The one-year anniversary of Ahmaud Arbery’s death. The release of an official report confirming that police had no reason to stop, frisk, or choke Elijah McClain. The lack of charges for police officers who killed Daniel Prude. The shooting deaths of two Fort Wayne teenagers in a hate crime. All of these events are happening…
Sometimes we cover what is there to try to produce a facsimile of beauty. We cover up signs of age with makeup and hair cream. We touch up photographs to display them in magazines and online. We change our appearance, hide the experiences we consider inappropriate, fail to acknowledge our mistakes. We wear figurative masks…
Each moment in our lives is followed by another. As we experience this succession of moments, we become accustomed to them. They begin to seem like one another, ordinary, commonplace, as if a moment the same as the last is always coming, rushing past like the vast number of droplets that make up a swiftly-flowing…
This piece was also published in the Oak Park newspaper Wednesday Journal. If we value humanity, we white people must co-create and work in spaces that aspire towards antiracism. If we work in these spaces, our family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors of color will, at some point, call us racist or white supremacist, will say…
What are grades for? And now, during a pandemic, what purpose do they serve? Should grades measure how many assignments students complete? Student work is affected by the relationships we form with them, but right now we are unable to form those relationships as we usually do. Depending on our district and the age of…
Entwining holds immense power within and through itself. Those existing within the entwining hold the power of relationships with one another. Each single-celled organism, each plant, each animal, and the living systems they comprise hold the power of those relationships -- they have evolved with and because of one another to be as they are,…
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” - Octavia Butler Today is the Inauguration of Joe Biden, our 46th President. Today, the administration of Donald Trump ends. And amidst all the doubts about the possibility of renewed attacks, about what will happen next, about…
A reckoning means a settling of accounts. I've heard the word numerous times in the past week, since the insurrection in Washington, D.C.: "a day of reckoning", "a racial reckoning", "reckoning with our history". It seems that we need to account for what has been taken in and paid out over the four centuries since…
I heard the news this evening. I cannot believe that two of my former students are dead, ages 27 and 30. I can comprehend neither the pain that these deaths must cause nor the pain that caused these deaths. We all feel pain. Sometimes we are so consumed by our own pain that it blinds…
Each bit of news I hear knocks me further off of my axis. In my own village of Oak Park, a local resident has filed objections against the candidacies of the only two Black men who are running for Village Trustee, and the hearing on those objections is today. This local resident, of course, says…
Entwining 