by Brian Williams On a recent Friday night my wife and I watched in stunned confusion as a man in a pickup truck tried to intimidate our son and, possibly, goad him into an incident that could have ended in tragedy. First, some context. My wife, my son and I are Black. The man in ...
Many of my Black students today do not by Adam Schwartz When I was 15, I smoked a joint with a friend. High and goofy, we wandered into a grocery store in D.C. where I unsealed a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies and started crunching away. My friend — worried about going home ...
by Tony Norman When even white people have begun noticing the paradoxes in the criminal justice system, then the contradictions have become too blatant to chalk up to “the way things have always been done.” A passive belief in the status quo has worked for centuries in America. ...
One big question deserves to be on every police officer’s mind when pulling a motorist over for a relatively minor offense: Is this stop really worth the violent confrontation or death that could follow? Even if cops aren’t asking that question, city governments are, and they increasingly ...
by Richard Holt Imagine two kids on a playground. These children play. They laugh. They are helping each other on the slides and sharing a sandwich for lunch. At 4 years old, these children — one Black and one white — see each other as they see themselves. They see not a color ...
November saw two high-profile criminal trials with two major — but very different — verdicts. First was the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse for the deaths of two men and the wounding of a third during the unrest in Kenosha, Wis. Second was the trial of Travis McMichael, his father, ...