The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
Each holiday season, as family members arrive and couches are unfolded, my household settles into a palpable nostalgia. Poorly designed photo albums are pulled from the shelves. Home videos of prepubescent siblings in matching pajamas dance across the television screen.
There is a solidarity that black people can find in celebrating the athletic success of our own, especially in sports where our existence is sparse.
In my home, guns were not something to be earned or celebrated. Water guns and Nerf guns were not allowed outside. B.B. guns were not even a part of the conversation.
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
I'm not sure that there are days of my life when I'm not confronted with racism. For some, that may seem hyperbolic, but it's true.
When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.
Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being.
To be clear, affirmative action is not, by itself, an adequate response to decades of systemic looting, but it has been an indispensible tool in inching us towards some semblance of a more equitable society.
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.