Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the “human hierarchy” was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological racial inferiority to “those Americans who believe that they are White.”12 Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to his son, “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”13 America’s legacy of oppression and
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