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How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.
am more at home in myself than ever, and it’s due in large part to those experiences, the people in those spaces who accepted me in all my unresolvedness and problematicness and taught me how to tell the truth about who I am, without burying it in a joke.
There’s a power and a clarity in saying, “This is where it begins for me, and this is where it ends,”
The stories of black life in this nation and prior to this nation have never been as well kept as the stories of white life.
We inherit a narrative that is full of sand. There are so many on the outside who want our stories, our histories of achievement, erased, so we have to save the space for them—in ourselves and in our midst.
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?
All of us have, at some point, logged on and thought, This seems like a good idea! And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say,
America is never a set notion; it is an ideal scarred from battle, perceived through smoke. The people must cry as one, “We do!” Is that what patriotism feels like? I feel that I should know, but patriotism, too, is always a question. It’s a concept that has been hijacked and beaten up, sold out and ripped to shreds by those who want it only for its surface rush, and not its arduous roots. Anything good in this country has had to be wrestled free.
