I am defending my personhood. You are trying to map your vision of personhood onto the rest of us. In the wake of the 2016 election, I and many of my leftist friends have taken to the streets, the airwaves, the media, and the Internet to express our dismay. Many of us are bewildered. Lots […]
We hijack their voices before they are old enough to form their own opinions, exploiting their cuteness or creating shock value by inserting an innocent child into a messy adult debate. In the wake of recent shock videos purporting to “prove” that Planned Parenthood sells aborted body parts, social media has erupted once again with […]
Millennials will soon be in charge of the country while lacking an intimate, critical knowledge of America’s history. Due to that lack of knowledge, they’re changing the definition of one of the most politically charged words of our time to one of personal philosophy and the bliss of ignorance. Dismay is the only word that […]
Kids are capable of making realistic connections whether we use a protective narrative with them or not. Once, before my husband finally sold his small, 40-year-old, spit-and-tape sealed sailboat, we considered joining a yacht club at our local lake. An acquaintance who was a member invited us to a party at the club so we […]
Money helps you make the judgment call for essentials versus desires. But when your funds are zero, everything is as equally unattainable as it is up for grabs. “First the food, then the morality.” — Bertolt Brecht When my 13-year-old son came home from school on Thursday and saw me watching news clips about the […]
Well-intentioned white people don’t want to acknowledge our own racism because it doesn’t fit the image we’ve built of ourselves. Asking the question, “What does racism look like in 21st century United States?” seems straightforward but I’m betting most white people’s answers are frustratingly incomplete. I know mine are, even in the wake of the […]
As white people, we’ve been taught that our help is not just needed, but will fix everything. And that simply isn’t true. I’ve been thinking about how to write about Saturday’s Million March in New York City, which I went on, and what it was like to be part of the group that shut down the Brooklyn […]
Racism and misogyny are inseparable everywhere, but their intertwining is exceptionally pronounced in the United States. During the past few weeks, coverage of nationwide racial justice protests and the fallout of Rolling Stone’s stupendously flawed UVA rape coverage have overwhelmed the media. The fight for racial justice has finally become a large-scale, public, and highly […]
