Parents of color don’t receive a visit and a warning if their children are found playing alone; they are immediately blamed and far more likely to be arrested or lose custody of their children. At first glance, my 9-year-old daughter doesn’t look “poor.” She meticulously chooses her outfits for school, often sleeping in them—even the […]
I know, Tamir Rice’s mother knows, the cops and the prosecutors and the judges and the jurors all know: If it had been my son out there in the playground that day, holding any kind of gun, he wouldn’t have been shot. It’s winter break, so yesterday morning I was home with both of my […]
I want a horoscope that tells me when they’ll stop killing us, when justice will stop being a joke the powerful pretend to tell, when I’ll stop thinking my partner might have been killed by police just because he’s 20 minutes late. Every night I get my horoscope sent to my mailbox. I don’t read it […]
As a mother of a white child, I don’t worry that my son will be killed by a cop after a traffic violation; I do worry that he might want to be that cop someday. I am the mother of a son. These days, with angry white men bearing guns, with unarmed black boys and […]
If none of these new stories, none of these videos, none of these cries for help makes you hear the voices of people you know and love yourself, makes you sad for another mother’s child, then you are the problem. For over a year now the abuse of black and brown bodies has filled up […]
We are afraid that no one will help us, that no one will ever see us as a girl worth saving. This past weekend, many of us watched the incident in McKinney, Texas. We held our breath as a police officer grabbed a black girl in a bathing suit by her hair and sat down on […]
Like my parents, I do not want to shield my son from the ugliness and injustice of racism. A few months ago, while watching the news from Ferguson, Missouri, my 9-year-old son, who is white, wondered out loud why the police keep killing young black kids. He looked down at his arms and said, “My […]
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 […]
It was a rough year in gender and race, but there were a few bright spots. Oof, what a terrible year. Ebola. ISIS. Boko Haram. The murders of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and so many others. If you visit CNN’s “What Stories Got You Talking in 2014” page, it’s a veritable cornucopia of the […]
