customers with the best products and prices, workers with sustainable employment, and
shareholders with plenty of money to spend on their own choice of good works, if they so wished. In other words,
take care of profits, and the free market will take care of everything else.
Friedman, who died in 2006, wasn't shooting random mortar shells into the sky. He was responding to a public
debate on the corporation's role in society launched in the late '60s that sounds very much like the direct forebear of
Occupy Wall Street.
Dissident shareholders at Bank of America, AT&T and dozens of other companies freaked out managements by
questioning not their financial results but the "social impact" of their activities, and disrupted annual meetings with
demands for proxy votes on such issues as their company's role in the Vietnam War, its record on minority hiring
and its contribution to pollution.
Text #4 From the Baltimore Sun found online @ http://articles.baltimoresun.com/200312-08/news/0312080118_1_preschool-and-child-universal-preschool-drug-coverage
Child care: Beyond personal responsibility
December 08, 2003|By Ellen Goodman
BOSTON - This tale of elders and children, of common dollars and common sense, began behind a
one-way mirror.
Earlier this fall, I watched a dozen mothers talking about child care. The women had a variety of
caregivers for their children, from grandmas to groups, from preschool to after school. They talked
about complex arrangements, about the good and the bad, the costly and the more costly.
But when the conversation veered toward a gripe, one mother said, "Well, nobody asked us to have
these children." And the others shook their heads in agreement.
The people running the focus group for the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense and
Education Fund jotted down the familiar phrase: "Nobody asked us to have these children." It was a
sentence that came up in every group. It seemed that moms had absorbed the ethic of individual
responsibility through the cultural placenta. The responsibility for child care had fallen from their
wombs and onto their laps.
Well, nobody did ask them - or any of us - to have kids. Personal responsibility is a great family
strength. But sometimes it's also a political stumbling block, and sometimes it's applied selectively, if
not randomly. So, listening, I wondered, is this why we've never set in place a child care strategy from
preschool to after school?
I thought about those mothers when the prescription drug bill passed, enlarging Medicare by $400
billion over 10 years. Put aside questions about a bill that may offer more hype than help. What's
notable is that prescription drugs for the elderly had become the issue of the moment: Congress had
to do something.
Political scientists write doctoral theses trying to explain why one social issue gets on the radar
screen and then on the docket. But it's still worth asking why $400 billion is going to elders on
Medicare instead of, say, uninsured workers or kids programs such as universal preschool and child
care.
I know the cliché: Children don't vote. There's no kiddie AARP. But middle-age Americans were at
least as supportive, in some cases more supportive, of prescription drug coverage as seniors
themselves. Why hasn't that attention turned down the age scale? How come all the kids got was the
debt?
Economist Belle Sawhill at the Brookings Institution says that we have "silo" debates, each issue in a
separate container. In the 10th year, the Medicare bill will cost $70 billion - just enough to pay for
every child initiative on the menu from paid family leave to fully funded Head Start to universal
preschool.
"I wonder what would have happened if you told the voters, `This is what you could have bought,
which would you prefer?'" she asked.
I don't want to describe this as a generational struggle. After all, we could pay for the same array of
kids programs by eliminating the part of the 2001 tax cut that went to the wealthiest 20 percent of
Americans. But let me go back to my mirror.
There are a whole lot of difficulties in mobilizing the child care issue. The very people most stretched
between work and family doesn’t have a lot of energy left for politics. Many parents worry about child
care only when it falls apart. The child care discussion was framed in the 1970s around the issue of a
woman's choice to work. It's been caught in the mommy wars and the cultural wars.
But if we don't have a kid care constituency, if we don't have what every European country has, is it
fundamentally because Americans don't regard children as a common good? Because nobody asked
us to have them?
Today, 70 percent of families with kids have either two working parents or a single working parent.
Sometimes it seems that everything has changed except the internal dialogue.
Kathy Rodgers, the head of NOW LDEF, points out, "No one ever says, `It's my responsibility to
educate my own child, or to doctor my own child when she's sick.'" How do you shift the dialogue to
the responsibility of demanding help?
I don't want to suggest that no one is talking about work and families and child care. Arnold
Schwarzenegger made his political debut touting after-school programs in California. Every one of the
presidential crop of Democrats offers something for working families, from paid leave to universal
preschool.
But we are far from the political moment when the country decides it must do something. The truth is
that we do not yet regard a 3- or 4-year-old the way we regard a 65-year-old. We need a new mirror
that reflects child-raising as something more than a private luxury.
After Reading Questions
Common Core Standards: RI.2 Determine a central idea of a text; provide a summary of the text. RI.6
Determine an author’s point of view in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of
view.
Directions: After reading each of the articles, answer the following questions for each article.
1. Who is the author? Where is the article published? Who is their intended audience?
How do you know?
2. If applicable, list two opinion statements. Why do you know they are opinions?
3. What is the tone or attitude (perspective) of the author toward his/her subject? How
do you know? Cite evidence to support your answer.
4. What diction does the author uses that stands out to you? What is the impact on the
reader? Explain your answer.
5. What words in the article did you not understand? Explain how you may be able to
figure out what they mean by the way they are used in the article / in context.
6. Does the author use word repetition? If so, provide examples and explain the effect.
7. Does the author use any rhetorical questions in the article? If so, what is the effect?
Explain your answer citing details from the article.
8. Are their visuals provided with the article? If so, do they help you predict what the
article might be about? Do they provide information? Explain. If there are no visuals,
explain how adding a visual would enhance your interest or understanding of the
article.
9. Which of the four articles on social responsibility did you find the most informative?
Why? Explain your answer and also what it helped you to understand about the
meaning of social responsibility.