Author: Reggie Jackson

On a warm summer day 25 years ago a tragic motorcycle accident altered the lives of two young men and two families forever. The lives of 15-year-old Justin Bobholz and 30-year-old Tracy Washington intersected, and changed their families in a way that is considered divine intervention by members of both families. Tracy was one of my best friends. He and I lived our lives like brothers from another mother. He called my mother “mom” and she called him “son.” We lived a block away from each other, along with our closest friends Dave, James, Peter, and Paul, we were...

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I...

“Once again, House Democrats have used their majority to balkanize our country and fuel separatism by creating a race-based ‘Independence Day. There is only one Independence Day in America, just as there is only one National Anthem, one American flag and one America — under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It is unfortunate that some have chosen to politicize the naming of this important historical event — one of many momentous milestones in America’s shared journey that began in 1776 to create a more perfect union — to turn Americans against one another and foment division...

“Because he’s weak. And don’t ask me to get inside the mind of a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist like President Biden.” – Ron Johnson, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin “Johnson means them all as epithets rather than ideological descriptors. You can see that in that he doesn’t know the differences between them.” – Kennan Ferguson, UW-Milwaukee political science professor Lately Republican lawmakers and those opposed to the teaching of systemic racism have gone on the warpath using the word “Marxist” to make their points. They are attacking the principle of systemic racism by attacking the concept known as Critical Race...

“It is probably true to say that there would be no crisis in race relations if the Negro continued to think of himself in inferior terms and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. But it is at this very point that the change has come. For many years, the Negro tacitly accepted segregation. The system of slavery and segregation caused many Negroes to feel that perhaps they were inferior. Indeed this is the ultimate tragedy of segregation. It not only harms one physically, but it injures one spiritually. It scars the soul and distorts the personality. It inflicts the segregator...

“The moment you make racism more than an isolated incident, when you begin to talk about it as systemic, as baked into the way we live our lives … people don’t like that. It runs counter to a narrative that we want to tell ourselves about who we are. We have a narrative of progress, that we’re getting better.” – Gloria Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education The irony of systemic racism is that it allows the system to deny systemic racism. My question about this is simple. What are you afraid of? A lot of people...