"I want to try my bike without training wheels, but I can't. I’m too afraid,” my daughter said. I tried to reassure her: “It’s normal to feel afraid. I feel afraid sometimes too. Do you still want to do it?” “Yes, but I can’t,” she replied. “When you’re afraid,” I said, “You can be brave.…
Throughout life, death visits us in many forms. I wrote recently about how I relate to thoughts of my own death. And I, like all of us, have had to deal with the deaths of close family and friends in the past, and I will again. I have been one of the fortunate ones, because…
Listen to "Antimatter" here. White and Black defined in opposition to the other, Each of them inverted on itself so we can cover Up the lies we tell about ourselves we’d rather not admit‘Cause they contradict the truths that we think fit. Like matter and antimatter, White and Black are mirror images.Helping us hide clearer images…
When I was 11 or so, I started to imagine the unimaginable. For a stretch of time, I would wake up every day contemplating my own death. Not the manner of it, or how old I would be when it happened, but the fact of it. It was a tension in my chest, a tightness…
The president visited Chicago this past Monday, as thousands of people turned out to protest his first return to the city since his campaign and impeachment hearings picked up speed in the House. I wish I could have been out there protesting on Monday, and I support every effort to remove this president. He has…
This post builds on concepts from my previous posts "Racial development: a proposal for white people", "Antiracist white identity", and “Racial agency”. In the earlier essays in this series, I laid out the connections between antiracist white identity and racial agency. Antiracist white identity elaborates our vision of how we white people want to be…
The thread of Filipino-American history began on October 15, 1587, when the first Filipinos arrived on US shores aboard Spanish colonial ships. In the late 2000’s, California and Hawaii started to celebrate Filipino-American History Month in October to commemorate this arrival, and the US Congress proclaimed this month nationally in 2009. Now this is one…
I wrote recently about an argument on whether to include the phrase “systems of oppression” in an equity statement being adopted by the Oak Park Village Board. In this argument, one white male board member expressed reservations over including this phrase because he said that police officers might think their department is being called a…
At the beginning of each new session of the Oak Park Village Board, the board members vote to re-adopt the village's 50-year-old Diversity Statement. In the past year, a citizen commission had updated this statement, turning it into an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Statement. Rather than adopting this new statement at the first meeting of…
This post builds on concepts from my previous posts "Racial development: a proposal for white people" and "Antiracist white identity". In my post on antiracist white identity, I emphasized that we must learn from history to develop our own vision of ourselves, mapping our personal journeys toward racial justice. To take an active role in…
Entwining 