The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
This idea of shared humanity and the connections that we make with one another - that's what, in fact, makes life worth living.
Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin.
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?
Silence is the residue of fear.
If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.
When we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't: it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not.
To be an Arsenal fan is to convince yourself that you can no longer support a team that disappoints you, only to be drawn back in by the ever-flickering promise of something better.
Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.
It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.
The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.
When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.
Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.
The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity.
Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
In many ways, the very notion of school choice operates under a false pretense - an assumption that every child has the same set of choices to make and the same places to choose from.
