Take a long look at the man pictured above. Study his visage and photograph it, because I want the memory implanted in every crevice of your brain. Upon initial perception of this person, a veritable stranger to all who choose to read this essay, one would probably ascertain him as…

Firstly, let me just state that I abhor the credit to your race phrase, as it has been a patently odious way for racist people to refer to any black person they purport to admire. Black people are generally good people, family-oriented, relentlessly god-fearing, and law-abiding. We do have our…

As a high school student, I was unlike most of my peers. Because I liked attending secondary school, and for an assortment of reasons. For I was an academic star, one of the roughly forty students who were members of the top ten percent of the graduating class. I participated…

I have spent significant portions of the Trump era being angry, spitting, stewing, hissing like a cat, and vigorously cursing the man’s name to anyone who would listen. …

Senator Barack Obama’s historical, inexorable, and rapid ascent to the presidency in 2008, a seismic event that activated formerly closeted racists, also brought about a countervailing effect: black people, long denied positions in the highest echelons of the political arena, saw opportunities to seize power. Today, more black people than…

Apart from my departed father and former President Barack Obama, two individuals of African ancestry who created successful existences in this country, I do not usually admire famous men. This is especially true in 2023, as social media and the twenty-four news cycle remake civil society, giving us a more…

“I am so excited to tell you this news, Eze,” said Cora, the director of the laboratory and my boss, an individual that I have known for nearly nine years. We were sitting in her office, facing each other across her wooden desk. Finally, I thought. Although, I knew the…

I am writing a memoir about my time as an elementary school teacher, requiring painful recollections from an extremely fraught two years of life. Abject fear was a consistent thread that linked all of my experiences. There was the fear of failing my students and my family, two groups of…

At the advent of each year, terrible memories flood my consciousness, reminding me of when I reached the lowest point. Exactly twenty-two years before I conceived the idea of this personal essay, I was dangling outside the open window of my third-story New York City apartment, holding onto a makeshift…