Brave

AP Stylebook 2016 Cover A ny multi-media attack system perfected by extreme groups for the deconstruction of critical institutions, civil rights movements, and fact-based news includes a massive propaganda war that begins with the perversion of a term or phrase, or the rebranding of extremist ideas with new and unfamiliar terms and phrases meant to normalize radical concepts. The introduction of the term "alt-right" by   American Neo-nazi leadership was one such attempt. That attempt, off to a great start when journalists rushed to interview any pro-Trump supporting faction in the wake of the 2016 election slowed down significantly when the AP Stylebook defined and set firm usage standards of the term, and by doing so, slowed the attempted normalization of white supremacist propaganda machine efforts to push their own political agenda into the language of mainstream media. This literally brought equilibrium back in professional journalistic coverage of white nationalism ...

Dear Mr. President, Image of the biracial  brown skinned 44th President of the United States wearing a blue shirt with blue/white striped tie, black jacket with US Flag lapel pin and short cropped hair. He is beginning to smile.  I heard your speech today. Addressing the nation as one would petulant school children after a particularly brutal schoolyard brawl, you reminded us that we were all on the same team and so we must unite behind the KKK endorsed President-elect. You view our rejection of the President-elect as our not accepting Secretary Clinton losing to Trump. You must know it is not that simple an issue. I have had the civil liberty of free speech under your Presidency for 8 years now. I will miss my right to disagree with a sitting President without being jailed or threatened with a lawsuit. Let me avail myself of that right one final time. Respectfully Mr. President, asking me to get behind a man who gleefully accepted the endorsement of the ...

Vista of the Museum from Constitution Avenue, looking across the north lawn to the Washington Monument. Photo credit: Alan Karchmer/NMAAHCcaption W hen the six-month backlog of free visitors passes have ended and all the novelty of having toured the National Museum of African American History and Culture has dimmed, perhaps my family with go there. Maybe by then I'll be able to manage that painful tour. Oprah Winfrey's uttered narrative identifier of the museum as a source of pride and healing thing for us is something I don't entirely agree with. I had pride in myself before  the idea of this museum even existed. So the museum as a pride tool doesn't hold true for me at least. I can't and don't speak for every member of our race in our country. Understand that this is me, Afro-Latina first person singular. I was raised by many mentors to internalize that pride in a period of our history when James Brown could be heard any day on the radio singing Say ...

I used to work as a fry cook at the SONIC. It was a brief stint, mostly working the night shift.  I was hired for the night shift because no one wanted to cook for it. See, all the factories working nightshift would put in evening meal orders right at the beginning of that shift for 60 or more people at a time, and since they were the bulk of the small town business for the drive-in, you had to get each massive order right, keep everything hot and get them out quickly. On a Friday morning,  I went to pick up my first paycheck, happy to be getting a paycheck locally instead of traveling the over 70 miles I did to get summer work as a dark-skinned Black girl in that region. I was clueless about what was going to happen; I only realize now, years later, that subsequent events may be the reason I have avoided  SONIC restaurants since repatriating to the United States nearly 15 years ago. I had signed for and collected my paycheck and was weaving my way around the s...

Add caption  "PHOTO ABOVE-LEFT: Olympic Project for Human Rights button, worn  by activist athletes in the 1968 Olympic games, originally called for a boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games. PHOTO ABOVE-RIGHT: This iconic photo  appears in many U.S. history textbooks, stripped of the story of the planned  boycott and demands, creating the appearance of a solitary act of defiance".- From  "If We Knew Our History" By the Zinn Education Project    " Özrü kabahatinden beter " is a Turkish proverb meaning  the apology is worse than the error. I couldn't get that proverb out of my head after reading an article in the magazine "Good" about a German sports team's photograph in digital Blackface. The op-ed was a whitewashing justification for the incident, based on team assurances that this was done "in support" of their two African teammates. Back in November of 2014, I wrote a blog post about the responsibilities of an ally ...

Guest post on structural racism in international educational environments, offering a view from the perspective of a marginalized student and a special education teacher. Amanda Hansel, M.Ed blogs on topics in special education and race hen I was in the first grade, I found and read a Turkish children’s book about a little talking plane. It took two children around the world, stopping at different countries and talking to locals. At one point in the story, the plane flies over Africa. Underneath the text was an illustration of a little black child, half naked, looking up at the sky. The children wanted to land, but the plane warned the children that it wouldn’t be safe to land and talk to the natives. The plane flew over as the children waved. I reread that part a few times. I remember scratching out the word “friendly plane” and scribbling “pis uçak”—Turkish for “dirty plane”—on the next page. That black people, like me and my mother, were thought of as dangerous, or the...