Bread and Bread

Among the celebrities lending their voices to the movement for Black lives, John Boyega has stood out. Not just because he’s put his body on the front lines at protests and because he’s shut down Twitter trolls with delightful wit, but because—in our house—he is Finn. You know: the ex-Stormtrooper stolen from his family and raised as FN-2187. When he refuses to kill for the First Order, he defects and eventually joins the Resistance. It’s not the subtlest metaphor, and I’m not the first to say “Yes, this guy! The guy who took off his blood-smeared Stormtrooper helmet and refused to be a cop for the last gasp of the Empire!” But at this moment in history, I am especially grateful for how much Dash, at age 5.5, adores him. Before schools closed in March, I had never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through, although AK, Dash’s other mom, flew her toy Millennium Falcon around her childhood living room and, as a forty-something adult, has been known to read Star Wars fan ficti...

1. On my first day off in weeks I stand with my son watching a spider who has spun a web in the bamboo a floating silver blanket that has snared a ladybug. The spider pedals his back legs a busy typist or a mother preparing dinner. The ladybug yields, all squirming undercarriage her red jewel of a shell consumed by white thread. I wonder if I should intervene and what the metaphor might be. This is the week protesters stood up in the name of Black bodies and our president wielded the military in the name of the bible. I sat home, a typist, tangled scared and tired. 2. Dee Dee Blanchard named her daughter Gypsy Rose, and that's half of what you need to know. Smile, baby, she told her child after ordering a dentist to pull out her teeth. I let them entertain me. She pushed her in a wheelchair, a pink blanket over her strong legs. Gypsy stood up in the night took off her oxygen mask ate frosting by the light of the fridge looked up "kissing...

On Friday night, I scrolled through a feed of burning cop cars, protesters in cloth masks, and cops in riot gear. On Sunday morning, I looked at pictures AK texted me from the park: Dash next to a glassy green pond. Trees stooped to touch their branches to the water. I stayed home to catch up on work, which meant writing this blog post about my org's work in the context of police violence. (Official Organizational Statements declaring solidarity with Black people have become a thing in the past few days, which is part of what makes this time--this violence, this uprising--feel like a tipping point, like the moment homophobia finally became an unacceptable default mode. Of course, homophobia has not gone away and even most of my nicest straight friends are casually heterocentric. So tipping points are not victory, but they are  a victory, a big wave in a sea of incremental change.) (Official Organizational Statements also bump up against my dislike of platitudes and virtue signal...

Note: Contains spoilers, so if you’re an even slower viewer than me, move along. Pop culture has an unfortunate history of killing off both Black characters and lesbians as plot devices. So how did Orange is the New Black manage to violently kill a Black lesbian and make it the complete opposite of gratuitous? Which is to say devastating, and a tragedy in the true Aristotelian sense. I took some mental notes as I was watching/sobbing, and I’m writing them down because I think they’re relevant to anyone who cares about narrative and social justice, and narratives that advocate for social justice without feeling like a Very Special Episode (see: The L Word, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman ). Here’s what OITNB did right in the episodes leading up to and following the one in which Bayley, a young, gullible white guard, accidentally strangles Poussey while fighting off Suzanne, aka Crazy Eyes: The show doesn’t introduce a character solely for the purpose of killing her. We got t...

1. inconsolable Several people in my feed shared a news clip of Alton Sterling’s son bawling and crying out “Daddy!” I try not to be a look-away type, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn the sound on. The headline and a few seconds of silent video was enough. I kept thinking of last year’s Homeboy Family Picnic, when a little boy temporarily lost his dad, a Homeboy trainee. The boy was maybe seven. He had a chubby face and a buzz cut; a smear of barbecue sauce had defiled his ribbed white tank. He was in tears, calling out “Daddy!” “Who’s your dad?” asked the crew of women who quickly gathered around him. “Raul,” he said.* Raul had to be nearby, playing volleyball or grooving to oldies in the shade. But his son was inconsolable, despite the women’s assurance that we’d find Raul momentarily. He sobbed and sobbed until finally he stopped and threw up on the grass. This year's picnic. Families lost and found. As a kid I’d been quick to panic when separated...

This morning I woke up with the thought: If not for Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn’t be living the great life I’m living. I wouldn’t be able to move through the world easily with my Mexican-American esposa, hoping/planning to adopt a kid, having checked the “any/all ethnicities” box on our adoption preferences. This was followed immediately by the thought: And if not for white privilege, we probably wouldn’t have been able to finance any of it. Welcome to the smoothie of gratitude and guilt that is my brain. It’s okay, I’ve come to find it endearing. We spent the weekend in Oakland*, site of historic and recent civil rights activism. With Pedro and Stephen, we walked the quiet Sunday streets downtown, looking for a place to have a late lunch amid shops with boarded up windows. On the sidewalk, in front of Gold Rush-era storefronts selling artisanal canvas bags or perfectly curated vintage Southwest sweaters, was the repeated stencil: Black lives matter. Downtown O...