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May 24, 2021 Guest Submission I was supposed to write this post weeks ago, way back during budget week in April. Or was that in March? Lege time feels very different from usual work time. You never know when your boss is going to text or call you to get on the computer and do some work. When you walk into the office you never know what time you will get to go home. Sometimes that can be 5:30 pm, other times that can be 3 am. When you’re not writing analyses, you’re watching your committee, or the floor, or someone else’s committee. Maybe you’ll call a few people to get the latest w...

In the beginning of the 87th Texas Legislative Session, I felt hopeful. Hopeful for what I would learn, the ways I would grow, the people I would meet, the friends I would make, things I would learn about myself, and much more. Nearing the end of session, all of these things have come to fruition. What I have been able to learn and accomplish has shown me so much about myself. Myself and the other 12 University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work legislative interns are often asked the impossible, with impossible time limits. However, every time, we have

May 11, 2021 Guest Submission I have been thinking a lot about integrity lately. It is my favorite of social work’s six core values, perhaps because it is the most all-encompassing. The word can represent honesty, competence, kindness, and morality. For a social worker, having integrity means promoting social justice and universal well-being in your service of diverse communities. For a political social worker, this can look and feel more complicated. Instead of being out in the field, meeting people where they are, providing direct services, we dress up in our suits and spend our days t...

May 10, 2021 Guest Submission The George Floyd Act addresses qualified immunity by creating a cause of action for deprivation of rights; requires corroboration for the testimony of undercover police officers; adds a duty to intervene and to render aid; prohibits chokeholds and limits lethal force to imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. It also ends arrests for many non-jailable fine-only violations and mandates creation of a progressive disciplinary matrix establishing different disciplinary actions for policy violations and violations of law by police. The law would call for...

April 13, 2021 Guest Submission One Friday night in early March, after a long work week during the lege, I received a text message from a white friend. The noting of my friend’s “whiteness” is an essential part of understanding the lens through which I see things. It is a critical part of being able to have a purposeful conversation about race. She sent me a text with a TikTok link of a comedian telling a joke titled “how to tell Asians apart only by their accents.” This friend followed up her text link with texts for me to “wait for it” and “so funny.” At the end of this...