Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.
I think people who are not from here think the Inner Harbor is the only center for culture or fun in the city, and there's so much more to Baltimore. The Harbor's a beautiful place, but there are so many gems embedded in other communities that don't get as much visibility.
I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children's Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.
Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.
Some people are more interested in fighting than winning.
As a protester, I protested because I had to, not because it was exciting. I don't want to get tear-gassed again.
When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.
The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.
You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust. And they can spark change.
We question these issues of race and struggle and white privilege because we know that those issues are real and because those issues have real implications in black communities. And white supremacy is not only dangerous, but it is deadly.
I think about Twitter as the friend that's always awake. It's why I tweet so much.
I think the reality is that there's a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.
I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.
It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.
I'm not a politician. I'm somebody who knows the world can be better, and I'm willing to fight for it.
Systemic change rarely comes overnight.
I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.
I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn't believe they could learn math, who didn't understand, who didn't think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.
My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.
If anything, any success that I have ever experienced has been because people who didn't have to care about me did, and they pushed me to see things in myself that I did not see in myself at the time.
