OP-ED

What a week this has been! The Orange Man has met a Mack Truck.  Every time he looks at a woman of African descent, I suspect he must say to himself, “Here comes trouble!”

The Black community as a whole can never afford to lose empathy for one another. One of the core challenges in maintaining social justice is communicating the need for empathy. It is most critical to be willing to put yourself in another person’s shoes to understand their feelings, plight, and perspectives while using that understanding to guide your actions.

If you think the Trump campaign is just an amusing but unthreatening sideshow, it is not. This is dangerous.

Driven in part by restrictive laws enacted since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the racial voting gap has exploded and grows wider by the year.

On Earth Day 1993, I delivered the first major speech of my life. It was in New York City’s Bryant Park, kicking off a nationwide tour to rally opposition to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In a country growing more diverse by the day, we have the power to stop book bans and other attempts to erase Black history.

Despite the wide-ranging opinions and perspectives held by individuals representing different cultures and political persuasions, there is one common dominator that should always connect people of goodwill. Facts are a common dominator that should easily be accepted by everyone, regardless of their backgrounds.

When we see a 75-year-old white man out in the woods with a group of Black and brown kids from lowincome neighborhoods, teaching them about nature, few of us assume he is there because that is where he feels most comfortable. Probably even fewer of us assume many of those kids look just like the ones he grew up with in public housing projects more than 60 years ago.

Almost everybody who delivers a speech, anywhere we go, somebody seems to be quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Obviously, somebody is not hearing what he said or doesn’t understand what he meant. For starters, let’s go back to his speech on America’s war against the Vietnam War.

It's a familiar pattern in right-wing political manipulation:  Sabotage an institution. Point to the resulting damage as evidence of the institution’s ineffectiveness. Use the manufactured evidence to subvert the institution.