Terry Blackhawk: Legacy of Flames
the battering, the desecration
of a body let dangle from its limb
then gouged, sliced, and still the mob
craved more.
Ellen Bryant Voigt | At the Movie: Virginia, 1956
When finally we got our own TV, the evening news
with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan
seemed like another movie
Adam Patric Miller: A Chill in American Classrooms
I’m trying to be a good teacher, listening carefully to my students so I can make the ten-thousand micro-adjustments in what I’m presenting to them so they will feel how much I really want them to learn.
H.G. Reza: Living While Brown in America
Walking through a Home Depot parking lot while being brown raises enough reasonable suspicion in an immigration agent’s mind to cause my detention for a citizenship check…
Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
William Wenthe: Assembly
What moved us, perhaps, was something like
what moves the calling of these robins.
George Yancy: When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth
In these times of narrow ideological allegiances and goose-stepping conformity, philosophers who ask “why?” as a challenge to the status quo are asking an unsafe question. And that fact, more than anything else, shows us why we need philosophy in times like these.
Antoine Davis, Darrell Jackson: What Juneteenth looks like for prisoners
As Black men in prison, we live the tension between celebrating the abolition of slavery and struggling inside the system that replaced it.
Richard Michelson: Angels with Guns Guarding the Gates of Heaven
My grandmother didn’t
live to see her youngest son, my father, murdered in a Brooklyn
gutter by a fifth generation, drug-addicted, unemployed house-
painter whose ancestors were dragged here like devils in chains.
Countee Cullen: Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind
Video: My Story of Love and Loss as a Transracial Adoptee
A mysterious tattoo on her forearm was all that linked Sara Jones, adopted as a child by white parents, to her South Korean origins.
Darrick Hamilton, Naomi Zewde: Truth and Redistribution
How to fix the racial wealth gap, end plutocracy and build Black power.
