When it comes to confrontations with the police, Black people are asked to do something strange — Fight or flight is an “automatic physiological reaction” to a stressful or fearful situation. You will start to breathe faster, and your blood pressure and heart rate will rise, preparing your body for a possible fight. According to Professor Karin Roelofs, people and animals have various defensive modes that trigger…

We’ve all been there. Here’s how to get to the other side — “Hello, hello, is anyone there?” We’ve all been there — you work hard on a draft of something, post it, and then…no one seems to be reading your work. But don’t take it personally — you are not necessarily being ignored. Readers don’t know your writing from a can of…

To communicate effectively, you have to control your tone. Here’s how to do that. — A couple of months ago, I read a story about blackface. Initially, I felt relieved that someone was bringing attention to this issue. Then, sentence after sentence, I realized my initial assumptions, based on the title, fell short. To my surprise, this article supported blackface. As a Black writer, I…

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin are everyday reminders of chattel slavery. — If you call America a racist country, some people will passionately disagree with your assessment, yelping like someone poured hot coffee in their lap. Often, this defensiveness is rooted in patriotic vigor. It’s as if they feel personally insulted by historical facts that contradict whitewashed narratives they’ve learned. While many…

They’re twisting the true purpose of the 14th Amendment — How does any group chip away at another group’s rights and opportunities? If history is any indication, it’s done little by little, like axing a tree piece by piece. At least, that’s the case when we consider the case of Black Americans. Over the past few years, conservatives have quietly…

Coded language perpetuates inequality right under our noses — "School choice" may sound as harmless as a white winter hare to some and possibly empowering to others, but there's actually something much more sinister at play — anti-black racism. The underlying premise behind the national movement to provide vouchers for some students to attend private schools rather than public…

Like a fish out of water, language loses all its air, its meaning outside of its context — What makes someone “Black” or “colored” cannot be measured definitively on a color-coded scale because race is a social construct, not a genetic one. It was the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who constructed and promoted the idea of race, portraying White people as superior. These categories included more than…

Police have no credibility in the black community because of cases like this — In a heartbreaking turn of events, Mississippi officials engaged in a cover-up after a police cruiser ran over and killed a 37-year-old Black man, Dexter Wade. While the Mayor of Jackson called his death a tragic accident and claimed the police had "no malicious intent" in hiding his death, the…

How do they get away with continuing this practice? Laws change, but anti-black racism is persistent in American society — Imagine this. Two Black truck drivers, hungry from their travels, pull into Denny's parking lot in South Dakota to order some breakfast and a White waitress denies them service. Naturally, you might assume that this event is historical, a regular occurrence during the Jim Crow era, but you'd be wrong…