Dear President Biden, Please, sir, please read today's WP editorial by Jonathan Capehart entitled Being Black in America is Exhausting. It should be required reading for all White people. That’s all I have to say today except to reiterate, please read it. May we all be safe to be.May we all be willing to radically …
Deep pockets and shallow ethics
Dear President Biden, Most everything coming out of your White House has been much more palatable than anything that ever came out of DLT’s White House. This includes your recent Executive Order targeting ghost guns and stabilizing braces for pistols, and putting more money towards community-based violence prevention programs. At least it looks like you’re …
What if George had been a big White man?
Dear President Biden, For days now I’ve been thinking about the eggshell skull rule (or the brittle bone rule) and how one of Nelson’s many lame-ass defense arguments on behalf of his client, Derek Chauvin, is that it wasn’t Chauvin’s knee grinding down on George’s neck (spine, windpipe, carotid artery) for 9 minutes and 29 …
The weight of history
Dear President Biden, Do you know what “the weight of history” means? I thought it was a super common idiom that must have a fleshy backstory, but Googling it didn’t yield much of anything. Maybe it’s too basic for anyone to bother unpacking, but it’s been bugging me. I can only speak from my position …
The revolutionary gift of seeing and naming
Dear President Biden, I told you the other week about my now favorite podcast Hear to Slay by Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Well, this past week R&T talked with a young Black activist named Amber J. Phillips and at the end of the conversation when they asked her how they and their listeners …
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Revolutionary ego-tripping
Dear President Biden, Her sermon isn’t posted yet, but it probably will be in a couple of days and you could listen to it here, if you’d like. The Dr. Reverend Kelle Brown of Seattle’s Plymouth United Church of Christ was on fire yesterday. Her sermon “The Necessity of Ego-tripping” riffed off of Nikki Giovanni’s …
Equity is critically important, and it’s very, very messy
Dear President Biden, Was it really a coincidence that you wore your very cute blue dog socks to the meeting with the 10 Republican Senators about the COVID relief bill? That’s apparently what your staff told the WP. I kind of think, though, that you were doing a little low-key Madeline Albright move there. You …
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Unpacking “ordinary voters”
Dear President Biden, Happy February! We made it out of January! This shouldn’t be any big shakes but after the attempted self-coup earlier in the month I think a lot of us were worried there’d be significant fallout surrounding your inauguration. I know we’re still crashing around in the middle of a very dark forest …
The Biden Letters 