Acknowledging the realities of structural and institutional racism is hard for conscionable white people. It might ask them to consider how they're personally implicated, or have gained from systems that have oppressed and rejected others. It might require them to take a next step. It's easier to say, "I don't see race," or to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement as structureless and theatrical than to embrace and promote its most basic premise, which is to believe that black lives have worth.

I learned from James Baldwin that one can be a novelist, essayist, and activist, combined. That being critical of one's country is a way of loving it. That travel is crucial for perspective. That faith needn't be confined to organized religion.

I don't think of rejection as rejection, just a bad fit. Then I seek out other avenues of acceptance.

It matters when public officials admit that their hearts have changed, but only in the service of changing actual policy.

I think it's really crucial to leave our American context, not only for a sense of individual freedom, but also to make links to international struggles for civil rights.

Acknowledging the realities of structural and institutional racism is hard for conscionable white people. It might ask them to consider how they're personally implicated, or have gained from systems that have oppressed and rejected others. It might require them to take a next step. It's easier to say, "I don't see race," or to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement as structureless and theatrical than to embrace and promote its most basic premise, which is to believe that black lives have worth.

Nowadays we can sidestep traditional media with social media and technology that allows us to become citizen journalists, to fight against injustice by showing what's shamefully going on.