The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is joining nine state and local fair-employment agencies to increase the use of voluntary arbitration in settling employment-discrimination complaints. The agency's new partners are civil-rights offices in New York City and Kansas City and the states of Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico and South Carolina. The new pilot program is designed to resolve disputes quickly and cut mediation costs. "This pilot program strengthens our partnership with [other agencies] and builds on our mutual goal of eradicating discrimination in the workplaces of America," EEOC Chair Cari Dominguez said in a press statement.

Coretta Scott King has been laid to rest but the dream lives on. The widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was laid to rest February 8 after a moving, sometimes rousing five-hour funeral in Atlanta. Some eulogists pointed out the work that remains before the country can claim to offer equal opportunity for all. Mrs. King grew up in Perry County, Alabama, a place where color lines are still sharply drawn. According to an article in Newsday, the area “remains an epicenter” of the poverty and racial division Kings fought to end. Forty-six percent of the county's black residents live below the poverty line, compared to 11.7 percent of its white residents. Public schools are virtually all black, while most white children attend classes at private academies or in nearby white school districts. "The challenge we face in Alabama's Black Belt is the encrusted poverty that has resisted modernity and has resisted 100 years of economic development," U.S. Representative Artur Davis said. "If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would be in Perry County denouncing the entrenched poverty that still exists."

Women are doing it for themselves in Canada. According to a study by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of self-employed women in Canada, and one million Canadian women will own a small business by 2010. There are now 800,000 women business owners in Canada and the number of women-owned businesses is growing 60 percent faster than those run by men. The report says that nearly two-thirds of self-employed women are "life-stylers" -- business owners who chose self-employment specifically to balance the demands of work and family. Not surprising since 70 percent of Canadian business women are married and nearly a third of them have children under the age of 12.

Millions of students observed Black History Month by listening to Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” or learning about notable African-Americans. What most students didn’t get “is a deeper understanding of race and inequality” in America, according to the website Tolerance.org. “’Black history’ often begins with slavery and ends with the Civil Rights Movement,” the organization says. “When ‘diversity’ is taught, it's often in feel-good language that fails to help students examine how racism still occurs today.” One set of answers is offered by Peggy McIntosh, developer of the Knapsack Project. McIntosh says, “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks." The Knapsack Project teaches educators how to explore the invisible benefits of white privilege to give students a better understanding of the social structures of racism without which little progress toward real equality can be made.

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