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When the Authorities Say You're Not Welcome Here When our kid was kicked out of his public school as a young teen, we had no idea what his near future held. Without any consistency in direction, the authorities kept changing the length of the expulsion: first, they said, it would be a month. Next, a year. Then, a semester...And so it went. They clearly knew not what they were doing. The good news for our son and his family is that there were some limits to the length of time that the district was allowed to continue to deny him an education. Our pro-bono lawyer helped us to understand that our child had to be allowed back to his home school at least after the entire school year had passed. And in the end, without apology, the district recognized their obligation to us after one semester when they finally resumed helping us in educating our child. But then I look to the plight of the immigrants. In particular, the ones who live in my own Sanctuary city. These are my friends a...

Peacing it all Together "Any friend of Steven's is a friend of mine..." So begins the inscription inside a book written by Mimi that my college friend Steven had gifted me in 1987. I had never met the author, but I knew she was old enough to be my mom and that Steven was calling her by her first name. On the other hand, I had met Steven four years prior and knew him quite well. And nothing felt more satisfying than to be accepted into a community simply because a friend of a friend's had signed her book. Steven and I met at college, the small program within the larger university. His individualized major included a study of feminism. I didn't know it at the time, but he was also embarking on a serious study of what today we know as privilege and intersectionality. The program we were in allowed us to call all of our professors, administrators, and staff members by their first names. No, they didn't just "allow" this, it was standard pro...