Carissa Explains It All

      In the film I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck was both inspiring and sickening in the same viewing. It was almost like James Baldwin had a magic crystal ball in 1968 and knew what was to come regarding the struggle for justice amongst the black community. He predicted the Black Lives Matter Movement. Just as Robert F. Kennedy had prophesied before he was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles in 1968 he said that in twenty years a man of color would become president. His prophecy came true with the election of Barack Hussein Obama II in 2009. However, although we elected our first black president, it has been marred from the ever constant struggle for blacks to be seen as equal members of US society. Baldwin's account is haunting in that he was a witness to lives and death of three prominent men, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr whose words will echo throughout history forever.      One of the first things that I n...

         In the United States, one cannot refute that the passing of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990 was not a turning point for people with disabilities. However, almost thirty-years later we still see gross inequities within the dis/abled community. While reading Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/abilty by Annamma, Conor and Ferri brought up a range of emotions and memories. I have witness first-hand what it is like to live with a disability. My cousin Richard who was born in 1929 he had no formal schooling and was sixty years later diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum Disorder, which in the reading these "notions of dis/ability continually shift over time according to social context." Had it not been for my grandmother's family, my cousin Richard would've ended up at the Howard Complex in Cranston, Rhode Island where the disabled were lumped in ...