The Nightlife I Remember There was a time when going to the club did not feel like preparing for a small financial emergency. Women could often get in free before a certain hour, while men paid a reasonable cover at the door. A woman might spend her first money of the night on a drink
Money Changed the Club Before People Realized It Read More »
What We Are Really Fighting About I have lived long enough to understand that most arguments are not really about what started them. Two people can fuss about dirty dishes, laundry on the floor, coming home late, or spending too much time on the phone. But beneath those everyday arguments, there may be deeper problems
The Argument Is Rarely About the Dishes Read More »
What Alignment Means to Me The older I get, the more I understand that love by itself does not guarantee a healthy relationship. Two people can deeply love each other and still not be a good match for one another. What makes the difference is alignment, because alignment determines whether two lives can actually move
When Love Is Aligned, You Can Finally Exhale Read More »
What a Tree Can Teach Me The older I get, the more I understand why people have always looked to nature for lessons about living. A tree does not begin its life by reaching only toward the sky. Before it can stand tall, it must send roots deep into the earth beneath it. Those roots
Rooted in the Earth, Still Reaching for the Light Read More »
The Life We Live on Autopilot I have come to understand that much of what I do every day begins somewhere deeper than the conscious mind. I may believe I am making a fresh decision, when in truth an old belief could be making that decision for me. Habits do not always appear out of
When I Finally Looked at the Parts of Myself I Had Been Avoiding Read More »
The Bible Has Been Used in More Than One Way The Bible has given millions of people comfort, hope, moral guidance, and spiritual strength. But history also shows that powerful institutions have sometimes used it to justify control over others. Those two truths can sit in the same room without canceling each other out. Enslaved
When Faith and Control Get Packaged Together Read More »
The Symbols We Carry Every Day I have handled dollar bills most of my life without giving much thought to all those symbols printed on the back. There is an eagle, an unfinished pyramid, an eye above that pyramid, Latin phrases, stars, arrows, and an olive branch. Once you start looking closely, I can understand
What Are We Really Looking at on the Dollar Bill? Read More »
Whiteness Was More Than Skin Color One thing history taught me is that race in America has never been as simple as looking at somebody’s skin and deciding where they belong. The meaning of whiteness developed over time through law, politics, immigration, labor, property, and social custom. People we now casually place inside one racial
When Whiteness Became a Door That Could Open Read More »
The Argument Behind the Casting Every so often, a casting decision becomes about much more than a movie. Suddenly, people are debating history, race, cultural ownership, and who gets to represent the ancient world. The controversy over the possibility of Lupita Nyong’o portraying Helen of Troy raises those kinds of questions. Some people see a
Who Gets to Play Helen of Troy? Read More »
The Question Behind the Argument I keep coming back to a difficult question about race, law, and American democracy. For generations, openly discriminatory laws created damage that did not simply disappear when those laws changed. So how does a society repair that damage when some efforts to correct it can also be challenged as discriminatory?
When the Remedy for Discrimination Gets Called Discrimination Read More »