Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

Every day, I try to make the best decisions possible about what I create, what I consume, and who I collaborate with - but living in the world, participating in capitalism, requires moral compromise. I am not looking for purity; it doesn't exist. Instead, I'm trying to do the best I can, and take a stand when I think I can have an impact.

Avoid creating a hierarchy of human suffering as if compassion were a finite resource.

The freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom from consequence. You can speak our mind, but you can also be shunned. You can be criticized. You can be ignored or ridiculed. You can lose your job. The freedom of speech does not exist in a vacuum.

And other times I get angry, because anger is an entirely appropriate response to bigotry, systemic bias, and injustice.

I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. But I do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales.

There is also this. Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted. That’s what makes discussions of safety and safe spaces so difficult. We are also talking about privilege.

Opinionated people of a certain ilk often lament the “good old days” of discourse when everyone, regardless of affiliations and persuasions, listened to and respected one another. I’m not really sure those days ever existed for women or people of color or queer people or anyone else living in the margins.

I am often interested in identity politics. That phrase is often weaponized to dismiss the concerns and lived experiences of marginalized people. It is used to derail conversations about how identity shapes the way we move through the world and the way the world moves through us. It is an accusation that implies that we can somehow separate ourselves from the very things that contribute to who we are. It implies that we can’t both acknowledge and embrace our identities and be part of a broader community. To decry identity politics, to suggest you are not political, that you are simply human before anything else is, in fact, an identity politic. And that in itself interests me, as one of the ways that people can so utterly lack self-awareness while denying the lived experiences of everyone different from them.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

When students leave my classroom, any classroom, they have to and should face the real world, the best and worst of it. I can only hope they are adequately prepared to navigate the world as it is rather than how we wish it could be. But I also hope they are both realistic and idealistic. I hope that, like me, they search for safety, or work to create a world where some measure of safety, not to be confused with anything as infantile as coddling, is an inalienable right.

As a teacher, I think carefully about the intellectual space I want to foster in my classroom -- a space where debate, dissent ad even protest are encouraged. I want to challenge students and be challenged. I don't want to shape their opinions. I want to shape how they articulate and support those opinions.

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witness, and then we move on the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

The United States is not at all united. We live in two countries. I one, people are willing to grapple with racism and bigotry. We acknowledge that women have a right to bodily autonomy, that every American has a right to vote and the right to health care and the right to a fair living wage. We understand that this is a country of abundance and that the only reason economic disparity exists is because of a continued government refusal to tax the wealthy proportionally.

We should not live in a country where bodily autonomy can be granted or taken away by nine political appointess, most of whom are men and cannot become pregnant. Any civil right contingent upon political whims is not actually a civil right.

But maybe that is what happens in love and marriage. We admire from a distance, and we look away when we get too close and see what is actually there.

Writing about race can feel repetitive, but then, racism is repetitive.

Ultimately, such responses to my work are more reflective of their dimcomfort with who is expressing certain opinions rather than the opinions themselves.

I am often accused of being angry because I write about infuriating problems. I bristle at this accusation

Technology has made the world a panopticon. It has widened the range of who watches and who is watched.

In his impassioned new memoir

instead of this indelible part of our present. Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery

L.G.B.T.Q. officers are more than welcome to join Pride celebrations—unarmed and in civilian clothing. They are being asked to confront their complicity with an institution that does more harm than good to vulnerable communities. It is telling that some of these officers refuse to do so.

the world is on fire both literally and figuratively. This is the world into which these new graduates are entering and the world in which they’ll begin their careers. They are going to have to grapple with all of it. And so are we.

So much of what is possible is

in waiting. Black boys in particular are never allowed to be boys. Manhood is ascribed to black boys because we are part of a culture where innocence and blackness are seen as antithetical.

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” Ernest Hemingway wrote.

I have come to crave safety, the idea that I can live free from physical or emotional harm. As an adult, I understand that there is no such thing as safety, that safety is promised to no one, but oh the idea of it remains so lovely, so elusive.