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Race
Where We Start
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidate — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
September 2018Jewish Enough
The morning after my fourth-grade teacher / taught my class about the Holocaust / (how Christians like Mom were safe, Jews / like Dad were sent to camps in cattle cars)
September 2018Father Figure
As Lee immersed himself in these families’ daily lives, he witnessed tender interactions that ran counter to stereotypes of Black men as indifferent or absent fathers. Despite challenging financial and personal circumstances, the men Lee encountered were “loving, present, and responsible fathers,” he says, who worked hard to provide for and nurture their children.
September 2018
The Cure For Racism Is Cancer
This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.
In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.
September 2018Prisoner Of Hope
Cornel West’s Quest For Justice
[Black people have] learned a lot from being invisible, spit on, dishonored, and devalued. One thing we’ve learned is that when you have been terrorized, it is spiritually empty to terrorize others back.
September 2018
V.I.P. Tutoring
For a term paper I demanded a Louis Vuitton purse. For a take-home midterm, a Tiffany bracelet.
July 2018
July 2018
Featuring Lorenzo Milam, Tram Nguyen, Brian Doyle, and more.
July 2018Sunbeams
June 2018It was the last day of school, and I was walking with my dad. . . . Suddenly, he paused, looked at me intently, and said, “Son, you’re a black male, and that’s two strikes against you.” To the general public, anything that I did would be perceived as malicious and deserving of severe punishment, and I had to govern myself accordingly. I was seven years old.
June 2018
Featuring Michelle Alexander, Reverend Lynice Pinkard, Akhim Yuseff Cabey, and more.
June 2018From Slavery To Freedom
The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition.
June 2018
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