Jamal Michel is a Duke graduate and an English teacher at Northern High School. His column runs on alternate Fridays.
On the back walls of my classroom, covering old holes and Sharpie-scribbled hashtags and Instagram handles, my kids hang their social contracts.
The storytellers of old always worked to reshape history as they saw fit, but if we can allow a platform for diverse groups of storytellers and creators in the 21st century, then change can follow.
Today’s conversations should turn into action, and that action must work to combat the staggering number of crimes against marginalized groups.
When doing the most simplistic, most mundane, most necessary job of president suddenly makes you president, then our issues with the current administration’s powers are only now beginning.
Now that one of their roster’s most crucial performers has been sidelined, Irving must again face a challenge akin to those of his past.
As a high school teacher, the stress of such issues permeates my life from the linoleum laced hallways, all the way down to the desks my kids occupy several hours a day.
Black and Brown athletes, it seems, are to live and breathe their profession with no regard for the outside world. Only when an athlete steps out of the realm of a football field or basketball court and speaks the language of race and politics are they stopped in their tracks and sent back to their respective spaces.
Jenkins’ work provides a platform for anyone who once thought they were alone in that conversation, for anyone who felt bogged down by clouds of confusion and opposition.
Historically disadvantaged communities are often the targets of hate speech, and the near explicit backing that nationalist groups in the country receive should not be entirely surprising. It is a pre-existing condition of our country to use our laws to justify the most or near greatest forms of invisible inequity.
We are currently witnessing a horrifying attempt by this administration to defend the motives and actions of racist and violent neo-Confederates bent on asserting their demands for an ethno-state, and somehow there remains a nationwide divide.
