Recently, at Happy Hour, I had a conversation with a white female friend and co-worker that really made me stop and think. She told me that I, or rather we—meaning the Black staff at our job—were being racist because we have a Black staff organization. She felt excluded, like she wasn’t welcome because she isn’t Black, and to her, that was unfair. In that moment, I had to break it down for her—explain why Black spaces exist in the first place and why her feeling left out is not the same as experiencing racism. But this conversation wasn’t just for her. Too many white people walk through life completely blind to these realities, and when they do encounter them, they mistake equity for exclusion. So, I’m sharing this message with her (again) and with the world, hoping that maybe—just maybe—some white people will read this, learn something, and begin to truly understand. It’s a wild concept that white people feel like they experience racism. Any time they feel excluded from something—a c...
So.. I just recently started watching the most amazing show The Master of None which debuted on Netflix last year. My man Ira told me that it was a dope show worth checking out and his quick analysis turned out to be correct. This comedy drama is awesome, the writing is superb, and the casting is damn near perfect. I binged watched the entire first season yesterday. But the season finale left something with me, something heavy. There is a scene where Dev Shah played by Aziz Ansari, is in a bookstore reading a book. And the viewer is somewhat in his head as listeners, like an aside or soliloquy, and we hear what he is reading as the scenes change. As I re-winded and listened to (about five times) the excerpt from the novel, "The Bell Jar" written by Sylvia Plath. I realized that this just might be the deepest and realest piece of literature that I have come across in my life's journey. I immediately ordered the book and found the quote online. Maybe it has som...
Written October 2005 Throughout my entire life, I have heard about the mystery between humans and God or gods. If there is an all knowing God, that knows our every move, choice, and action before we do it, do we really have free will? This discussion is very intriguing to me, because it makes me think about life. Is life already pre-planned, our every decision already made in fact for us, and all of our thoughts previously given to us. It seems like we are computers, with different programs in each of us, which has already been made and put into us in the form of our brains. In the Iliad some things were acts of human will, but the majority of the time they did what the gods wanted or supported. It seems as though we have do have the choice that determines which path our lives will follow. Because we can think, we can act, and everything else on our own, we can choose the life we want. The topic of free will is a very hard on...
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