What do you do when two impossibilities collide? This was my dilemma fifteen years ago while sitting in class at my conservative Christian university before I recognized race. Our normally boisterous class began on a somber note as our Hispanic professor recounted his...
The grisly video of Ahmaud Arbery’s death shook many of us. It was so wanton, so cruel, so animalistic. A twenty-five year old image bearer of God bled out on the asphalt of a suburban neighborhood, staining the street and the conscience of a nation with those three...
I came late to loving my skin. I was the fairest-skinned in my family and they teased that if I stayed outside for too long, I’d become as dark as they were and never fade. So I avoided sunlight. I’d bought into colorism—the idea that the lighter your skin the better....
I always say I recognized race and that I was black when I came to New York in 1978. For the first twelve years of my life, I lived in the Bahamas. We were a large family doing OK for ourselves. We could hire someone to do the cleaning and look down our noses on...
When I Recognized Race: John Talley III My wife, Celeste and I got married back in 2011. We had nights when we just spent time with one another. There were times when we went to the movies, went to a restaurant, or both because we were broke and did not have much...
“At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, a Union soldier observed that the remains of the Confederate army consisted of boys and old men. Upon asking what had happened to ‘Johnny Reb’, he was told, “he died at Gettysburg”. That statement may or may not be...
