It is exceedingly easy to act like an asshole as a man. “Well, Bravo, grease lighting.” I can imagine many readers, who aren’t Hetero, Cis, and Male, sarcastically congratulating me, all with the added burn of a slow clap. “You’ve crossed the finish line”. A more than fair criticism. So…

Things are looking rather bleak. It has been a constant deluge of hate, violence, anger, illness, death, and loss, long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further darkened the horizon. So much has happened in such a short period. These times of uncertainty are unsettling. …

After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of cops, countless Americans took to the streets in BLM protests. They were repeatedly met with violence. Here, on the west coast, an officer in Los Angeles drove his cruiser into protestors, trapping some beneath the vehicle. In…

The first gun I ever held in my life was a large .45 revolver. I was 9 or 10 years old when I discovered it after climbing onto the roof of our house when we still lived in Oakland on 79th & Hillside. Much to my mom’s chagrin, I frequently…

12-year-old Tamir Rice, and 14-year-old Emmet Till, are Black boys who were murdered decades apart from one another, yet their deaths share a disturbing number of commonalities. The White men who committed these murders, or those justifying their violent crimes, claimed neither Tamir nor Emmitt were boys. It is reported…

“How did we get here?” This is a question I repeatedly hear and read these days. It began after Trump’s election but has echoed on ever since. The question was repeated after the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally. It is asked each time we witness cops around this nation brutalize…

There is a false narrative that cultural assimilation promises safety and acceptance in the U.S. One of the main driving points behind this misleading argument is that the continued racial disparities and conflicts in this country are at least partly driven by groups of people refusing to become “fully American”. …

It is time that many of you accept some difficult truths. Unfortunately, if you have any friends, family, or loved ones who still openly denies the existence of systemic racism, who pretends ANTIFA is a pale horse, and BLM is death riding upon it, then you must understand this is…

When we talk about the loss of one’s religion, we often expect to hear of a single dramatic shift that sounded the death knell of faith. For me, however, that was not the case. The loss of my religion was a gradual erosion or a death by degrees, something that…