Hope is like an appendage that hangs from your soul. It is flexible and it is lithe. It reaches out to grab hold of the things it needs to sustain it. And, like any other limb, it doesn’t grow back… Read More ›
Race
The Men in the Plastic Masks: How Anonymous Complicates Protests in Ferguson
A movement without organization is little more than a ship without a rudder. Take an idea—any idea, no matter how noble or just—and let it loose upon the world in great numbers without anyone to guide it and it won’t… Read More ›
Country Club Problems: The Dangers of Driving While Black In St Louis County
Country Club Hills. The name conjures up images of gated communities chockablock with gaudy McMansions and Maseratis that sit at the end of enormous gravel driveways; places with front lawns the size of football fields and guesthouses that are bigger… Read More ›
The Center Cannot Hold: St. Louis County on the Eve of the Darren Wilson Verdict
The meeting starts and everyone around me instinctively stands up and faces towards the front of the room. It takes me a couple seconds to realize they’ve all angled themselves towards the American Flag and that they’re about to say… Read More ›
The Last of The Gang to Die: How Democrats Lost the Deep South
On the evening of July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson lay down beneath the grand canopy of his four post bed in The White House’s 2nd floor living room, exhausted; his mind surely swirling with that mixture of clear conscience… Read More ›
Different Shades of Black: A Conversation About Race & Class in America & Abroad
On the day that I happened to visit Tallahassee last summer, a group of student activists who call themselves The Dream Defenders were going into their 3rd week of physically occupying the lobby to Governor Scott’s Capitol office in protest… Read More ›
The Deep South Up North: The Struggle For American Indian Voting Rights in South Dakota
What happens to an injustice unheard? Does it wisp skywards like warm smoke from a gun or deflate down, dissolve and be done? Does it cry itself to sleep or rage into the night then softly weep? Maybe it hardens… Read More ›
Here Comes The Freedom Winter: The Failure of Truth to Keep Black Men Breathing
Because that’s what the job is for. To keep a little freedom bubble From rising to the surface And spreading Everywhere Pop Pop So the job of a cop Is to stop Stop Stop Those words are 50 years old…. Read More ›
A Walmart is Not a War Zone: Photos From The Journey For John Crawford
On Monday, September 22nd, more than 100 men and women set off from a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio–a predominantly white suburb of Dayton–and walked 11 miles to the Greene County Courthouse in Xenia, OH. On August 5th, a 22 year… Read More ›
A Symptom of a Greater Sickness: How Ferguson’s Roots Run From Our Schools To The Supreme Court
There is nothing that I can say about the shooting of Michael Brown that hasn’t been said before by people whose experience affords them a perspective and an authenticity that I lack for the simple reason that I am white…. Read More ›