Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD

To change course, to simply decide not to continue on a path that can only produce more bloody corpses of black bodies, is to demand a new course for law enforcement.

calling on Americans to call forth their “better angels” may have been a marketing strategy for someone like Oprah to hold on to her white women, middle and upper middle class audience, it’s not intended, however, for someone like Breonna Taylor, who, as an EMT, put her own health on the line for the great good. But you won’t hear the media referring to her as an “angel.”

Faulkner, in the 1910s and 1920s Mississippi, would have sat on some adult’s lap to hear stories about the gallantry of Robert E. Lee. In Chicago, at my Catholic elementary, I heard about Robert E. Lee. I saw pictures of him in my history textbooks before I was told anything about Frederick Douglass. Devoid of all his anger and fight, of course.

Who are these humans who desire to live in a democratic society, but who allow for the co-opting of ideas about democracy, the work and the creatively to bring it into existence, by the tyrants among them who seize on an opportunity to eliminate civil liberties, even the memory of civil liberties, until nothing resembling life remains on the landscape.

Any acknowledgment of African American existence must first go through whites in control of the neoliberal narrative and who, in turn, provide the model “ideal” African Americans for other whites to accept as authentic, legitimate, human.

the gun carriers want the economy flowing again over the dead and dying bodies of people of color.

Keep the physical distance! Keep the physical distance! It’s a dance of sorts, as we pay close attention to the closest person to our left and to our right. Who’s in front of me and should I slow down to keep the six feet between us?

change is happening. The witches are stirring, things are brewing outside the seats of power. Even in our own homes and apartments. Underfoot, the people are thinking critically and wisely about the immediate future of this planet, about capitalism’s fostering of heartlessness of racism and fascism. The stamping out of life by the heartless is destroyed, once and for all, on the battlefield.

More than 89% of black and Latinx patients, however, suffer from underlying health conditions. Few want to talk about why because to do so would be to become other than self and think beyond the “normal” and engage in listening to blacks and Latinx. But, in America, it’s so much easier to serve a corporate schedule of appointments, fifteen minutes and out! Next on the schedule!