Category: OTHER POPULAR WRITINGS
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On Ferguson Protests, the Destruction of Things, and What Violence Really Is (And Isn’t)
Since the announcement on Monday that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, wouldn’t be brought to trial, huge protests have broken out all over the country, from Ferguson (where the community had already been protesting for over a hundred days, since the day Michael Brown…
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Why I’m Not Really Here For Emma Watson’s Feminism Speech At the U.N.
Actor Emma Watson, of Harry Potter movie fame, is a new Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women and she spoke at the UN on Saturday to launch the HeForShe campaign, which aims to mobilize men to end gender inequality somehow (the campaign doesn’t seem to call men to any particular action of any sort). The campaign wants men…
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Things To Stop Being Distracted By When A Black Person Gets Murdered By Police
The killing of an unarmed Black teenager named Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, which has resulted in protests in that town and harsh police push-back and brutality against even more of its citizens, and which, via social media, has gotten the attention of people around the world, probably isn’t even the latest occurrence of unarmed…
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The White Teachers I Wish I Never Had
I was born Black in a Black family in a Black neighborhood. My early childhood was an entirely Black experience. Besides what I saw on television and in movies, my whole world was Black people. My family, my friends, my babysitters, my neighbors and my teachers were all Black. From Head Start through third…
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4 Ways to Push Back Against Your Privilege
I’ve often said that it’s not enough to acknowledge your privilege. And, in fact, that acknowledging it is often little more than a chance to pat yourself on the back for being so “aware.” What I find is that most of the time when people acknowledge their privilege, they feel really special about it, really…
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No More “Allies”
I’m over the term “ally.” Between Tim Wise’s recent (but not new) bullshit, a recent visit to a college where some so-called allies don’t even understand basic racism 101, and the constant cookie-seeking of people who just can’t do the right thing unless they are sure they’re gonna get some kind of credit for it,…
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On Getting Free
A long time ago, when you were a wee thing, you learned something, some way to cope, something that, if you did it, would help you survive. It wasn’t the healthiest thing, it wasn’t gonna get you free, but it was gonna keep you alive. You learned it, at five or six, and it worked,…
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How To Be A ‘Reverse-Racist’: An Actual Step by Step List For Oppressing White People
White people who are confronted with their white privilege and the white supremacist acts they perpetuate have been known to cry, “You’re being a reverse-racist!” That is completely true: people of color have the power and control to create, perpetuate, and maintain brutal systematic reverse-racism that oppresses white people every day. As such, we have…