Room One
What Was Taken.
Some losses arrive all at once.
Others reveal themselves over generations.
Others reveal themselves over generations.
Loss · Displacement · Absence
Hollywood
The high waters rose, tried to take us. But we learned how to fly.
For the first seven years of my life, everyone who mattered to me lived within arm's reach in the North Memphis neighborhood where my family settled after leaving Sunflower County, Mississippi, during the Great Migration. My grandmother Madear, her baby sister who we all called Little Auntie, and my immediate and extended family clustered like constellations within a single square mile on Vandale Street. We lived in an area called "Hollywood" in North Memphis—the name stamped on the crooked marquee of the main commercial corridor that announced entry into our hood.
Our Hollywood was a working-class Black community stitched together with churches, cafes, corner stores, and shotgun houses. The neighborhood was a sensory feast: a chorus of voices of every age, laughter drifting from open windows and front porches, the smell of fried catfish coming from backyards on Friday afternoons. Kids would stand on the sidewalks, afros blown out to perfection, screaming, "Say it loud—I'm Black and I'm proud!" while James Brown screamed it from the transistor radio in the middle of the circle. He said we were beautiful, and we believed him.
Our Hollywood was special. Sacred even. By any grown-up measure it was anything but ideal. Yet in its own way, it was perfect. It wasn't glamorous, but it was ours.
We were on higher ground, and we were hood rich.
That's how I remember it.
Long before I was born, the Great Mississippi Floods forced my family out of the Delta into a city sharply divided by race. Neighborhoods like ours were redlined before we ever arrived. Banks and government officials had already decided: no loans here. No investment here. Families like mine could only go so far.
Black women like my grandmama and aunties worked for the rich white folks across town—about the only job available to "colored women" in the south. Madear would open up a juke joint called Honey's Grill, just a small shack at the back of the corner store. Little Auntie worked for one family for twenty years, washing their clothes, cooking their meals, and keeping their house clean. She still had to pay the lady of the house for the hand-me-down clothes she passed along to my mama once their daughters outgrew them. When she finally retired, there was no pension, no ceremony, not even the comfort of Social Security. Just a faded photo of her dressed pristinely in a black-and-white maid's uniform, her beautiful ebony skin beaming amidst a sea of white faces. And memories that drifted away in ripples—her labor, her presence, her care, all quietly written out of their collective memory.
Years later, I found myself driving back through my old neighborhood with my daughter Kai. I wanted her to know the places that had made me—seeds Madear, Little Auntie, my Mama had planted in me.
When I turned on our street, my voice caught mid-sentence. The small shack at the back of the corner store where Madear's Honey's Grill used to stand was gone. All I could see was an empty lot and browning weeds—beer cans, rubbish, the debris of erasure. I kept driving until I stopped in front of the small red brick house that had replaced Madear's clapboard home. The house next door was gone except for the porch. No children played outside. No neighbors stood outdoors sharing the latest gossip. Just Madear's original clapboard house, long replaced by the government with grant money to "upgrade." A block full of cookie-cutter brick houses had replaced the original shotgun structures with wide porches.
An upgrade they said.
Kai’s voice broke the silence; “Mom, I think we should go now.”
That night over dinner, I told Kai my stories. Catfish dinners on Friday. The Candy-lady that sold penny-candy to all the kids on the block. Madear visiting the sick and shut-in that lived on our street. I told her about the white folks Madear and Little Auntie worked for across town. About how Little Auntie still saved enough to start a college fund for my Mama. I told her all these stories because I needed to remember. Because I needed Kai to remember. Because I could hear Madear's voice: "Ain't no use in crying. We gots to keep on living." And that's what we were doing—living. Remembering. Refusing to let the erasure be complete.
The high waters came, tried to drown us.
Instead, they taught us how to remember.
And in remembering, we learned how to fly.
Hollywood
The high waters rose, tried to take us. But we learned how to fly.
For the first seven years of my life, everyone who mattered to me lived within arm's reach in the North Memphis neighborhood where my family settled after leaving Sunflower County, Mississippi, during the Great Migration. My grandmother Madear, her baby sister who we all called Little Auntie, and my immediate and extended family clustered like constellations within a single square mile on Vandale Street. We lived in an area called "Hollywood" in North Memphis—the name stamped on the crooked marquee of the main commercial corridor that announced entry into our hood.
Our Hollywood was a working-class Black community stitched together with churches, cafes, corner stores, and shotgun houses. The neighborhood was a sensory feast: a chorus of voices of every age, laughter drifting from open windows and front porches, the smell of fried catfish coming from backyards on Friday afternoons. Kids would stand on the sidewalks, afros blown out to perfection, screaming, "Say it loud—I'm Black and I'm proud!" while James Brown screamed it from the transistor radio in the middle of the circle. He said we were beautiful, and we believed him.
Our Hollywood was special. Sacred even. By any grown-up measure it was anything but ideal. Yet in its own way, it was perfect. It wasn't glamorous, but it was ours.
We were on higher ground, and we were hood rich.
That's how I remember it.
Long before I was born, the Great Mississippi Floods forced my family out of the Delta into a city sharply divided by race. Neighborhoods like ours were redlined before we ever arrived. Banks and government officials had already decided: no loans here. No investment here. Families like mine could only go so far.
Black women like my grandmama and aunties worked for the rich white folks across town—about the only job available to "colored women" in the south. Madear would open up a juke joint called Honey's Grill, just a small shack at the back of the corner store. Little Auntie worked for one family for twenty years, washing their clothes, cooking their meals, and keeping their house clean. She still had to pay the lady of the house for the hand-me-down clothes she passed along to my mama once their daughters outgrew them. When she finally retired, there was no pension, no ceremony, not even the comfort of Social Security. Just a faded photo of her dressed pristinely in a black-and-white maid's uniform, her beautiful ebony skin beaming amidst a sea of white faces. And memories that drifted away in ripples—her labor, her presence, her care, all quietly written out of their collective memory.
Years later, I found myself driving back through my old neighborhood with my daughter Kai. I wanted her to know the places that had made me—seeds Madear, Little Auntie, my Mama had planted in me.
When I turned on our street, my voice caught mid-sentence. The small shack at the back of the corner store where Madear's Honey's Grill used to stand was gone. All I could see was an empty lot and browning weeds—beer cans, rubbish, the debris of erasure. I kept driving until I stopped in front of the small red brick house that had replaced Madear's clapboard home. The house next door was gone except for the porch. No children played outside. No neighbors stood outdoors sharing the latest gossip. Just Madear's original clapboard house, long replaced by the government with grant money to "upgrade." A block full of cookie-cutter brick houses had replaced the original shotgun structures with wide porches.
An upgrade they said.
Kai’s voice broke the silence; “Mom, I think we should go now.”
That night over dinner, I told Kai my stories. Catfish dinners on Friday. The Candy-lady that sold penny-candy to all the kids on the block. Madear visiting the sick and shut-in that lived on our street. I told her about the white folks Madear and Little Auntie worked for across town. About how Little Auntie still saved enough to start a college fund for my Mama. I told her all these stories because I needed to remember. Because I needed Kai to remember. Because I could hear Madear's voice: "Ain't no use in crying. We gots to keep on living." And that's what we were doing—living. Remembering. Refusing to let the erasure be complete.
The high waters came, tried to drown us.
Instead, they taught us how to remember.
And in remembering, we learned how to fly.
See full previous text.
The United States cannot claim accountability for harms it refuses to name. As we approach our 250th anniversary, the country's responsibility to Black communities is not redemptive, it is recognition.
Recognition that the Great Floods forced my family from Mississippi, but redlining corporal violence prevented us from ever truly settling in the place we now called "home". That my grandmama Madear built a life of beauty despite being told "you can only go so far." That Black women like my Little Auntie gave twenty years of labor and received $20 bills and nothing more than hand-me-downs. That the neighborhood we built was systematically erased, first by disinvestment, then by "upgrades" that erased our architecture along with our memory, and then by neglect.
Meaningful repair requires more than apology. It requires restoration, and accountability from systems not just individuals. It also requires that we remember and teach the next generation so they don't forget. The country cannot fly forward while refusing to remember where it grounded us. Meaningful repair requires us to do what my grandmother taught: keep on living, yes. But also keep on remembering. Keep on refusing. Keep on demanding that the systems that displaced us be held accountable, not just by history, but by policy, by investment, by real power returned to the communities that built America while being told they could only go so far.
For most of my life, I lived in the tension between my authentic self and someone who often felt like a stranger. While I could see the beauty of my own brown skin and feel the rhythms of my people in my everyday life, stepping just beyond the sanctuary of my historic Black neighborhood in Northeast Alabama revealed a harsh reality: the lingering consequences of a global colonial settler epidemic that had devastated (and continues to devastate) so many of us. The contrast of my ‘hood with the palatial landscapes, pools in the backyard, houses built just for boats and maids, cleaners and helpers made for a bit of confusion on my part.
My neighbor, Ms. Lue – whose daily ways of surviving included dashes of weeps and woes sprinkled with temporary moments of joy – taught me to never wait for the perfect moment to celebrate, that good friends are meant for a lifetime and that there was nothing like a soul-filling ‘hoot and holler’ while sitting on the porch with family and friends. Of course, none of these moments would mean much without the soothing backdrop of the soulful voices of artists like Whitney Houston, Sister Betty Wright and Bobby Blue Bland playing in the background on any given day.
No matter how quickly moments like these may have dissipated, it was our medicine – a cure for the imbalance of things. There was an intoxicating cadence and rhythm in those sounds that awakened something in us, in me.
Every time these notes reverberated through Ms. Lue’s screen door, creeping over the crepe myrtles that acted as border between our houses to reach my chest and ears, I felt it. I was free.
This is what it was to be free.
This is the beginning of my identity story. It’s an origin story steeped deeply in great pride for what had been and hope for what the future could hold.
Alongside the harsh reality that we live in, I carry the hopes and dreams of my grandparents whose own parents had lived their lives as workers and contributors in the community I grew up in. I also carry the deeply embedded memories of those who unknowingly provided me with a bird’s eye view of the many layers of what it meant to be a Black futurist. They were dreamers and visionaries who could not be bothered to allow what they saw in front of them to keep them from placing one foot in front of the other.
For most of my life, I lived in the tension between my authentic self and someone who often felt like a stranger. While I could see the beauty of my own brown skin and feel the rhythms of my people in my everyday life, stepping just beyond the sanctuary of my historic Black neighborhood in Northeast Alabama revealed a harsh reality: the lingering consequences of a global colonial settler epidemic that had devastated (and continues to devastate) so many of us. The contrast of my ‘hood with the palatial landscapes, pools in the backyard, houses built just for boats and maids, cleaners and helpers made for a bit of confusion on my part.
My neighbor, Ms. Lue – whose daily ways of surviving included dashes of weeps and woes sprinkled with temporary moments of joy – taught me to never wait for the perfect moment to celebrate, that good friends are meant for a lifetime and that there was nothing like a soul-filling ‘hoot and holler’ while sitting on the porch with family and friends. Of course, none of these moments would mean much without the soothing backdrop of the soulful voices of artists like Whitney Houston, Sister Betty Wright and Bobby Blue Bland playing in the background on any given day.
No matter how quickly moments like these may have dissipated, it was our medicine – a cure for the imbalance of things. There was an intoxicating cadence and rhythm in those sounds that awakened something in us, in me.
Every time these notes reverberated through Ms. Lue’s screen door, creeping over the crepe myrtles that acted as border between our houses to reach my chest and ears, I felt it. I was free.
This is what it was to be free.
This is the beginning of my identity story. It’s an origin story steeped deeply in great pride for what had been and hope for what the future could hold.
Alongside the harsh reality that we live in, I carry the hopes and dreams of my grandparents whose own parents had lived their lives as workers and contributors in the community I grew up in. I also carry the deeply embedded memories of those who unknowingly provided me with a bird’s eye view of the many layers of what it meant to be a Black futurist. They were dreamers and visionaries who could not be bothered to allow what they saw in front of them to keep them from placing one foot in front of the other.
I can feel it
It rises like the morning sun right up my chest and through my lungs and rolls its way up through my throat to my mouth
But I choke
Before it can make its way over my tongue and through these lips
I choke
You see
It happens every time
And oh I am searching so desperately to find it
I don’t know when it happened, but I know it did.
I know because I was standing right there in front of a room full of people looking at me, expecting me to give them something I couldn’t even give myself.
I’d been invited to come and give a talk to women who’d lost their way. They were mothers, friends, aunties, workers and professionals and, at the end of the day – they were just like me in so many ways, yet so very different.
This invitation came on the heels of a personal milestone, following several months of travel, guest appearances on dozens of podcasts, Instagram Lives and published interviews after my book release in 2019.
Not only had I just come off a gauntlet of speaking engagements, I’d been preparing for moments just like this since I was a kid growing up in the A.M.E. Church. From Sunday sermonettes, to Easter speeches and leading custom-tailored prayers at the altar – I was not new to this.
“Thank you all for such a wonderful welcome. It is such an honor to be here with you tonight,” I opened. After that, much of my time on that platform is a blur as I attempt to recall the details of my talk that evening.
What I do recall is that I could not speak to save my life and, oh my goodness, did it feel like my life needed saving in that moment. I struggled my way through that 15-minute time restriction by filling the space with needless nothings and a whole bunch of unnecessary air.
The ‘why’ behind what became a very public struggle was not clear to me then, but now I understand perhaps a little more what had caused me to fail miserably on that night – a night I’ve so fiercely tried over the past several years to forget.
The truth is, that room became a mirror – reflecting back to me all the things I’d been wrestling with since the release of my book.
Somewhere along the way, I’d lost my voice but it didn’t necessarily happen on that night – it started well before that. I lost those hopes and dreams of my grandparents that I’d carried with me. I’d tucked them away to become a talking head full of perfectly timed inflections and tones of voice palatable enough to be tolerated by some of the finest followers of Yeshua the world has ever seen.
George Floyd became a modern culminating story of the many Black lives that were senselessly taken at the hands of those who deemed our lives, our Black lives – meaningless. These are the things I did not speak of in most public spaces. These were the topics reserved for offline conversations mostly and within the safety net of Black friends who could hold the weight of this story alongside the many others who’d been taken before him.
I’d spent much of my time in spaces and with people who were tolerant at best and agnostic at worst, when it came to the responsibilities of holding both themselves and others around them accountable. They covertly and overtly, intentionally and unintentionally showed up as sanitized versions of their racist ancestors who, through scripture and smiles, thought they were doing the lord’s work by removing the ‘hard R’ from their s-h-u-g-g-u-h filled words. A whisper of sweet-nothings, coated in promises of freedom in the afterlife paled in comparison to the in-person hugs and pats on the back in the Sunday morning ‘team’ huddles from folks who could not fathom a mention or see the pain so many of us felt at the time. After all, “he wasn’t ‘saved’ anyhow, we didn’t know the whole story and there were good people on both sides”. I cannot claim to tolerate this type of carrying on – most certainly not then; as evidenced by my inability to ‘pull it together’ that night and undubitably – not now, either.
The reckoning had come.
That night, my body was no longer willing to negotiate with what I had long known yet found tension in reconciling.
Sometimes
When the wind blows ever so slightly from the East, I can hear it
I call to it but every time I try to take a breath, I lose it
Somewhere between there and here
It becomes irretrievable, it seems
And I cannot perceive how this could ever be any other way
If I were to truly honor the work of those who had come before me as well as the memory of those our communities continued to be forced to mourn, I would need to parse out truth from lie, separate the spiritually proverbial wheat from the chaff to find alignment with who I had always been.
There was so much that had been consistently unclear to me in those months leading up to that moment, but this one thing I knew – I would never choke again on the expectations and
limitations of others – especially those who were willing to trade pure, raw sugar for the poisonous arsenic of their anti-Black delusions.
Alas, I live to see another day so
I take it all in
Count my losses as wins
The greatest story ever told is the story of you. The grandest dream yet to unfold is how you made it through And if there’s one thing I need you to know it’s that the bluest sky is tilted toward you
The thing I’ve been searching so long to find was, no – is right here.
I live in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY and we have experience a great deal of trauma and challenges since many have either been brought to the city thru slavery or migrated from the Caribbean and the South. Now many who have lived her for decades or even generations are being forced out due to the high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, job loss and lack of educational opportunities. In addition, more and more are losing their homes due to deed theft. Public officials are creating policies and laws to stop it but its not enough and not happening fast enough. Neighbors are losing generational wealth, their homes and memories due to these orchestrated crimes. These are the many things that are changing the face and culture of the community and it needs to stop.
What has been lost and denied is the loss of generational wealth, property, community and memories. We are becoming the minorities in our own community. The police are being weaponized against us. there is also a loss of political and economic power.
The US owes us reparations, we need our 40 acres, as well as all the DEI programs that were eliminated. More job training and economic opportunities, house and education programs and most important the role that Native Americans, Latinos and people of the African descent need to be not on every level in education and noted in government policies. We need to reverse the harm and trauma that have placed of people of color in this country.
I live in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY and we have experience a great deal of trauma and challenges since many have either been brought to the city thru slavery or migrated from the Caribbean and the South. Now many who have lived her for decades or even generations are being forced out due to the high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, job loss and lack of educational opportunities. In addition, more and more are losing their homes due to deed theft. Public officials are creating policies and laws to stop it but its not enough and not happening fast enough. Neighbors are losing generational wealth, their homes and memories due to these orchestrated crimes. These are the many things that are changing the face and culture of the community and it needs to stop.
One of the most formative experiences that shaped my understanding of accountability, repair, and the unfinished work of racial justice in the United States occurred during my senior year of high school. Like many students, I looked to my guidance counselor for encouragement and direction as I prepared for college. Instead, I was met with lowered expectations rooted in bias.
Throughout the college application process, my guidance counselor repeatedly discouraged me from pursuing the colleges and universities that I believed reflected my academic abilities and aspirations. Rather than encouraging me to reach for institutions that aligned with my achievements, she insisted that I should limit my options to community colleges or public institutions because, in her view, minority students needed more time to "catch up" academically and economically. The message was unmistakable: regardless of my accomplishments, my potential was being measured by stereotypes rather than merit.
What made this experience even more painful was that school is supposed to be a second home—a place where educators nurture possibility, cultivate confidence, and expand students' horizons. Instead, I experienced how systemic racism can quietly operate through lowered expectations, gatekeeping, and the subtle but powerful act of convincing young people that they should dream smaller.
Ironically, this occurred in a school district that struggled to attract and retain Black and Brown students and faced questions about diversity and representation. Yet rather than creating an environment where students of color were empowered to excel, some of the very systems designed to support us perpetuated inequity. It demonstrated that representation alone is insufficient if institutional culture and practices continue to reinforce deficit-based beliefs about students from historically marginalized communities.
I refused to accept those limitations. I applied broadly, earned admission to institutions beyond those I was told were within my reach, went on to earn multiple degrees, built a career in educational leadership, and pursued doctoral studies dedicated to culturally responsive education and equity. My success was not an exception because I overcame my race; it was possible because I refused to internalize someone else's limited vision of my future.
To me, reparations and repair are not solely about financial compensation. They also require honest acknowledgment of the ways educational systems have historically underestimated, excluded, and discouraged generations of Black and Brown students. Accountability means examining how bias influences advising, access, opportunity, and expectations. Repair means ensuring that every student is affirmed, challenged, and supported according to their potential—not constrained by assumptions about their identity.
My experience continues to fuel my commitment as an educator and leader. I work to create the kind of educational environments I once needed: spaces where students are seen, believed in, and encouraged to pursue opportunities without artificial ceilings. Until we confront the inequities embedded within our educational institutions and hold ourselves accountable for dismantling them, equality and equity in education will remain aspirations rather than realities.
What was lost in that experience was not my ambition, but my trust that every student is encouraged equally by those entrusted to guide them. When my guidance counselor suggested that my race and background limited my college options, it revealed how deeply bias can shape educational opportunities. Although I refused to accept those limitations, I often think about the students who may have believed similar messages and never pursued the futures they deserved.
That experience taught me that systemic racism is not always overt; it often appears through lowered expectations, biased advising, and assumptions about students' potential. These subtle forms of discrimination continue to affect educational equity today, contributing to disparities in access to advanced coursework, college opportunities, and academic support for many Black and Brown students.
Rather than discouraging me, this experience strengthened my commitment to educational justice. As an educator and leader, I strive to ensure every student feels seen, valued, and empowered to pursue opportunities without artificial limits. Meaningful repair requires confronting bias and creating educational systems where every student's potential is recognized and nurtured.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, I believe the nation has a responsibility to honestly confront the legacy of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism and acknowledge how those injustices continue to shape the lives of many Black communities today. Meaningful repair begins with truth-telling, accountability, and a commitment to dismantling the structural inequities that persist in education, housing, healthcare, employment, and the criminal justice system.
For me, repair is not solely about financial compensation. It also means ensuring equitable access to high-quality education, investing in historically underserved communities, preserving Black history, and creating policies that expand opportunity rather than perpetuate disparity. It requires institutions to examine how bias continues to influence decisions and to actively remove barriers that limit success.
As an educator, I believe one of the most powerful forms of repair is ensuring that every child is seen, challenged, and supported according to their potential not judged by stereotypes or limited expectations. As we reflect on 250 years of our nation's history, we have an opportunity to build a future where equity is not simply an aspiration but a lived reality for every generation that follows.
One of the most formative experiences that shaped my understanding of accountability, repair, and the unfinished work of racial justice in the United States occurred during my senior year of high school. Like many students, I looked to my guidance counselor for encouragement and direction as I prepared for college. Instead, I was met with lowered expectations rooted in bias.
Throughout the college application process, my guidance counselor repeatedly discouraged me from pursuing the colleges and universities that I believed reflected my academic abilities and aspirations. Rather than encouraging me to reach for institutions that aligned with my achievements, she insisted that I should limit my options to community colleges or public institutions because, in her view, minority students needed more time to "catch up" academically and economically. The message was unmistakable: regardless of my accomplishments, my potential was being measured by stereotypes rather than merit.
What made this experience even more painful was that school is supposed to be a second home—a place where educators nurture possibility, cultivate confidence, and expand students' horizons. Instead, I experienced how systemic racism can quietly operate through lowered expectations, gatekeeping, and the subtle but powerful act of convincing young people that they should dream smaller.
Ironically, this occurred in a school district that struggled to attract and retain Black and Brown students and faced questions about diversity and representation. Yet rather than creating an environment where students of color were empowered to excel, some of the very systems designed to support us perpetuated inequity. It demonstrated that representation alone is insufficient if institutional culture and practices continue to reinforce deficit-based beliefs about students from historically marginalized communities.
I refused to accept those limitations. I applied broadly, earned admission to institutions beyond those I was told were within my reach, went on to earn multiple degrees, built a career in educational leadership, and pursued doctoral studies dedicated to culturally responsive education and equity. My success was not an exception because I overcame my race; it was possible because I refused to internalize someone else's limited vision of my future.
To me, reparations and repair are not solely about financial compensation. They also require honest acknowledgment of the ways educational systems have historically underestimated, excluded, and discouraged generations of Black and Brown students. Accountability means examining how bias influences advising, access, opportunity, and expectations. Repair means ensuring that every student is affirmed, challenged, and supported according to their potential—not constrained by assumptions about their identity.
My experience continues to fuel my commitment as an educator and leader. I work to create the kind of educational environments I once needed: spaces where students are seen, believed in, and encouraged to pursue opportunities without artificial ceilings. Until we confront the inequities embedded within our educational institutions and hold ourselves accountable for dismantling them, equality and equity in education will remain aspirations rather than realities.
The Cost of Becoming
The mind can never prepare you for the journey that comes with the cost of becoming.
I never imagined that earning an education to survive would complicate one of the things I wanted most: building the kind of family that shaped my earliest understanding of love and joy.
Navigating the world as a highly educated Black woman who still hopes to experience partnership has been one of the most unexpected chapters of my life. Like many Black millennial women, I was raised with a singular message: go to school, work hard, read, and build a life that no one could take from you.
As a first-generation American with parents from Hispaniola, I grew up in a multigenerational home where education was never presented as one option among many. It was the expectation. My parents' migration carried with it a profound belief that education could change the trajectory of a family's future. Their sacrifices became my opportunity, and their dreams became my inheritance. Weekends were spent at the public library. Good grades were celebrated. College was assumed. Graduate school was encouraged. Every achievement represented another step toward a life that previous generations could only imagine.
There was, however, one conversation we rarely had.
No one talked about dating.
No one explained how building an independent life might reshape the possibilities of building a shared one.
No one suggested that achievement, while opening professional doors, might quietly narrow personal ones.
No one prepared me for the quiet grief that can accompany becoming everything you were told to be.
Growing up, Black girls are often taught that education is our way out. We are encouraged to work twice as hard, never depend on anyone, and build our own financial security. Those lessons were born from love. They were passed down by mothers and grandmothers who understood that education could offer protection in a society that had rarely protected them.
That inheritance deserves to be honored.
It also deserves to be examined.
As I moved from undergraduate studies to graduate school and eventually earned my doctorate, I found that my world expanded professionally while my dating world became increasingly narrow. The challenge was never simply finding someone I enjoyed spending time with. It was finding someone whose life experiences, aspirations, and long-term goals felt compatible with my own. More than once I found myself minimizing my accomplishments before a first date. I learned to mention my work long before mentioning my degree, as though the title I had worked years to earn might somehow make me less approachable. As my educational journey continued, I increasingly found myself navigating spaces where educational attainment and economic opportunity had begun to diverge between Black women and Black men.
This is not because Black men lack ambition, intelligence, or the desire to build meaningful lives. Rather, Black women and Black men have inherited different burdens from the same historical systems.
While Black women have become one of the fastest-growing populations earning bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, Black men continue to face disproportionate barriers in educational attainment, employment, incarceration, wealth accumulation, and labor market opportunity.
We are responding to different pressures created by the same history.
The distance I began to experience was not born from a lack of love or desire for partnership, but from histories that continue to shape our present in different ways.
I love Black men.
I love Black fathers.
I love seeing Black families thrive.
My hope has never been to abandon Black love. My hope has always been to live it.
That hope is precisely why this conversation matters.
Because when conversations about dating become reduced to individual choices or personal shortcomings, we lose sight of the larger systems that quietly shape those choices before we ever make them.
What concerns me most is not simply whether I will marry.
It is what these changing dynamics mean for the future of the Black community.
Healthy communities are built through relationships, mentorship, stable families, and shared economic investment. When structural inequalities make partnership increasingly difficult, the effects extend beyond individual loneliness. They shape neighborhoods, children, wealth, and our collective imagination of what Black futures can look like.
I still believe in Black love.
I still believe in Black families.
I still believe in the brilliance of Black men and Black women.
But I also believe we owe ourselves the courage to talk honestly about the conditions that shape our relationships.
Perhaps repair begins there.
Not in blame.
Not in shame.
But in telling the truth about what it has cost us to become.
Dr. Krystiana Bonheur
I believe what was most interrupted was the ability to build stable Black families and communities under equitable conditions. Generations of structural inequality shaped educational opportunities, economic mobility, housing, labor markets, and wealth accumulation differently for Black men and Black women. While education became a pathway to survival and advancement for many Black women, those same systems often created different barriers for Black men. The effects continue to appear today in widening educational and wage disparities, delayed wealth building, challenges in forming economically stable partnerships, and the emotional burden of navigating relationships shaped by systemic inequities rather than individual shortcomings. These realities influence not only who we become, but also the families we are able to build, the communities we sustain, and the opportunities available to future generations.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, I believe it has a responsibility to tell a more complete story about who built this nation and who has too often been excluded from fully sharing in its promise. Celebrating the country's achievements without acknowledging the generations of enslavement, segregation, discriminatory public policies, and systemic barriers that continue to shape Black communities presents an incomplete history. Meaningful accountability begins with truth telling.
Repair requires more than symbolic recognition or isolated opportunities that celebrate individual success stories. It requires sustained investment in the conditions that allow Black communities to flourish: equitable education, economic opportunity, pathways to homeownership and wealth building, quality healthcare, safe neighborhoods, and support for Black families and entrepreneurs. It also requires removing the structural barriers that continue to limit opportunity across generations.
For me, repair also means creating space for Black Americans to stand fully within our identities without having to minimize our history, our culture, or our aspirations to be accepted. The pain carried by our ancestors did not disappear with them. It echoes through the disparities we continue to navigate today. Acknowledging that legacy is not about remaining rooted in the past; it is about understanding how the past continues to shape the present.
The 250th anniversary offers an opportunity to move beyond celebration toward accountability. My hope is that America will not only recognize the immeasurable contributions Black people have made to building this nation, but also commit to removing the barriers that continue to prevent many Black families and communities from fully realizing their own vision of the American dream. Repair begins when we tell the truth about our shared history and follow that truth with sustained action.
The Cost of Becoming
The mind can never prepare you for the journey that comes with the cost of becoming.
I never imagined that earning an education to survive would complicate one of the things I wanted most: building the kind of family that shaped my earliest understanding of love and joy.
Navigating the world as a highly educated Black woman who still hopes to experience partnership has been one of the most unexpected chapters of my life. Like many Black millennial women, I was raised with a singular message: go to school, work hard, read, and build a life that no one could take from you.
As a first-generation American with parents from Hispaniola, I grew up in a multigenerational home where education was never presented as one option among many. It was the expectation. My parents' migration carried with it a profound belief that education could change the trajectory of a family's future. Their sacrifices became my opportunity, and their dreams became my inheritance. Weekends were spent at the public library. Good grades were celebrated. College was assumed. Graduate school was encouraged. Every achievement represented another step toward a life that previous generations could only imagine.
There was, however, one conversation we rarely had.
No one talked about dating.
No one explained how building an independent life might reshape the possibilities of building a shared one.
No one suggested that achievement, while opening professional doors, might quietly narrow personal ones.
No one prepared me for the quiet grief that can accompany becoming everything you were told to be.
Growing up, Black girls are often taught that education is our way out. We are encouraged to work twice as hard, never depend on anyone, and build our own financial security. Those lessons were born from love. They were passed down by mothers and grandmothers who understood that education could offer protection in a society that had rarely protected them.
That inheritance deserves to be honored.
It also deserves to be examined.
As I moved from undergraduate studies to graduate school and eventually earned my doctorate, I found that my world expanded professionally while my dating world became increasingly narrow. The challenge was never simply finding someone I enjoyed spending time with. It was finding someone whose life experiences, aspirations, and long-term goals felt compatible with my own. More than once I found myself minimizing my accomplishments before a first date. I learned to mention my work long before mentioning my degree, as though the title I had worked years to earn might somehow make me less approachable. As my educational journey continued, I increasingly found myself navigating spaces where educational attainment and economic opportunity had begun to diverge between Black women and Black men.
This is not because Black men lack ambition, intelligence, or the desire to build meaningful lives. Rather, Black women and Black men have inherited different burdens from the same historical systems.
While Black women have become one of the fastest-growing populations earning bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, Black men continue to face disproportionate barriers in educational attainment, employment, incarceration, wealth accumulation, and labor market opportunity.
We are responding to different pressures created by the same history.
The distance I began to experience was not born from a lack of love or desire for partnership, but from histories that continue to shape our present in different ways.
I love Black men.
I love Black fathers.
I love seeing Black families thrive.
My hope has never been to abandon Black love. My hope has always been to live it.
That hope is precisely why this conversation matters.
Because when conversations about dating become reduced to individual choices or personal shortcomings, we lose sight of the larger systems that quietly shape those choices before we ever make them.
What concerns me most is not simply whether I will marry.
It is what these changing dynamics mean for the future of the Black community.
Healthy communities are built through relationships, mentorship, stable families, and shared economic investment. When structural inequalities make partnership increasingly difficult, the effects extend beyond individual loneliness. They shape neighborhoods, children, wealth, and our collective imagination of what Black futures can look like.
I still believe in Black love.
I still believe in Black families.
I still believe in the brilliance of Black men and Black women.
But I also believe we owe ourselves the courage to talk honestly about the conditions that shape our relationships.
Perhaps repair begins there.
Not in blame.
Not in shame.
But in telling the truth about what it has cost us to become.
Dr. Krystiana Bonheur
What I Shared With My Team On My Last Day…
*Some parts had to be adjusted to make sense to those who aren't on the team*
MORE THAN 300,000 BLACK WOMEN HAVE BEEN PUSHED OUT OF THEIR DEI RELATED JOBS SINCE 2025! Even Crossnore Communities for Children’s DEI role/language changed. Yet, there are so many Black women continuing to find ways to do the work, to heal, to lead UNAPOLOGETICALLY, and to show up for ourselves and our neighbors.
I was invited to join other Black leaders for a Career Day at a local school. The Career Day was hosted by a Black woman educator who lost her husband last year. Even in her grief, she continues to find ways to show up for the scholars at her school and for (small) businesses in the community. My heart was warm because many of the Black folk who were also there sharing their careers, I’ve also interacted with them through my work at Crossnore's Center for Trauma Resilient Communities (CTRC), and other spaces in the community. Not to mention, the awareness the scholars had about trauma, mindfulness, the Sensations/Emotions Wheel, and how they planned to use the tools with their families.
Later in the day, I joined 100+ Black women at a “Black Women Thrive” Political Party. It was held at a Black woman-owned restaurant, with a Black woman DJ, Black woman photographer, Black women speakers, and a host of Black women bipartisan candidates! Make sure you vote…
Black women who adjusted our calendars, pooled our contact lists, and took on tasks for the event, while also focusing on the “businessES that pay us!" All to make sure other Black women heard from candidates, to help them make informed decisions, because we know this city, county, state, and country are A MESS!
I advocated for naming the hurt Black women felt/feel (caused by those outside and inside the community), and also naming the need for healing. There was some pushback because it was supposed to be a party, so it needed to be upbeat. Well…we partied AND, because there was a longing for an experience like last Friday, AND when Black women like Judge Denise Hartsfield (Ret.), Mama Hazel Mack, Esq., Mama Ruth Hopkins, Mayor Pro Tem DD Adams, Commissioner Dr. Malishai Woodbury, Shayla Herndon-Edmonds, and Rev. Dr. Melva L. Sampson (who volunteered to speak after experiencing the energy in the room) are on the program…healing will take place ‘anyhow’.
Why do I share all this? Because, as we close THIS Black History Month, I need trauma informed/resilient practitioners to understand that this was NEVER just a job for me! THIS WAS/IS PERSONAL!!! The curricula I facilitated are among MANY tools I use to survive and thrive as a Black woman in THIS country! I don’t have the luxury to turn things on and off. I don’t have the opportunity to ignore my body when it is dysregulated.
Thankfully, there were some Black women (people) watching and listening when I named patterns I was recognizing at work. Behaviors I was witnessing that were institutionally violent. And thankfully, when the changes at CTRC no longer made sense, when they no longer benefited the Winston-Salem team internally, nor the Winston-Salem community externally, and they also made me sick (literally), one of those Black women was working on my behalf to make sure I had another job opportunity.
I know, I know…just as I had to name during a training…race is a social construct. Nevertheless, the side effects of its ‘construct’ion, such as racism, continue to impact SO MANY! Because of the impact of racial/historical trauma, those who don’t identify as Black MUST decide whether you’re an ally, co-conspirator, or an 'opp' to the Black (women) community. WE KNOW who you are! DO YOU?!
People are hurting. Black women continue to be pushed out of the workforce by the very people, organizations, and institutions they sacrificed and fought for. The colleagues and leaders outside of the Black community, who fight for Black women (people) to be treated fairly, are being targeted and punished.
I will end my time with Crossnore’s CTRC as I end each Kijiji Winston-Salem episode (I recorded Episode 171 on Saturday): “Be Vigilant, Be Careful, and I pray you continue to Be Well. Until next time…”
Micha aka Michai’s Mom
The violent attempts by nonprofit administrators who flipped when the US government administration flipped were meant to take Black women’s voices while continuing to profit off the work the Black women risked their livelihood and their lives to bring forth. The way the Black community had to move in a Hush Harbor way to name the violence, recognize what needed to happen to ‘get out’, while making sure we were all supported during the transitions are acts I have only read about regarding the ancestors. Living the acts in real time assured me that it is okay to have a radical imagination…I do have community who understands me and will journey alongside me just as they have watched me journey alongside others. The oppressors who realize their insecurities, and are threatened by our resilience, WILL NOT WIN! “We came here whole, and we will leave here whole.” We all we got, and we have everything we need!
This US of A owes its existence to the Indigenous siblings who did not ask for this shit. The hospitality that is so rich throughout the Indigenous and Black communities is what opens the communities up to so much harm, AND it is also what continues to keep their ecosystems operating. The country has to return ALL THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO THE COLONIZERS (AND THEIR OFFSPRING) WHO STOLE. That should come in the form of returning land, returning financial resources (in today’s pricing schedule), and ensuring other resources are equitable to what was available when they came to disrupt and to what is available now. There should be free holistic healthcare to aid in repairing and reducing the GENERATIONAL harm caused. Speaking of harm…all of the racial, cultural, and spiritual harm caused should be named, acknowledged, and owned. And there has to be a repairing of the breaches. It is better to be done now to reduce the suffering that will take place, because someone will have to pay for the harm that has been caused.
What I Shared With My Team On My Last Day…
*Some parts had to be adjusted to make sense to those who aren't on the team*
MORE THAN 300,000 BLACK WOMEN HAVE BEEN PUSHED OUT OF THEIR DEI RELATED JOBS SINCE 2025! Even Crossnore Communities for Children’s DEI role/language changed. Yet, there are so many Black women continuing to find ways to do the work, to heal, to lead UNAPOLOGETICALLY, and to show up for ourselves and our neighbors.
I was invited to join other Black leaders for a Career Day at a local school. The Career Day was hosted by a Black woman educator who lost her husband last year. Even in her grief, she continues to find ways to show up for the scholars at her school and for (small) businesses in the community. My heart was warm because many of the Black folk who were also there sharing their careers, I’ve also interacted with them through my work at Crossnore's Center for Trauma Resilient Communities (CTRC), and other spaces in the community. Not to mention, the awareness the scholars had about trauma, mindfulness, the Sensations/Emotions Wheel, and how they planned to use the tools with their families.
Later in the day, I joined 100+ Black women at a “Black Women Thrive” Political Party. It was held at a Black woman-owned restaurant, with a Black woman DJ, Black woman photographer, Black women speakers, and a host of Black women bipartisan candidates! Make sure you vote…
Black women who adjusted our calendars, pooled our contact lists, and took on tasks for the event, while also focusing on the “businessES that pay us!" All to make sure other Black women heard from candidates, to help them make informed decisions, because we know this city, county, state, and country are A MESS!
I advocated for naming the hurt Black women felt/feel (caused by those outside and inside the community), and also naming the need for healing. There was some pushback because it was supposed to be a party, so it needed to be upbeat. Well…we partied AND, because there was a longing for an experience like last Friday, AND when Black women like Judge Denise Hartsfield (Ret.), Mama Hazel Mack, Esq., Mama Ruth Hopkins, Mayor Pro Tem DD Adams, Commissioner Dr. Malishai Woodbury, Shayla Herndon-Edmonds, and Rev. Dr. Melva L. Sampson (who volunteered to speak after experiencing the energy in the room) are on the program…healing will take place ‘anyhow’.
Why do I share all this? Because, as we close THIS Black History Month, I need trauma informed/resilient practitioners to understand that this was NEVER just a job for me! THIS WAS/IS PERSONAL!!! The curricula I facilitated are among MANY tools I use to survive and thrive as a Black woman in THIS country! I don’t have the luxury to turn things on and off. I don’t have the opportunity to ignore my body when it is dysregulated.
Thankfully, there were some Black women (people) watching and listening when I named patterns I was recognizing at work. Behaviors I was witnessing that were institutionally violent. And thankfully, when the changes at CTRC no longer made sense, when they no longer benefited the Winston-Salem team internally, nor the Winston-Salem community externally, and they also made me sick (literally), one of those Black women was working on my behalf to make sure I had another job opportunity.
I know, I know…just as I had to name during a training…race is a social construct. Nevertheless, the side effects of its ‘construct’ion, such as racism, continue to impact SO MANY! Because of the impact of racial/historical trauma, those who don’t identify as Black MUST decide whether you’re an ally, co-conspirator, or an 'opp' to the Black (women) community. WE KNOW who you are! DO YOU?!
People are hurting. Black women continue to be pushed out of the workforce by the very people, organizations, and institutions they sacrificed and fought for. The colleagues and leaders outside of the Black community, who fight for Black women (people) to be treated fairly, are being targeted and punished.
I will end my time with Crossnore’s CTRC as I end each Kijiji Winston-Salem episode (I recorded Episode 171 on Saturday): “Be Vigilant, Be Careful, and I pray you continue to Be Well. Until next time…”
Micha aka Michai’s Mom
I did not lose my job in March 2025. My job was taken from me. I want to be precise about that, because precision is part of repair.
I am a Black woman, a Spelman alumna, a certified school counselor, and an educator. I built my career on a simple belief: that children, especially girls, deserve adults who will speak when something is wrong. For years I did exactly that. I mediated conflicts. I sat with students in their hardest moments. I helped a cohort of students reach a 98 percent graduation rate, one relationship at a time.
Then, I used that same voice on behalf of students inside my own workplace. I named harm I witnessed. I went through appropriate channels. I followed the process I had taught children to trust. However, March 2025, I was terminated.
What happened to me is not new. It is part of a long American pattern. After Brown v. Board of Education, tens of thousands of Black educators were pushed out of schools, not because they failed children, but because their presence and their voices were inconvenient to the systems around them. Retaliation against Black women who advocate is one of the quieter forms of unresolved harm in this country. It rarely makes headlines. It simply removes us, one at a time, and calls it a personnel matter. I didn’t play nice on the education plantation, so I went from pet to threat. From winning multiple awards and kudos to pushed out and terminated.
What was lost was not only a paycheck. The financial harm was severe and lasting. I went into deep credit card debt trying to hold my life together. My family came close to losing our homes. The distance between advocacy and homelessness in this country is shorter than most people want to believe, and I have measured it.
What was lost was also harder to name. The termination was built on lies, told on me and about me by people I had trusted and had supported in multiple ways. That betrayal did something the job loss alone could not. I fell into a deep depression that took me to the lowest point of my life. There were days I did not want to be here. I say that plainly because Black women are expected to absorb harm quietly, to be strong on schedule, and I will not participate in that expectation. The mental cost of retaliation is real. It nearly cost me everything.
What remains unresolved is accountability. The people who spoke falsely were never required to correct the record. No one who participated in my removal was required to answer for it. The students I advocated for did not receive an explanation. The system that produced my termination remains intact, ready to do the same to the next educator who speaks. That is what unresolved harm looks like in real time. It is not only historical. It renews itself.
I also want to be honest about what I built from it. I founded ThatSmithGirl Consulting, LLC, a conflict resolution practice serving schools and women's communities in Arizona and Georgia, and expanding globally. I created frameworks that teach institutions to hold conflict without punishing the people who name it. My work now exists because a system failed me. I am proud of it. I also refuse to pretend that resilience is repair. It is not.
Repair would require truth-telling from institutions, not just endurance from individuals. It would require financial restoration for those who lose income to retaliation. It would require real protections for educators, especially Black women, who advocate for children. It would require this country to understand that reparations is not only about the distant past. It is about every present-day mechanism that still removes us from rooms we earned our way into.
I have always used my voice. I did not find it. This is me using it again.
What was interrupted was a career in full stride. I was a certified school counselor with documented results, a 98 percent cohort graduation rate, and a 100 percent mediation success rate. That trajectory was cut mid-motion. The years I would have spent building seniority, retirement contributions, and institutional standing were taken, and those years do not come back. Interrupted momentum is its own form of loss. It compounds quietly, the way interest does.
What was denied was financial stability. The termination pushed my family into deep credit card debt, and that debt did not end when the crisis did. It follows us. It shows up in interest payments, in a damaged debt-to-income picture, in the margin we no longer have. We came close to losing our homes. Even though we held on, the closeness of that loss changed how we live. Every financial decision now carries the memory of almost. That is what the afterlife of harm looks like in a household budget: caution where there used to be building, recovery where there used to be growth.
What was made more difficult is trust. The harm came through lies told by people I trusted, inside an institution I served. I recovered from the depression that followed, but recovery is not the same as restoration. I still enter professional rooms differently. I document more. I brace more. I read rooms for danger before I read them for possibility. Institutional mistrust is not a personality trait. It is a learned response to institutions that proved untrustworthy, and it costs energy every single day.
The effects reach beyond me. My household absorbed the financial shock, which means the wealth we would have passed forward was diverted into survival. That is how generational interruption works. It rarely announces itself. It simply subtracts, year after year, from what the next generation inherits.
There is a wider afterlife. Every educator who watched what happened to me learned a lesson about the price of speaking. Some will stay silent because of it. The students who lose those silenced advocates will never know what was withheld from them. Harm to one advocate is never contained to one advocate. It teaches an entire community what advocacy costs, and that lesson keeps collecting payment long after the original harm is done.
I carry all of this today. I also carry the work I built in response. The debt, the vigilance, and the interrupted years are real, and they are still being paid.
A country turning 250 years old is old enough to tell the truth about itself. The United States has had two and a half centuries to compound wealth, and Black communities have spent most of that time locked out of the compounding. That is the plainest way I know to describe the responsibility. This country did not simply harm Black people in the past. It built systems that kept collecting on that harm, generation after generation, and many of those systems are still collecting today. Like a tithe that never ends even after you leave the church.
So the first responsibility is to remember accurately. Not a softened version. The record itself: enslavement, land theft, terror, redlining, school segregation, the mass displacement of Black educators after Brown, and the quieter modern removals that still push Black professionals out of institutions when our voices become inconvenient. I know that last harm personally. Remembering only the distant past lets the present-day machinery run unexamined.
The second responsibility is to admit. Admission is different from acknowledgment. Acknowledgment says something happened. Admission says we did it, we benefited from it, and the benefit is still in our accounts. A 250th anniversary that celebrates the founding without admitting the financing is not a commemoration. It is a performance.
The third responsibility is to repair materially. Meaningful repair cannot live only in apologies and murals. It requires funding: direct investment in Black homeownership, debt relief, business capital, and schools. It requires returning what can be returned, including land and stolen equity where the paper trail still exists. It requires protecting Black people inside institutions now, with real consequences for retaliation and discrimination, so that repair is not undone as fast as it is offered. What good is a door opened by one policy if another policy pushes us back through it?
And the fourth responsibility is to make things possible. Repair is not complete when the harm stops. It is complete when the futures that were stolen become reachable again. That means the next Black educator who speaks up for children keeps her career. It means a Black family one crisis away from losing their homes has ground under them instead of air. It means our children inherit assets instead of our debts.
I do not believe this country lacks the resources for repair. It lacks the willingness to admit what repair is owed for. At 250, the most patriotic thing the United States could do is stop treating accountability as an accusation and start treating it as maintenance. Every institution I have ever worked with taught me the same lesson: unaddressed harm does not stay still. It compounds. So does repair, if you ever begin it. Will we begin it?
I did not lose my job in March 2025. My job was taken from me. I want to be precise about that, because precision is part of repair.
I am a Black woman, a Spelman alumna, a certified school counselor, and an educator. I built my career on a simple belief: that children, especially girls, deserve adults who will speak when something is wrong. For years I did exactly that. I mediated conflicts. I sat with students in their hardest moments. I helped a cohort of students reach a 98 percent graduation rate, one relationship at a time.
Then, I used that same voice on behalf of students inside my own workplace. I named harm I witnessed. I went through appropriate channels. I followed the process I had taught children to trust. However, March 2025, I was terminated.
What happened to me is not new. It is part of a long American pattern. After Brown v. Board of Education, tens of thousands of Black educators were pushed out of schools, not because they failed children, but because their presence and their voices were inconvenient to the systems around them. Retaliation against Black women who advocate is one of the quieter forms of unresolved harm in this country. It rarely makes headlines. It simply removes us, one at a time, and calls it a personnel matter. I didn’t play nice on the education plantation, so I went from pet to threat. From winning multiple awards and kudos to pushed out and terminated.
What was lost was not only a paycheck. The financial harm was severe and lasting. I went into deep credit card debt trying to hold my life together. My family came close to losing our homes. The distance between advocacy and homelessness in this country is shorter than most people want to believe, and I have measured it.
What was lost was also harder to name. The termination was built on lies, told on me and about me by people I had trusted and had supported in multiple ways. That betrayal did something the job loss alone could not. I fell into a deep depression that took me to the lowest point of my life. There were days I did not want to be here. I say that plainly because Black women are expected to absorb harm quietly, to be strong on schedule, and I will not participate in that expectation. The mental cost of retaliation is real. It nearly cost me everything.
What remains unresolved is accountability. The people who spoke falsely were never required to correct the record. No one who participated in my removal was required to answer for it. The students I advocated for did not receive an explanation. The system that produced my termination remains intact, ready to do the same to the next educator who speaks. That is what unresolved harm looks like in real time. It is not only historical. It renews itself.
I also want to be honest about what I built from it. I founded ThatSmithGirl Consulting, LLC, a conflict resolution practice serving schools and women's communities in Arizona and Georgia, and expanding globally. I created frameworks that teach institutions to hold conflict without punishing the people who name it. My work now exists because a system failed me. I am proud of it. I also refuse to pretend that resilience is repair. It is not.
Repair would require truth-telling from institutions, not just endurance from individuals. It would require financial restoration for those who lose income to retaliation. It would require real protections for educators, especially Black women, who advocate for children. It would require this country to understand that reparations is not only about the distant past. It is about every present-day mechanism that still removes us from rooms we earned our way into.
I have always used my voice. I did not find it. This is me using it again.
The first lesson I ever learned about reparations came from my mother.
She never used the word reparations. She wasn't a policy expert, an activist, or a historian. She was a gentle woman whose strength revealed itself not through loud protest but through quiet righteousness. She believed in telling the truth, especially when that truth explained how ordinary Black families came to carry extraordinary burdens.
My mother often told the story of why my oldest sister carried a scar on her leg.
It wasn't really a story about the scar.
It was a story about a highway.
Before I was old enough to remember, our family lived near Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama, in what my family remembers as the Highland Park area. When the state built a highway through our community, families—including ours—were forced to move. My sister was five years old, almost six. I was only three or four.
The new house was different. Instead of central heat, individual space heaters warmed each room. One night, my sister got up to use the bathroom. As she walked through the house in the dark, she bumped into one of the heaters and suffered a severe burn to her leg. The scar remained with her for the rest of her life.
My mother always connected those events.
She never spoke of my sister's injury as though it were simply an unfortunate household accident.
She always began with the highway.
If we had never been forced to move...
If we had remained in our home...
If the conditions of our lives had not been altered...
Perhaps my sister would never have carried that scar.
As a little girl, I listened.
At the time, I thought my mother was simply telling me why my sister's leg looked the way it did.
Only as an adult did I understand that she was teaching me something much deeper. She understood that public decisions settle into private lives, and that what appears to be an isolated family tragedy is sometimes the final chapter of a much longer public story.
Years later, I would learn words like displacement, urban renewal, and reparative justice. But my mother had already taught me their meaning. She understood that families often carry the consequences of public decisions long after the public has moved on.
As an educator, I began to recognize how often stories like ours were absent from what I had been taught. As I revisited my mother's story, I found myself looking up the history of the highway that reshaped our neighborhood. I realized that what I had always understood as a family memory was also part of a much larger public history shared by countless Black families whose communities were divided or displaced in the name of progress.
Today, I carry my mother's story with me because it reminds me that repair begins with remembering. Before we can repair what was harmed, we must first understand how harm traveled through families, neighborhoods, and generations.
My mother's story has stayed with me because it reminds me that some harms are spoken aloud and others are carried quietly. Whether they are named or not, they leave visible memories—on bodies, in families, and across generations.
Long before I learned the language of reparations, my mother taught me to recognize the scars and to remember what came before them.
The most immediate loss was our home and the sense of stability that comes with remaining in a familiar community. My mother understood that losing a home was never just about a physical structure. It meant losing neighbors, routines, and the security that had been built over time. Those losses are difficult to measure, but they shape the way families experience the world.
The effects of that displacement continued long after the move. My sister carried a scar on her leg for the rest of her life, a reminder that what appeared to be an isolated accident was connected, in my mother's mind, to the conditions created by our forced relocation. She taught me that public decisions do not end when construction is complete. They continue to unfold in the private lives of families, sometimes in ways that are never documented.
As I grew older, I also came to understand that something else had been interrupted: our family's story. Like many Black families, we knew what had happened, but we rarely heard those experiences reflected in textbooks, public commemorations, or conversations about American progress. The absence of those stories can make people believe their experiences were isolated rather than part of a larger pattern.
Today, I see the afterlife of that harm in the continued displacement of Black communities, in unequal opportunities to build and transfer wealth, and in the ways families still carry memories that have never been publicly acknowledged. I also see it in my own commitment to preserving those stories. My mother's memory taught me that repair begins by telling the truth—not only about what was lost, but about how those losses continue to shape generations.
For me, reparative justice is not simply about addressing the past. It is about ensuring that family stories like ours are no longer treated as private memories alone, but as part of the public history of this country..
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, I believe the country has an opportunity to do more than commemorate its founding. It has an opportunity to tell the truth about the people who helped build it and the harms that many communities continue to carry.
Meaningful repair begins with truth-telling. My mother's story taught me that harm does not end when a law is passed, a highway is built, or a project is completed. The consequences often continue in families long after the public has moved on. Repair requires us to acknowledge those consequences—not only in history books, but in the policies and investments that shape people's lives today.
Repair also requires remembering. Too many Black families carry stories of displacement, denied opportunity, broken communities, and interrupted futures that have never been recognized as part of our nation's history. Preserving those stories is itself an act of accountability because it restores experiences that were often overlooked or forgotten.
I hope our country continues creating opportunities for communities to tell their own stories, for descendants to be heard, and for history to be taught honestly and completely. I also hope we continue investing in the neighborhoods, institutions, schools, and cultural spaces that have long sustained Black communities despite generations of inequity.
For me, meaningful repair is not only about addressing what was taken. It is about making it possible for future generations to inherit something different. It is about ensuring that our children receive not only the stories of harm, but also the truth, dignity, opportunity, and hope that make genuine repair possible.
The first lesson I ever learned about reparations came from my mother.
She never used the word reparations. She wasn't a policy expert, an activist, or a historian. She was a gentle woman whose strength revealed itself not through loud protest but through quiet righteousness. She believed in telling the truth, especially when that truth explained how ordinary Black families came to carry extraordinary burdens.
My mother often told the story of why my oldest sister carried a scar on her leg.
It wasn't really a story about the scar.
It was a story about a highway.
Before I was old enough to remember, our family lived near Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama, in what my family remembers as the Highland Park area. When the state built a highway through our community, families—including ours—were forced to move. My sister was five years old, almost six. I was only three or four.
The new house was different. Instead of central heat, individual space heaters warmed each room. One night, my sister got up to use the bathroom. As she walked through the house in the dark, she bumped into one of the heaters and suffered a severe burn to her leg. The scar remained with her for the rest of her life.
My mother always connected those events.
She never spoke of my sister's injury as though it were simply an unfortunate household accident.
She always began with the highway.
If we had never been forced to move...
If we had remained in our home...
If the conditions of our lives had not been altered...
Perhaps my sister would never have carried that scar.
As a little girl, I listened.
At the time, I thought my mother was simply telling me why my sister's leg looked the way it did.
Only as an adult did I understand that she was teaching me something much deeper. She understood that public decisions settle into private lives, and that what appears to be an isolated family tragedy is sometimes the final chapter of a much longer public story.
Years later, I would learn words like displacement, urban renewal, and reparative justice. But my mother had already taught me their meaning. She understood that families often carry the consequences of public decisions long after the public has moved on.
As an educator, I began to recognize how often stories like ours were absent from what I had been taught. As I revisited my mother's story, I found myself looking up the history of the highway that reshaped our neighborhood. I realized that what I had always understood as a family memory was also part of a much larger public history shared by countless Black families whose communities were divided or displaced in the name of progress.
Today, I carry my mother's story with me because it reminds me that repair begins with remembering. Before we can repair what was harmed, we must first understand how harm traveled through families, neighborhoods, and generations.
My mother's story has stayed with me because it reminds me that some harms are spoken aloud and others are carried quietly. Whether they are named or not, they leave visible memories—on bodies, in families, and across generations.
Long before I learned the language of reparations, my mother taught me to recognize the scars and to remember what came before them.
I think about repair through the lens of education and generational opportunity.
My mother did not graduate college. She became a mother young, and although she worked hard throughout my childhood, I grew up seeing how not having a college degree could limit the opportunities available to her. There were jobs she wanted that required credentials she did not have and career paths that were much harder to access.
But my mother’s circumstances did not stop her from creating opportunities for me.
She made sure I had a good life. More importantly, she intentionally put me in environments that exposed me to opportunities she may not have had herself. She wanted me to go further, and education became one of the ways she made that possible.
I eventually earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
When I think about that difference between our generations, I think about how much one generation can sacrifice to change the trajectory of the next. My accomplishments are mine, but they are also connected to the sacrifices my mother made before I was old enough to understand them.
As a Black woman, that makes education feel bigger than an individual accomplishment. For generations, Black Americans faced barriers to quality education, employment, homeownership, and wealth-building opportunities. The effects of those barriers do not simply disappear because laws change or because one person in a family earns a degree.
That is where I believe conversations about repair and accountability become important.
To me, repair is not about changing the past—we cannot. It is about acknowledging how the past continues to shape the opportunities people inherit today and being intentional about what we do next.
My mother gave me access to opportunities she did not have. Because of that, I was able to accomplish things that changed what is possible within my family.
But families should not have to rely solely on extraordinary sacrifice from one generation for the next generation to have access to quality education and economic opportunity.
Meaningful repair means removing barriers that continue to make opportunity unequal. It means investing in education, communities, economic mobility, and pathways that allow people to build sustainable futures for themselves and their families.
My family’s story reminds me that progress is possible. I am living evidence of what can happen when someone is given access to opportunities and has another person willing to sacrifice to help them reach those opportunities.
But it also makes me think about the families who never received that access.
For me, accountability means making sure opportunity is not something a person has to be lucky enough to inherit.
Repair means making it something everyone has a fair chance to reach.
What I believe was made more difficult was the ability to build stability and pass that stability from one generation to the next.
When access to quality education, well-paying careers, homeownership, and other opportunities for building wealth has historically been unequal, the impact does not end with the generation that experienced it directly. It affects what that generation is able to pass down—financially, professionally, and socially.
I see that in my own family. My mother worked hard and gave me a good life, but because she did not have a college degree, certain professional opportunities were harder for her to access. Instead of being able to simply pass opportunities down to me, she had to sacrifice to put me in environments where I could find opportunities of my own.
That distinction matters.
Today, I have two degrees and professional experience, but I also recognize that education alone does not immediately create generational wealth or erase the disadvantages that existed before me. I am still part of the generation trying to build what future generations of my family will hopefully be able to inherit.
I believe this is one way the afterlife of harm continues to show up. When one generation is denied or has limited access to opportunity, the next generation often begins further behind and has to work to close that gap before it can truly move ahead.
The effect is not always something you can see. Sometimes it looks like having the education but not the connections. Having the income but not inherited wealth. Being the first person in a family to enter certain spaces and having to learn how to navigate them without a blueprint.
Progress has absolutely been made, but progress does not automatically erase what was interrupted.
For me, the goal is not simply to overcome those gaps for myself. It is to make sure the generation after me does not have to start from the same place.
I believe the first responsibility this country has is to be honest about its history—not only about what happened, but about what that history made possible for some Americans while making the same opportunities more difficult or impossible for others.
As the United States approaches 250 years, acknowledgment alone is not enough. We can recognize slavery, segregation, housing discrimination, unequal access to education, and other injustices while still failing to address the disadvantages those systems left behind.
Meaningful repair requires action.
For me, that means investing in the areas that have the greatest ability to change the trajectory of a family: quality education, affordable housing, homeownership, employment opportunities, entrepreneurship, and access to resources that help families build and maintain generational wealth.
It also means recognizing that equality and repair are not necessarily the same thing. Giving everyone the same opportunity today does not automatically account for generations when those opportunities were not equally available.
I think about that through my own family. My mother sacrificed to put me in environments that gave me access to opportunities she did not have. I was able to earn two degrees and enter spaces that may not have been accessible to previous generations of my family.
I am proud of that progress.
But Black progress should not have to depend on every generation overcoming what the previous generation was denied.
To me, meaningful repair is about making it possible for Black families to do more than overcome. It is about creating the conditions for them to build, keep, and pass something forward.
America cannot change its history, but it can decide what it does with the consequences of that history.
As the country celebrates 250 years, I believe that should be part of the celebration too not simply remembering how far America has come, but having the courage to acknowledge who was prevented from fully participating in that progress and committing to making the next 250 years different.
I think about repair through the lens of education and generational opportunity.
My mother did not graduate college. She became a mother young, and although she worked hard throughout my childhood, I grew up seeing how not having a college degree could limit the opportunities available to her. There were jobs she wanted that required credentials she did not have and career paths that were much harder to access.
But my mother’s circumstances did not stop her from creating opportunities for me.
She made sure I had a good life. More importantly, she intentionally put me in environments that exposed me to opportunities she may not have had herself. She wanted me to go further, and education became one of the ways she made that possible.
I eventually earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
When I think about that difference between our generations, I think about how much one generation can sacrifice to change the trajectory of the next. My accomplishments are mine, but they are also connected to the sacrifices my mother made before I was old enough to understand them.
As a Black woman, that makes education feel bigger than an individual accomplishment. For generations, Black Americans faced barriers to quality education, employment, homeownership, and wealth-building opportunities. The effects of those barriers do not simply disappear because laws change or because one person in a family earns a degree.
That is where I believe conversations about repair and accountability become important.
To me, repair is not about changing the past—we cannot. It is about acknowledging how the past continues to shape the opportunities people inherit today and being intentional about what we do next.
My mother gave me access to opportunities she did not have. Because of that, I was able to accomplish things that changed what is possible within my family.
But families should not have to rely solely on extraordinary sacrifice from one generation for the next generation to have access to quality education and economic opportunity.
Meaningful repair means removing barriers that continue to make opportunity unequal. It means investing in education, communities, economic mobility, and pathways that allow people to build sustainable futures for themselves and their families.
My family’s story reminds me that progress is possible. I am living evidence of what can happen when someone is given access to opportunities and has another person willing to sacrifice to help them reach those opportunities.
But it also makes me think about the families who never received that access.
For me, accountability means making sure opportunity is not something a person has to be lucky enough to inherit.
Repair means making it something everyone has a fair chance to reach.
This is a photograph I took of Nancy Elliott's tombstone, alongside 6 other tombstones of adults and children in my family who were born during and after the Civil War. They are all free Black people.
This is a photograph I took of Nancy Elliott's tombstone, alongside 6 other tombstones of adults and children in my family who were born during and after the Civil War. They are all free Black people.
This photograph shows the fragility of Black cemteries. It also shows that Black people were free and have a complex relationship with US history, as my family's freedom was a direct beneficiary of the displacement of indigineous people. Additionally, my family members remembered the men in the family, such as James Bowser who fought in Revolutionary War, but less of the women such as Nancy Elliott who is in the cemetery. So I perhaps her life and imagine who she is and how she shaped the community around her.
This is an image of a privately owned Black cemetery of free Black people on land that my family received during the Revolutionary War. It shows the life of a Black woman who was 19 at the start of the Civil War, with memory of life before it and who lived nearly 20 years after the war ended. It raises questions about a free Black family especially Black woman thought about freedom that they received via the displacement of indigenous people, while also likely trying to free other Black people.
Part and Woven is a short film exploring how my mom's decision to step away from family when she had children impacted me. Told through a conversation while she cornrows my hair, the film dissects my own feelings of loneliness and disconnection from family while growing up and how I felt starved of stories about my own ancestors. As the film progresses, I discover an unhealed wound within my mother's family history of internalized racism and misogyny that blocked her from achieving her dreams. The process of creating this film showed me how deeply cycles of racism can be imbedded in family and how my mom sacrificed something dear to make sure her children didn't have clipped wings.
Part and Woven is a short film exploring how my mom's decision to step away from family when she had children impacted me. Told through a conversation while she cornrows my hair, the film dissects my own feelings of loneliness and disconnection from family while growing up and how I felt starved of stories about my own ancestors. As the film progresses, I discover an unhealed wound within my mother's family history of internalized racism and misogyny that blocked her from achieving her dreams. The process of creating this film showed me how deeply cycles of racism can be imbedded in family and how my mom sacrificed something dear to make sure her children didn't have clipped wings.
Because I grew up in predominantly White spaces, often times I desired more Black family around me beyond my immediate family. I felt I missed out on key cultural experiences many Black families enjoy. I also feel I still have less access to my family tree and stories that can only be heard from the mouths I am not in relationship with. However, I still feel immensely grateful for the friends and community that have shaped my Black experience and made me feel secure in my identity.
In reflection of my short film, this country has a responsibility to invest economically in Black entrepreneurs and creatives. With Black history education under attack and DEI programs dismantled, it is more crucial than ever to show young Black children that there should be no limits to what they can grow up to accomplish. My mother grew up in a time when she and her family saw no one who looked like her in the profession she was interested in, so it was easier to deem it impossible.. But, the more this country creates equal opportunity for the countless Black people ready to break barriers, being Black will no longer be used as an obstacle to achieving one's dreams.
Some things were taken.
Some things remained.
And some losses settled so deeply into everyday life that
they became difficult to recognize at all.