…all of these amount to a deafening, collective cry from black American athletes’ own home and country to shut up and dribble, a collective f-ck your breath.
Category: peace by piece
Piece 36: Know My Name
In January 2015, Miller was 22 and living in her hometown of Palo Alto, California. She went to a party, was sexually assaulted, and then saved from further harm by strangers who stopped her assailant when they saw what he was doing. Six years later, eight people went about their normal daily activities on a March day in Georgia, completely unaware that their lives would be violently cut short.
Piece 35: Black Church
When you think of the terror that has been inflicted on the black church in this country time and again, how do you imagine you might feel if the black church was that first place of faith for you? Would you feel safe to worship in the space where you truly felt at home?
Piece 34: Black Love
Amidst the love I feel for my blackness, nothing is quite so magical as witnessing the strong, deep bonds of love between us: romantic, platonic, and familial.
Piece 33: Expanding the Antebellum Narrative
Can you imagine the connection students might feel to history if it were intentionally made concrete and brought near to them rather than remaining an abstract, olden time amoeba?
Piece 32: Caste
Whether we assimilate completely to the dominant culture’s ideals, religion, even monetizing white-centric punditry into a career, or we focus our efforts on honing our talent to become excellent and give back to build up our community – we cannot escape this caste.
Piece 31: Wakanda Forever
I’m deeply grateful for the artistic choices Chadwick Boseman made, that broke box office record expectations for a black-led movie, that made star-struck young children want to attend historically black colleges and universities, that provided hope, relief, and joy for an audience full of people like me who are so grossly underrepresented in such beautiful, thorough artistic endeavors.
Piece 30: Grown
Our society seems to have deemed it necessary to punish teens for looking like adults by sentencing them – even if only in the court of public opinion – like adults.
Piece 29: The Square Root of [Im]possible
When you watch Jingle Jangle, I hope you will move a step beyond passively taking in all the joy and beauty it offers to ask yourself when you last saw such lovingly crafted black characters on screen, how many heartwarming holiday movies uplift a wholesome image of a black family, and what it means for girls to see themselves represented as talented and determined and curious and bold.
Piece 28: Soul
So if Pixar is going to wait twenty-five years to give paying audiences a black protagonist, we can damned well insist they give us a thoughtful, human story – just as they have with all the white protagonists before.
