Once upon a time, someone tried to misuse Facebook to start a hate movement against LGBTQ people and the President stood firm in his values and saved the day. No, of course I don’t mean this U.S. President in 2018, don’t be silly. I’m talking about way back in 1989 when the Facebook was an […]
When you murder my people for being like me, you make me remember who else I am like. I am like the refugees walking thousands of miles with their children to seek asylum, as my kin did in the Holocaust. I am like my family members and friends and strangers who are trans, whose safety […]
This morning, someone tried to take my white privilege away from me, and it was scary. When I feel attacked because I’m Jewish, what can that teach me about how safe I usually feel because I’m white?
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, I will spend an hour re-listening to this amazing Seeing White podcast episode: “Little War on the Prairie.” Did you know that “we” deliberately mis-translated “Indian treaties” to leave out key provisions so we could trick them into signing bad deals, which we then repudiated anyway and turned into wars of […]
Summer of 1986. It’s hot and humid already at 6am as I’m on my way to start my shift at the 24-hour Burger King on the Mass Turnpike near my house. I’m walking fast and sweating in my too-big polyester uniform, desperately hoping none of the kids from school happen to see me because both […]
What I just learned about race here in my car while listening to The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist: slave-grown cotton in Massachusetts and the truth about zombies.
This. Is. Not. History. Most people running our country and policing our streets were either growing up when this happened, or were brought up by people who lived through this. This moment – which itself was not unique or isolated and was a product of the centuries that came before it – formed the moment […]
Absolutely chilling. As in I’m literally shivering while I listen to this audiobook methodically examine the historical truths of how enslavement powered the economic and geographic expansion of our country. Gasps just from today’s drive: 1. Yeah sure we all learned “the invention of the cotton gin revolutionized cotton production.” But did any of us […]
When you call someone “hysterical” for protesting, say, Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court nomination or unfair umpires or workplace sexual harassment: There is a reason this is a gendered insult and it’s not just because oh, we traditionally associate over-emotionalism with women. “Hysterical” comes from the Greek “hustera” which literally means “womb.” Do I think people […]
Still feeling the echoes of finishing Toni Morrison’s Beloved this week. And the echoes of having been so wrong about how it would end. (Semi-spoiler ahead if you haven’t read it – and if you haven’t YOU SHOULD.) I listened to it slowly as an audiobook, read by Toni Morrison herself. Caught up in a […]