Author: YES!

When AIDS became an epidemic: Memories of finding joy during the struggle despite all of the grief and loss

Forty years ago the CDC reported the first cases of what would come to be known as AIDS among five previously healthy gay men. I was a teenager at that time, coming to grips with my sexual orientation. When I moved to San Francisco as a 23-year-old gay man, AIDS was a full-blown epidemic. With no treatment, vaccine, or cure in sight, the awakening of my sexuality came with a death sentence. While sex, sexuality, illness, death, and dying are not typical topics of conversation among young people, it was all my friends and I talked about. It wasn’t...

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Suffering that sells: When society would rather pay to bury us than support a life in which we are thriving

They say that sex sells, but more and more, it seems like trauma has taken its place. As a Black femme, I was taught from an early age that I shouldn’t ask for help until I absolutely, positively had no other choice. Being a child of immigrants from Haiti only reinforced this belief. If I expressed any mild discomfort, I was immediately reminded that no one had to or would help me, but more importantly, they shouldn’t. Someone is worse off than you. You’ve had harder times than this and never asked for help, so how dare you do...

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Avoiding Politi-Speak: How activist jargon obscures more than it clarifies

If you had asked me six years ago to write a call to action to inspire people to participate in my social justice group, it would have gone something like this: “The United States of Amerikkka has always been and will always be an ecocidal White supremacist settler-colonialist police state. Join our never-ending intersectional struggle to dismantle the hegemonic forces of racial capitalism, imperialism and cis-hetero-patriarchy.” I am exaggerating, but only a little. (I would have used only one “k” in Amerika). Will you join my group? Wonderful, now we are a coalition of two. Recent life changes landed me...

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From chattel slavery to Jim Crow: Juneteenth is now an unavoidable reminder that reparations are due

Weeks after the last cannon sounded and the gun smoke cleared in April 1865, slavery in most of the United States had come to an end, unless you were an enslaved person in Texas. It was not until June 19, 1865, a full 71 days after the surrender at Appomattox and 37 days after the Battle of Palmito Ranch, that 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, to announce that the Civil War was indeed over; and that all enslaved people were now free. In Texas, this was known as “Juneteenth,” and it marks not only the day...

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The full scope of MLK’s dream took on the issues of poverty and war along with systemic racism

When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, he did something extraordinary for a speaker mounting a challenge to the existing order: he positioned those in his movement not as outsiders and dissidents, but rather as inheritors, indeed as the true inheritors, of the American Constitutional tradition. He laid hold of the “mystic cords of memory” that connect each generation of Americans. King—who had disobeyed the ordinances of many localities, defied the laws of many states, and written from the cell of a city jail—enveloped his cause and his message in the mantle of mainstream...

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Measuring Equity with Urban Forests: How planting trees helps build prosperous and healthy communities

The term “urban forest” may sound like an oxymoron. When most of us think about forests, we may picture vast expanses of tall trunks and dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves, far from the busyness of the city. But the trees that line city streets and surround apartment complexes across the U.S. hold great value, in part because of their proximity to people. “Per tree, you’re getting way more value for an urban tree than a tree out in the wild,” said Mark McPherson, founder and director of a Seattle nonprofit called City Forest Credits. In an increasingly urbanizing...

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