Historians will one day try to pinpoint the year when old ideas about assimilation in America succumbed to dry rot. “In earlier times,” they will say, “indigenous populations and immigrants were expected to assimilate into the dominant culture, which was...

Imagine our country as one enormous bolt of cloth. When people refer to the “social fabric” of the country, they have something like this image in mind, an image that says we are much more than links in a chain....

Raise your hands. How many people learned about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when you were in school? Do you remember how it ends?...

When Alan Paton wrote his novel (1948) about the effects of racial, economic and social injustice on individual citizens in South Africa, it became an international classic. The book portrayed the system of apartheid, and the suffering it caused in...

This morning (2/1/19), Representative Lee Zedlin (R) tweeted that it was “Crazy to watch what Democrats are empowering, elevating.” He had just learned that freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, was appointed to the House Foreign Subcommittee on Oversight and...

Note: For me and for my readers, it is good to pause every so often to take a more personal, less intellectual and philosophical approach to equality. I call these “inside-out” exercises because they draw from deep inside our own...

In San Diego, a white woman leaving a restaurant went on a 3 ½ minute rant against a group of people waiting to be seated for a family birthday party. Hearing these people speaking to one another in their native...

At a conference for writers, about 40 people crowded into a workshop on writing personal essays. The workshop leader wanted to get us off to a fast start by thinking about a topic that was easily relatable: hair. Hair? We...

An Open Letter to A Congressman, The Honorable Richard Neal December 11, 2018 Dear Congressman Neal: Today I am reliving the overwhelming sense of despair I felt on election night, when you won your bid for re-election. Let’s start with...

The migrant caravan that has arrived at the border between Mexico and the Unites States came to our attention back in early October. Back when thousands were walking across a bridge between Guatemala and Mexico....