CARA MIA

A letter about history, words, and justice

Cara Mia, Italian for my beloveds, refers to both the person my parents hoped I would become and MLK’s Beloved Community.

Reckoning
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Reckoning

This one’s a meditation on hunger, memory, and moral containment. It traces the distance between what we recognize and what we are willing to let reorganize our sense of responsibility.

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Safety
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Safety

When the right to guns outweighs the right to bodily autonomy and safety, something fundamental has fractured. This piece examines that rupture without offering false resolution.

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Bodies
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Bodies

A straightforward look at how the Supreme Court’s current makeup has reshaped the meaning of “choice”.

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Housing
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Housing

Housing has always been the place where America’s story about itself collides with the truth—where the political becomes personal, and where the past keeps shaping who gets to belong now

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Beloved Community
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Beloved Community

If the Beloved Community is ever going to exist, it’ll be because we stop looking away, dig into the truth, and decide that learning and repair actually matter more than protecting our own comfort.

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Forgetting
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Forgetting

The hardest thing I’ve learned lately is that even our most heartfelt outrage can disappear if we let it, and that forgetting is its own form of harm.

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Repentance
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Repentance

In a year defined by grief, revolt, and unbearable clarity, I’m sitting with the kind of atonement that asks us not just to look inward, but to reckon with the suffering we’ve allowed, ignored, or explained away.

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Words and Reality
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Words and Reality

A plainspoken examination of systemic, structural, and institutional racism—why the distinctions matter, how language is used to deny them, and what it costs us to pretend not to see.

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Fascism in PDX
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Fascism in PDX

As Portland draws international attention for violence and fascism, the deeper truth is in danger of being lost: this movement began, and continues, in defense of Black lives.

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Police
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Police

This history is important—it clarifies what American policing was built to do and who it was built to control.

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Mourning
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Mourning

Claudia Rankine asks what it would mean to live as if Black life were not an abstraction we mourn, but a reality we are implicated in and responsible to.

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Racism
Cara Ungar Cara Ungar

Racism

The difference between ‘not racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ is the difference between protecting one’s self-image and actively opposing harm.

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