My aunt still teases me about the first time she met me, before she got engaged to my uncle. Apparently, three-year-old me arrived at a family party in Boston, in the depths of winter, in a full-on hissy fit because my mother forgot my patent leather party shoes so I was doomed to wear ugly […]
Black History Month? Turns out it’s My History Month too. Today I learned that my family and I owe a debt of gratitude to Jan Ernst Matzeliger, the African-American inventor of the Automatic Shoe Lasting Machine. Quoting from an old publication by Compton College that I happened to see today: “His machine created new jobs, […]
Sharing my learning from a recent training with Dr. Heather Hackman about how white privilege and white supremacy interrelate: White privilege is when people like me look at our lives and think, “I earned all of that because I was just better/smarter/harder working than other people,” without seeing how the wind that was at our backs […]
Twenty well-meaning, diverse nonprofit folks sitting in a classroom. “What words does our society use to describe young black males?” Dr. Bryant T. Marks, Sr. asks us. We pull out our phones and text a word to him. He clicks a key on his laptop, and a slide appears on the big screen at the […]
In case you’re wondering why I keep talking about racial justice here? 1. Because it’s helping me to articulate what I’m learning. 2. Because I hope it may help others too. 3. Because the first change I can make is to help make visible what was hidden from me.
60-second video review: Spike Lee’s movie BlackkKlansman brilliantly calls white women and Jewish people (hey, those are me!) into the struggle against white supremacy. P.S. apologies for the background noise, but it does sometimes rain in L.A.!
Holding and sharing encouragement from last week’s White Allyship training: The fears and challenges I’m feeling as I try to join the fight to dismantle racism are super common. I’m not unique, and that’s good news. Brilliant leaders have gone before me, lighting the path. All I need to do is keep walking.
I just finished the audiobook of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I wanted to change up my racial justice commute time, because honestly sometimes it’s hard to feel like I want to immerse myself in a nonfiction book that’s gonna hit me with fact after fact after fact of the history and current […]
Oh hi, sorry I’m breezing into work an hour late, but I had to take a lil time to throw out at least $75 of perishable food from my fridge since the power was out for more than 8 hours last night. Yeah no worries, my pay doesn’t get docked, I don’t get fired, I’ll […]
When I was about 7, I announced at the dinner table that I was old enough to stay up late and tell dirty jokes with the family. Turns out, I wanted to tell a racist joke. And turns out, that says a lot about how we can look at racism in ourselves.