Writer

Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.

A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.

Silence is the residue of fear.

There is simply no better way to generate buzz for soccer in your country than having your team in the World Cup.

We inculcate young people with the message that if they don't succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.

Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?

The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there.

In sixth grade, my status as a Boy Scout was not something I went out of my way to share. In fact, I spent most of my adolescence attempting to keep it a secret from those who might use it as a source of derision. The off-brown collared shirt and forest-green sash were not something I would have ever been caught wearing in front of my friends.

The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.

After high school, I earned a scholarship to play Division I soccer at a small school in North Carolina, but I didn't get much playing time, which forced me to determine who I was beyond the field, something I had previously never had to do.

Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.

So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms.

I kind of follow in the tradition of some folks - some thinkers and scholars I really look up - who reject the idea of intellectual compartmentalization.

When we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't: it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

Young people are constantly absorbing - through media, textbooks, and policy - the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.

Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair.

Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.

If our principles are only our principles when it is convenient for us, when they align with our visceral emotional responses, then they are, in fact, not principles at all.

Do those serving life sentences deserve access to educational opportunities never having a future beyond bars? The answer is yes and necessitates that in-prison education serves additional goals beyond reducing recidivism.