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
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.
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.
Bodies
A straightforward look at how the Supreme Court’s current makeup has reshaped the meaning of “choice”.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Police
This history is important—it clarifies what American policing was built to do and who it was built to control.
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.
Racism
The difference between ‘not racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ is the difference between protecting one’s self-image and actively opposing harm.