“Watching these “allies” blunder their way around the anti-racism landscape feels like watching a toddler trying to perform open-heart surgery. The stakes are too high. The mistakes are too costly.”…

Albert Einstein was born in Germany on March 14, 1879, the same year tens of thousands of Black American refugees engaged in a mass flight from slave states along the Mississippi River to the hopefully better pastures of Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma. This event became known as the Exodus of 1879.

Although slavery technically ended in 1865, Black people still needed to escape the pervasive racial violence perpetrated by White supremacists in the years that followed. Southern Black people were also exhausted from the discriminatory laws known as the Black Codes, which effectively rendered Black people second-class citizens and prevented…

On June 1, Washington, D.C. police arrested more than 300 Black Lives Matter protesters during marches against police brutality.

Last Wednesday, when Trump supporters overran the Capitol with zip-cuffs and the intent to kill members of Congress, only 61 were arrested, and on less serious charges, according to a CNN analysis.

“We are a city that deals with mass demonstrations all the time,” Monica Hopkins, the ACLU of D.C.’s executive director, told CNN. “For any law enforcement agency in this city to say they were caught flat-footed or they didn’t know what was coming is just incredibly false.”

That 61…

America must like it this way. People on edge. People fighting. People starving. People dying. Otherwise, it would be different.

If America wanted peace, it would have peace. Trust.

I was always taught to learn the tree by observing the fruit. Some parts of America have strange fruit indeed. That fruit is represented by the people who stormed the Capitol and tried to defy democracy — as they tend to do every other day now and as they have done for hundreds of years. …

Add to Harry Styles’ list of accomplishments—including being the Variety Hitmaker of the Year, having three hit singles in 2020, and being extremely good at fashion—work as a social justice ally.

The musician and erstwhile One Direction-er told Variety that this summer’s protests and uprisings in support of Black Lives Matter inspired him to speak out about the importance of being anti-racist:

Talking about race can be really uncomfortable for everyone. I had a realization that my own comfort in the conversation has nothing to do with the problem — like that’s not enough of a reason to not have…

I grew up in Seattle — on traditional Coast Salish land — in the ’60s and ’70s. As a child, I didn’t truly understand the counterculture protests and the civil rights movement. Still, I saw that music, fashion, and hairstyles were changing — and with them, attitudes.

I was — and still am — a White, privileged middle-class kid who lived in a predominantly White, privileged middle-class neighborhood. My day-to-day adventures were relatively unrestricted, as my parents deemed it “safe” within the confines of our more massive arterial city block to visit any of my friends who lived within the…

Consider some of the things that have been done in response to the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department:

• Destruction of confederate statues and monuments
• Renaming and rebranding our favorite sports teams and products
• Painting streets to honor Black Lives Matter

To be clear, these are all positive moves. But they’re symbolic. Symbols are powerful and significant, but the danger is when they take the place of real change and give a false impression that real change is being enacted. They can remove the pressure on leaders while doing little for the affected groups.

Further, symbolic gestures…

It’s a season of critical self-reflection and reexamination. I am coming to terms with some hard truths about racism and choosing to move in a direction that aligns with my values more.

In a recent reread of the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr., I was struck by something I had glossed over before. I felt the sting when King calls out the “white moderate.”

He writes, “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great…