crystalhandjuliad

Three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~Buddha

And as a recap, we have the haiku of Dahlia Lithwick, a Supreme Court/jurisprudence expert and editor at Newsweek and Slate. The following haikus are from the Senate judiciary committee’s hearing on then SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Lithwick summarized of each of the Senators’ speeches [...]

Dear Crystal,
The story of Professor Gates’s arrest is everywhere- I just saw Meet the Press’s host ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about it.  Our President and Professor Gates are turning the arrest into a larger conversation about public safety vs. racial profiling and thank goodness! Here are some glimpses into the conversation.
***The coverage of [...]

Dear Julia,
Today was filled with highs and lows. Honorable Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing began today, Dr. Regina Benjamin was announced as President Obama’s Surgeon General pick, and the national board of the civil rights organization founded and led by Dr. King, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) has called the LA Chapter President of the SCLC, [...]

Dear Julia,
I really enjoyed your memorial to Michael Jackson.  Ever since his death, the media has been one circus event after the next.  Every major network outlet, including BET, has offered their own version of a tribute to Michael Jackson’s life.  Yet not one has been able to do it without somehow mocking this human [...]

Dear Julia,
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are celebrating the birthday of their oldest daughter, Malia Obama. She turned 11 years old today.

I would like to wish Malia a wonderful happy birthday and offer the following 11 birthday wishes for everyday of her life to this point:
1. I wish for you, like all brown [...]

Dear Crystal,
The Michael Jackson videos of his concert tours that cycled on MTV when I was a teenager were some of the first images I saw of youth around the world. Bedrooms in Brooklyn, Gary, Indiana (his birthplace), Mount Pleasant, SC, London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Johnannesburg…rocked with kids like me, secretly trying on the moonwalk, pelvic-bumping [...]

Dear Crystal,
The YWCA block party and local spoken word maestros and maestras we’ve been learning from have moved me, and last night at the mini-poetry slam I felt your inspiration too!
Consider poets like CJ here, discussing Chapel Hill’s gentrification and alluding to the murder of Eve Carson as both a profound community loss and a [...]

Dear Crystal,
I can’t wait to read the article; we’ve all been socialized to respond to skin color, to use it to judge character, life experience, worthiness. These value judgements determine the distribution of resources and how people, media figures, police and government officials interact with one group versus another.
This week, the healthcare reform debate on [...]

Dear Crystal,
I am in Charleston, my birthplace, minutes away from Sullivan’s Island, “Slavery’s Ellis Island,” the end of the Middle Passage for, historians estimate, 40 percent of the enslaved people taken from West Africa. The native food, speech patterns, evangelism: all have roots in West African traditions, in addition to the Western European heritage.
I have [...]

Dear Julia,
Here’s a video of Sistah Professor Melissa Harris Lacewell from Princeton University. I had to post her video here. Melissa is speaking at Planned Parenthood about shame, race, and reproductive health. 
I really love the way she gently and lovingly teaches Planned Parenthood about racial micro-aggressions, internalized racism, and oppression in the context of Black [...]

Dear Julia,
Old racist still live among us! South Carolina Republican Rusty DePass compared an escaped Gorilla from a South Carolina zoo to the First Lady Michelle Obama. He posted his ugly racism right on his Facebook page!  
To add insult to injury, when called out on his racism, he had the audacity to claim that Michelle [...]