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Happy New Year! My Top 7 blogs of 2020

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2020 saw a renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement superimposed with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Every Year for the past several around New Year’s, I share my top 7 most read blogs of the year. It is really fun to go back and pull my website stats to see what people read the most. And interestingly enough, once again a few blogs I wrote several years even ago made it into the current “Top 7” List.

Quick stats about his year’s list:
• Four of the top 7 were published this year, and 3 are from previous years
• Six of the 7 dealt with some kind of diversity topic and one was around career development
• Three of the 4 blog published this year had a connection to Black Lives Matter

Here are the seven most read of 2020, starting with number 7 and working up to number one.

7) This year’s number 7 was last year’s number 3 – a blog published way back in 2011 on using career mapping as a tool for career development. This performance of a 9-year old blog certainly signals an ongoing focus on the importance of investing in skills and career development as a way to recruit and retain the best employees. You may also want to check out my 11-question Skills Development and Career Road Mapping organizational self-assessment.

6) Published in late September, Trump cancels federal racial sensitivity training – Five reasons why this is so wrong discusses Executive Order 13950, which basically attempts to curtail any discussion of the USA’s historic systemic racism.

5) Published this past June given the intersection of June being LGBTQ Pride Month and the recent protests around racism and police brutality following the killings of George Floyd and other Black and Brown Americans; Five Intersections – LGBTQ Pride Month and Black Lives Matter.

4) Also published in June, yet another example of blatant racism and sexism in American life and politics. Black Lives Matter and the $20 Bill – An Awful American Travesty. What happened to the plans to place African – American abolitionist Harriett Tubmam on our $20 bill? This story is a slap in the face to “Black Lives Matter” and women’s rights.

3) And published in July, another blog that deals with our nation’s racism and connection to our monetary currency. In “A Black Lives Matter and an American Coinage Travesty – blog 2,” I recount the sad story of a Ku Klux Klan-inspired coin.

2) With the growing number and visibility of Hispanic Americans, Number 2 for the third year in a row was “Seven Misconceptions or Stereotypes of Hispanic People”, a guest piece written in 2016 by my part-time bilingual consultant on staff, Elsa Maria Jimenez Salgado.

1) And finally, With over 5,500 hits across the two blogs were 2018’s Seven More Fabulous Out Gay Men of Figure Skating (and One Bisexual Woman) and my 2016 personal labor of love which included several personal photos that I took, “Seven Fabulous Out Gay Men of Figure Skating.”

I wish all of my faithful readers a happy 2021 and hopefully a return to normalcy both with a new more inclusive President and with multiple vaccines leading to an end to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

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Brother, can you spare a dime? 3rd in a series highlighting numismatics and diversity.

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The beautiful Mercury Dime was in circulation during he 1930’s Great Depression

An Op Ed – Republicans are still up to those same tricks they pulled during the Great Depression.


As a diversity consultant and numismatist (a collector of money,) I am now finding some interesting connections between our nation’s money and our diversity as a nation. This past summer I wrote my first two parts of his series:

• “Black Lives Matter and the $20 Bill – an Awful American Travesty,” (do use the link and read it), I recounted the very sad story of how the approved plans to place African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman on our $20 bill got derailed.

• In “A Black Lives Matter and an American Coinage Travesty – blog 2,” I recount the sad story of a Ku Klux Klan-inspired coin.

In this blog, I am going to share an interesting sub-plot that was shared in the Numismatist Magazine story “Collecting Great Depression Coinage.” Our American coinage during the late 1920s and early 1930s included some beautiful and historic specimens such as the Buffalo Nickel, Mercury Dime and the Standing Liberty Quarter.

Typical scene from the 1930s Great Depression (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

In 1930, the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” was written by lyricist Edgar Yipsel Harburg and composer Jay Gorney. Shockingly, its release and exposure on the radio was limited due to the censorship of the Republican Party who considered the song to be the project of “anti-capitalist propaganda.” Clearly, they wanted to deny the existence of the millions of hard-working loyal Americans hurting, homeless and hungry from the Great Depression, just like the Republican Party of today is trying to deny that COVID-19 is ravaging our nation, that systemic racism exists and that Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election!

Great economic disparity continues to be a major issue in our country that still needs to be addressed. (See my 2014 blog “The Growing Culture of Poverty in the USA.”) And now we are seeing the highest rate of unemployment in our country since the Great Depression, and it is disproportionately impacting those on the lower ends of the economic scale.

Ultimately, the song “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” could not be repressed indefinitely due to recordings by well-known popular artists such as Bing Crosby (watch and listen here to Bing’s recording with a poignant photo essay), Lennie Hayton, Al Jolson and Rudy Vallee. The general public needed to become aware of the sad plight of their fellow Americans through this song.

Now, current day Americans should accept the reality that we are again in horrific times, and the truth should not and cannot be repressed. Hopefully we can rise up as a nation, face the truth, do the right thing, and give our brothers and sisters who need assistance several thousand dimes.