This post builds on concepts from my previous post "Racial development: a proposal for white people". I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the child of a teacher and an engineer. My parents, my sister, and I lived on a winding street near the top of a hill, close enough to Milwaukee for…
Racial development: a proposal for white people
As school begins for the fall, we must connect our schools and teaching to the real lived experiences of students. This means that we must make race a topic of conversation and study. Some schools have begun to take this leap when they are facing students of color, but too many do not do so…
Part 2: From critical hope to action
If you haven’t yet read it, please first check out Part 1. Global climate change is an unimaginable threat to us, to our descendants, and to our planet. As human beings, our brains evolved to consider the challenges facing us locally, in the present and the immediate future. Our brains find it much more difficult…
Part 1: From despair to critical hope
Global climate change. Just the three words are enough to make my soul shrink a bit. Global -- affecting the entirety of our huge planet. Climate -- the long-term temperature and weather systems of that planet, changing only on a geological time scale. Change -- I’m someone who generally likes things to stay as they…
5 years after Ferguson
Listen to "5 years after Ferguson" here. We're still shooting down Black men with no accountability, And flood the streets with guns that inevitably kill but weSay that's the price we have to pay for liberty.We claim this is the land of opportunity.We starve our neighbors and we need their laborsBut when they come we put…
Seeing the present
The New Friendship Baptist Church in Englewood, from which marchers set off on August 5, 1966. On August 5, 1966, activists from the Chicago Freedom Movement set off from the New Friendship Baptist Church in Englewood to march three miles through the white neighborhoods of Chicago Lawn and Gage Park to protest the housing segregation…
The Parable of the Cicada
The cicada emerges from its burrow. It spent 17 years underground and has just appeared into the morning sun for the first time. Time to stretch its wings -- one flap, two, then more. It is moving along the ground, first slowly, then quickly. Ready to attempt full-fledged flight through the air, it pauses. A…
Closer
Listen to "Closer" here. Every day, I hope to get closerTo the person I imagine myself to be. Because through me, you see what it means to close orOpen doors to love or hate or sadness or joy And all the emotions and experiences since your birth. When you laugh or cry or sing toThe heavens and…
100 years and the struggle continues
A commemorative plaque placed near where the 29th Street Beach in Chicago used to be located. One hundred years ago, on July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams went to the 27th Street Beach in Chicago on a hot summer day to cool off with his friends. They were playing, laughing, and…
How do we break down mass incarceration?
Today, we think that racism is someone else’s doing, that white supremacy is the work of those who marched in Charlottesville in August 2018. We may go so far as to acknowledge that our current president is a racist and white supremacist. But we white people don’t connect these labels to ourselves or to our…
Entwining 