This article originally appeared in The Lily. When I was a kindergartener in the 1960s, I, like many other little girls, owned a Barbie. She was a miniature blonde with a big bosom and a tiny waist and wide, surprised-looking eyes. She had rubbery legs that bent at the knee, which I moved back and forth so much they eventually […]
This originally appeared in The Lily, a Washington Post magazine. The rally began at noon with the clamor of dozens of motorcycles, and ended with the release of purple and white balloons into the afternoon sky. On Saturday, hundreds of people gathered in the parking lot of the Walmart at 5655 E. Sam Houston Parkway, the scene of Jazmine Barnes’s […]
Call me a snowflake. I own it. At some point in the latter days of the 2016 election, some right-wing Twitter users created an artificial identity divide, calling themselves “deplorables” and Trump critics “snowflakes.” If one is a snowflake simply by virtue of anger at injustice, watch me melt. On the evening of November 8, 2016, as commentators on CNN […]
Farmersville, Texas, lies about 35 miles northeast of Dallas — a few hours from my home in Houston. So when I read that the city council had scheduled a special town hall meeting to address opposition to a Muslim cemetery, I decided to take a road trip to attend the meeting.
Adama Bah’s story begins at Fajr time on March 24, 2005.
That morning, agents from the FBI, the New York Police Department and immigration authorities knocked on the door of her family’s apartment in Harlem. Adama was 16, the oldest of five children of Guinean immigrants.
