Articulate, Anyone?

When I was young, I was often bul­lied for “talk­ing white.” That’s the way my pre­cise enun­ci­a­tion, robust vocab­u­lary, and pol­ished use of the Eng­lish lan­guage were cat­e­go­rized by oth­ers in the Black com­mu­ni­ty. At the oth­er end of the racial spec­trum, sev­er­al white teach­ers ques­tioned the author­ship of my com­po­si­tions because they were “too […]

Under the Gun

So the argu­ment goes some­thing like this: Police­men come into con­tact with any num­ber of vio­lent, crim­i­nal black men dur­ing the course of their careers, and so it is only rea­son­able that they should view all black men as poten­tial threats, and should have their loaded guns at the ready, when­ev­er, wher­ev­er, and under whatever […]