Note: this piece was started before the pandemic was declared. For more depth on this moment, click here for details on the upcoming Coping with Corona Collective webinars. Very near my house, newly built “luxury” apartments will be opening soon, … Continue reading The road to repair
The Asheville Blade has published my first piece for them, which is a bold call to action: Abolish the TDA. Written with input from editor extraordinaire David Forbes and Blade writer Matilda Bliss, it makes a case for dismantling a … Continue reading Taking on the TDA
If you are reading this, you have resources. Your resources may include a home, a car, a computer, money to pay for non-essential items or experiences, influence at your job or place of worship, etc, etc. In addition, you may … Continue reading Rectify resources
Our economy was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and the violent extraction of labor from enslaved Africans. This cruelty was justified by white people’s created illusion that those we killed, stole from, and enslaved were inferior and that … Continue reading Reckoning with cultural extraction
Today I add my voice to the chorus of people singing the true story of old-time and bluegrass music. It is a marvelously multicultural story, wrought with pain and possibility. We call for the repair of false and incomplete narratives … Continue reading Repairing narratives: old-time and bluegrass music
Love. Let’s lead with love. I love you, in all of your tenderness and complexity and vulnerability, strength and pain. Feel that love. Words are inadequate. Yet words are what I have. Transformation feels slow. We move through cycles, change … Continue reading Breathe, Believe
“What does it take to rebuild community as a beautifully defiant act of resistance and a necessary tool in our collective survival?” Marisol Jiménez offered a beautiful, powerful, poetic testimony in response to that question at a recent CreativeMornings event. I … Continue reading “The foundation of activism…is love.”
As a person who cares about the collective narrative, the first WNC Wikipedia Record-and-Edit-a-Thon, which will be held this Saturday, is an event that I think is super important. It’s being presented by the Baird Family Reunion, the oldest black … Continue reading WNC Wikipedia Record-and-Edit-a-Thon
One does not have to be a scholar of history to know that colonizers used violence against Native Americans to take over land in this country. That white wealth was built on that stolen land using the labor of enslaved … Continue reading Legacy of Land Theft
Leaders from the historically African American neighborhoods of Shiloh, Burton Street, East End and Stumptown are partnering with the Asheville-Buncombe African American Heritage Commission (AAHC) on the installation of historic markers in their neighborhoods. The goal of the historic markers … Continue reading Historic Markers Project
