Thoughts

I have nervousness posting this blog. The majority of it comes from the intense stigma of 'mental illness'. The fear that future employers would not want to deal with an employee who struggles with anxiety. The fear of people looking at something like this, and not seeing the strength it takes to write it, but rather someone who is weak. Because that's how we deal with disorders of the brain in our society. We see people struggling as just being deficient in dealing with things, whiny even. But here's the truth: people who struggle with mental illness are some of the strongest and most determined people you will ever meet.  I didn't understand what it was like to have your brain betray you until I had my first anxiety episode in high school. It came on like a freight train; I went from feeling normal, to feeling like I was crawling in my own skin in days. It's a feeling of utter dread, terror, hopelessness, and sadness wrapped and boxed with a pretty little bo

Alright, alright, alright. I should be prepping my curriculum right now, but I couldn't get something off of my mind. The "Bad Blood" video has been circulating the internet lately. Don't get me wrong, I think the video is well done, cheeky, creative, and has a bomb catchy beat. But here's the thought that stubbornly stays in my head the entire time I watch that video. "You're too skinny to be able to realistically do any of that stuff" Let's be real, T-Swift might be borderline anorexic. Now I'm self conscious for this post, because on one hand, I'm not a fan of body shaming. And in no way is being lean, skinny, or etched inherently negative. There is a part of the skinny continuum though, near the anorexic side that becomes problematic. Not because the body type is ugly or wrong, but because the cause is of an underlying personal or societal problem. That being said, I will admit that I feel an emotional reaction when I see

All of my citations were footnotes, which did not get transferred over in the blogger format. I promise all of my statements are backed up though.  This essay gives a brief history of Black relationships to the land, and focuses on how two paradigms of relationship to the land have flourished and intertwined throughout American history. One is 'land as commodity' and the other is 'land as community'.  The lens of land as commodity was a very European understanding of land value. Land as community can be seen heavily in West African Customary law (these are very loose assumptions, and should be seen as paradigms rather than historical facts). But the entanglement of these two paradigms is particularly interesting in American history.  It is the commodification of land and labor propagated by the colonists protestant land ethic that was a driver of the Trans Atlantic Slave system. Agrarian virtues that were core to American citizenry and ethic were a key argument