Essays

Check out some of my recently published essays and reflections

I Can’t Separate America’s Mass Shootings from it’s Long History of Racial Terrorism

White America is impotent and vengeance is served in Percival Everett’s “The Trees”

I’ve been wanting to see Jordan Peele’s Nope in theaters for a while now, but I feel uncertain about it. I’ve never been much of a moviegoer, but I make an exception for iconic Black films. I saw Get Out three times when it first released; currently, I have only seen one movie in theaters since shuttered movie houses reopened from their months-long COVID-19 closures. Read more

Coming Full Circle: Appreciating Black Educators

My fractured Jamaican and Caribbean identity has long been both an open wound and an inspiration. So, when my 10th-grade AP Global History teacher assigned us a research paper to write on the topic of our choosing, I focused on the figure of Jamaica’s prime minister, Michael Manley. Read more

Dating, ‘Talking White’ and the Proximity to Whiteness

OPINION: Part of “lifting while we climb” is deconstructing and speaking out about the harmful practices and assumptions that allowed some of us to move up the ladder faster

Recently, I returned to the world of online dating. Or rather, I have attempted to date recently. In the early stages of the pandemic, amidst acclimating to a new job, the protests, and managing my anxiety around catching COVID-19 — the loss of the sole person in my pandemic bubble hit me hard. Read more

Cascading Crises: Alzheimer’s and COVID-19 in the Black Community

THIS PAST MAY, I reunited with my 97-year-old maternal grandmother after nearly a year and a half of separation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My grandmother, Ida Frances Shaw, is one of the 1.4 million citizens living in a nursing home — one of the most dangerous places for the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Read more

New Rochelle Police Department’s Complaint Suppression and the Need for Civilian Oversight

A little over two weeks ago, on February 15th, a White off-duty New Rochelle PD officer punched a Black man in the face. Eight months prior to that incident, on June 5th, NRPD officer Alex McKenna shot and killed Kamal Flowers, a young Black man, after Flowers fled a traffic stop. Read more