My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black

My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black

When the police pulled their guns on my mother, I reached for my phone and told her to be calm and do as they say. My parents and I had just been swarmed by police cars, sirens blaring, as we drove on I-64 through Virginia. Shock and fear consumed my family as we came...
It Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’

It Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’

It’s increasingly easy to believe that our country is irreconcilably divided. But that’s not quite the America that Michael Morrill saw from his perch in Reading, Pennsylvania the weekend before the Republican convention in Cleveland. Morrill, the...
I Can’t Watch Another Police Killing

I Can’t Watch Another Police Killing

Philando Castile and Alton Sterling became the latest black Americans to turn into Twitter hashtags when videos of their deaths at the hands of police circulated on social media. But I couldn’t bring myself to watch them. I still remember the helpless...