your take
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The Killing of Richard Collins III Is Not a Hate Crime—It’s Terrorism
The death of a young student just reaching his prime is always tragic. The death of a young black man, especially one only days away from college graduation, is an enormous heartbreak. But the death of a young black man allegedly at the hands of a suspected white supremacist, brutally stabbed merely for being black,…
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How Black Moms and Daughters Can Fight to Reduce HIV Rates
The statistics are well-known. African Americans bear the heaviest burden of HIV infection of all racial or ethnic groups in the United States, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the burden of this disease is carried squarely on the shoulders of African-American women. Their rates of new HIV infections are more…
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#BeyondTheMoment: This May Day, Movements Unite for Labor Protection, Equity and Justice
On Monday, May 1, thousands of people will convene in communities around the world to commemorate May Day, otherwise known as International Workers’ Day. On this day in 1886, men and women, many of them recent immigrants, organized a nationwide workers strike that led to the creation of the eight-hour workday and other basic protections…
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Fighting for Environmental Justice Is Fighting for Racial Justice
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Governmental neglect left majority-black wards destitute. Seventy-three percent of those displaced by Katrina were black, and more than one-third of them were estimated to have been poor. Although the hardest-hit areas in New Orleans were low-income communities and communities of color, white residents were favored over black residents…
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Assigning Value to Black Stories: Minority Art and the Racist Mountain
Comedian, writer and filmmaker Jordan Peele recently offered the hope that the success of his low-budget but high-profit film, Get Out, would convince Hollywood producers that “black voices … tell good stories like anyone else.” It is, frankly, startling that after two centuries of the African-American presence in theater, film, television and music, black artists…
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My Body, My Pain: Listen to Me and All Black Women
Pain has no color. But for black women, how they are treated—and not treated—for reproductive-health pain resonates deeply with historic roots in slavery and brutality. A new study from the University of Virginia shows a proven racial bias in how medical providers assess black patients’ complaints of pain, guaranteeing that medical providers consistently undertreat black…
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Clearly, NY Post’s Naomi Schaefer Riley Doesn’t Understand My Work Educating Students of Color
In what was intended to be a critique of my recent keynote address at the 2017 SXSWedu conference, an uninformed, aspiring education columnist with no experience in research, theory or practice in the field does a wonderful job of showcasing her ignorance about teaching and learning, and exemplifying a major issue in the education of…
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Will Driverless Vehicles Put Black People Out of Work?
Driving while black in America has always been fraught with peril. During the Jim Crow era, African Americans traveled the highways by night to avoid harassment by law enforcement and packed extra fuel and food because they could not stop at gas stations and restaurants that served only whites. Today, encounters with police that are…
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Tech Needs to Do the Work to Find Black Excellence, but You Can Do Your Part, Too
The Uber fallout of recent weeks makes something my grandmother used to tell me more important than ever now: “To get something you don’t have, you’ll have to do something you haven’t done. You’re a black woman. So, to do that, you’ll have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” However, the…
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The Day My Mother Asked About My HIV Status Changed My Life
I will never forget the day my mother asked me, “Is there something you want me to know about you?” Mom wanted to know if I had HIV. She had just attended her first HIV educational program. She learned about the virus and how important being in care is to ensure that a person with…