The Harris County Leadership Academy, set in the lonely outskirts of Katy, is surrounded by a rattling security gate and topped with coiled wire. Guards monitor every movement on closed-circuit TV. Dorm rooms contain thin cots that are piled in a corner during the day and communal showers shielded only by a low wall. A …
The images and sounds of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy flashed across television screens and social media posts: Wailing toddlers flanked by armed Border Patrol agents. Children huddled under foil blankets in detention centers. A seven-minute recording of weeping youngsters crying out “Mami!” and “Papa!” As news reports and eyewitness accounts of children being yanked …
The latest work from novelist Junot Díaz, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “genius grant” and National Book Critics Circle Award, began with a plea from his goddaughters. They begged Díaz to create a book that reflected their reality, as “smart, young Dominican girls of African descent living in the Bronx.” “I always felt …
In her early morning Sunday sermon at New Light Church, Dr. I commands a sweeping stage carpeted in gold and flanked by video screens. Her voice rises full and impassioned over the audience of nearly 5,000 worshippers. Her high heels flash as she strides from one side of the altar to the other. One hand …
Aesha Lee has heard the line countless times: “You’re pretty for a black girl.” The phrase, spoken by both black and nonblack people, evokes the racism woven into societal standards of beauty, the colorism that still persists within the black community, the often negative representation of dark-skinned women in popular culture, the scars left by …
Ask some of the fifth-grade girls at Harvard Elementary School about coding and STEM and, in between maneuvering a robot they programmed to demonstrate hydrodynamics, this is what they say: Sarah Ramos, 10: “It teaches me to problem-solve.” Hannah Horwath, 11: “It really teaches us metaphorical lessons like trial and error and how to persist.” …
Somewhere in the vast crowd, huddled with hundreds of thousands on a cold, rainy day, Elva Alvarez felt a moment of awakening, a spirit of sisterhood and surge of optimism. On the bus ride from Houston to the 2017 Women’s March in Washington D.C., Alvarez had seen fellow riders cry as they watched “Selma,” heard …
To the parents of the boy who called my daughters the N-word: I don’t know who you are. Perhaps we pass each other at the local Kroger or rub elbows at open house at our children’s elementary school. Maybe we both rise before dawn to sweat at the same boot camp workout or share the …
We want to look away. Close our eyes to ugliness. Turn our backs on racism. Bolt the door against bigotry. We want to change the channel – and shut out the horrifying images from Charlotteville. A car plowing into a crowd rallying against racism. Bodies flying. Screams. Panic. Confederate flags wielded as symbols of white …
Be strong. Be good. Be kind. Those were my parting words to my two young daughters as I left for work this morning. I kissed them lightly on the foreheads, but really I wanted to grasp them in a tight embrace and never let go, to protect them against an onslaught of ugliness that I …
HUNTSVILLE – A steady rain pelted the plain, brick church, muddying the crowded parking lot and blanketing the sky in a gray gloom. Inside the RCCG Rhema International Assembly, however, the spirit was joyful. Congregants sang and swayed and lifted their voices. They praised the Lord in English and in a variety of Nigerian languages: …
The case of Abigail Noel Fisher brought the issue of affirmative action in higher education to the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket for the first time since its 2003 ruling upholding the use of race in admissions. Fisher was a teenager in a Houston suburb when she first sued the University of Texas at Austin, claiming the school …
I didn’t expect to find a Grammy nominee inside a north Houston storefront church. But that’s where I met Kim Burrell, a gospel singer who has recorded with R. Kelly and Missy Elliot and been named by Harry Connick Jr. and Whitney Houston as one of the great voices of music. For the last nine …