In 2014, my son Wilson broke both of his arms — wildly displacing one of them — at his twelfth birthday party. Instead of cutting cake and opening gifts, we spent the next seven hours in the Stanford Emergency Room. During our time there, doctors straddled the gurney and yanked…

We Have Two Weeks to Save the State of Georgia from Desecrating Sacred ‘Weeping Time’ Land for a Brewery (and I believe we can) Please sign the petition to help us save this sacred land. On March 2 and 3, 1859, at Savannah’s Ten Broeck Racetrack, Pierce Butler sold 436 men, women, and children including 30 babies, many of whom had lived their entire lives together on Butler estates, to buyers and speculators from…

The rate of Black land loss doesn’t decrease during a national disaster. In that respect, our legal team came together just in time. The lawyer I called “Liz” in my last piece didn’t work out. Well-meaning and wise but admittedly not well-practiced in heirs property or eminent domain litigation, she…

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this story can be found by clicking these links. It seemed obvious to me that in a country grappling with what reparations to Black Americans for slavery and Jim Crow and beyond might look like, what they should not look like was…

Spoiler alert: This essay details the last scene of “Slave Play.” Part 1 and Part 2 of this story can be found by clicking these links. “Understand…” seventy-four-year-old Andrew Quarterman Jr. said to me from across the table as I ate avocado toast at Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan’s financial…

For Part 1 of this story, click here. Last week I caught a red eye to Hilton Head, spent a day recovering, and then my mother, step-father and I drove the 40 miles southwest to Port Wentworth, Georgia, to meet up with my cousin Koelker and his wife, and then…

When reparations discussions began to make big news, I didn’t need to understand what, exactly, was being proposed — money, acknowledgements, land, legislation — in order to know in my bones that they were due. The ways in which wealth was built on the backs of Black folks but kept…

There are many different kinds of religion. There is the kind of religion you are forced to observe as a child and that makes you feel shame. There is the kind of religion that lights you up for God as an adult and makes you want to believe. There is…

In Silicon Valley, I will like starting tech companies in my thirties for the same reasons I liked having open-heart surgery when I was four, or kissing my high school track coach with wine coolers in the parking lots of meets when I was fourteen. I will like it for…