Preserving the Story of Black Women

The preservation of the past is one of the most important aspects of remembering and honoring cultural identity. This may include uncovering artifacts, discovering cultural norms, or retelling folk stories. Remembering and honoring the past is one of the important responsibilities of an anthropologist, and more specifically, the responsibility of an ethnographer.  Zora Neale Hurston

Are We Running Out of Rights?

Lately, I have seen a lot of memes and comments on social media that suggest that there are not enough rights to go around. One of the ways that I have seen this is through the reaction of All Lives Matter when people proclaim Black Lives Matter. People post Blue Lives Matter, identifying the fact

Be Doers of the Word: An Analysis of Frederick Douglass’s Christian Ethics

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass depicts religion and Christianity as two separate realities in the world in which he was living.  Religion is characterized by the slave masters who Douglass encounters throughout his early life as a slave.  This religion is hypocritical, cruel, and dehumanizing. In contrast, for Douglass, Christianity must

He Shouts in a Whisper

We are living in a time with a lot of noise and distraction. Since January of this year, the news has been filled with chaotic information from the impeachment hearings of the U.S. president to the increase of positive cases of COVID-19 and now to cities that are filled with signs of revolution and rebellion

A Better Way: A Look at Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the narrator seeks to reconcile the dying words of his grandfather with navigating his own reality and identity. His grandfather confesses that he had “been a traitor all [his] born days, a spy in the enemy’s country” (16). This is not the reality that he wants for his descendants,

We Have to Join Hands

Today, I am writing to figure out what I think, what I feel, and what I believe. My favorite author, Flannery O’Connor wrote in a 1948 letter, I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say;