Racism

Kindness is the water of humanity. Without water, we harden. Kindness is an attitude, an aspiration, and a practice.

Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible.

Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps any one of them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here.

From this point of view, Rodney King’s protective reflexes, the disorderly movements by which he struggled to stay alive (he flaps his arms, staggers, tries to get up, stands on his knees) were described as being under his “total control” and as evidence of “dangerous intent,” as if violence were the sole voluntary action possible for a Black body,

I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be

It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores—two hundred points, as promised—than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual

Dreaming isn’t dead. It can’t be. We can do it anew. Me and you, both of us are required. I believe writing can be a moral instrument if it asks you to do more than read. Do you? How many times will you witness people being starved or worked to death, driven out of their homelands, the land blasted and lives destroyed, and be only quietly