Curiosity, Travel and Change
On May 14, the day of Bans off Our Bodies rallies around the country, my friend Judi and I decided to ditch our plans for a morning hike and headed north up Route 28 to Long Lake New York, where a rally had been planned. We had given some thought to heading to Albany, where …
A weaver in Teotitlan del Valle gives thanks before beginning work I am in awe of people who can make something out of nothing—salvagers and re-purposers and cultivators, dumpster divers and weavers, farmers coaxing food from the harshest earth, entrepreneurs finding possibility in a world of scarcity. On my recent trip to Mexico I saw …
The cemetery at Manzanar In a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise, a visit to Manzanar reminds one that the most shameful anti-Asian hate crime in our history was committed by the American government during World War II. Guilty of nothing, but targeted because of their Japanese descent, 120,000 Americans were forcibly …
Continue reading "An American Concentration Camp: Manzanar, California"
For me as a white person, part of learning to be anti-racist is understanding better the origins and structures of White supremacy. Part of that is the retelling of history. For example, I knew very little about the resistance of enslaved people against their oppressors—from the 1811 German Coast Uprising, to the daily small acts …
Continue reading "The Resistance of Enslaved People: Whitney Plantation, Wallace Louisiana"
Say their names, the 4400 documented victims of lynching, the millions more of undocumented victims of racial terror. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery draws the unambiguous and direct line from enslavement to Jim Crow to lynching to mass incarceration to police violence to voter suppression. The Memorial, along with the Legacy …
Continue reading "Say Their Names: The legacy of racial terror: Montgomery Alabama"
Old and On the Way 