Dear [insert name here],

I have found so much comfort from many of your texts, emails, and phone calls. Thank you. I am overwhelmed with gratitude by your thoughtfulness and I often just cry reading your messages. Specifically, to my white friends and family who have allowed these visible acts of violence to mobilize their empathy into actionable solidarity, again, I thank you. The grief and exhaustion I feel because of the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor are indescribable. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus and I couldn’t find the words, until now.

For myself…

It is substantially easier to talk about racial disparities in America than it is to actually fix them. We’ve heard of the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has on black communities in many U.S. urban cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans. In Chicago, African-Americans account for “more than half of those who have tested positive and 72 percent of virus-related fatalities, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population.” These stories of black lives no doubt reflect larger inequities of health care access, historical mistrust of health institutions and socio-economic gaps. However, this sounding of…

Is it even a thing to still use the term “woke”? Sam Sanders argues that “the muddling of the definition of woke is really what killed it” in his opinion piece entitled “It’s Time to Put Woke To Sleep.” He explains that woke came to represent a “shorthand for a worldview that values black lives” specifically contextualized by the social injustice of police brutality that fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. However, over the years since it’s resurgence, it has become a “buzzword” overused, often out of context, by well-meaning white liberals, corporations, and memes. While most would agree that…