I still remember watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11. Emotionally, I was gutted. All I could think about was the tremendous amount of suffering and grief that the victims’ family members would endure for the rest of their lives. I participated in the grief of the country as well. But intellectually I also knew that my life as a Black immigrant was about to change for the worse. I knew that this country’s imperialist foreign policy was going to turn more murderous and that the recipients of that international violence would mostly be Black and Brown bodies.

In the 2015 report entitled “Architecture of Segregation,” Century Foundation fellow Paul Jargowsky reported that Syracuse leads the nation in concentrated poverty for Blacks and Latinos. His study confirmed what Syracusans living in the city’s segregated neighborhoods already knew: institutional and personal racism excludes them from decent housing, schools, health care and jobs.

Every year on May 15, Palestinians and their allies around the world mark the Nakba, or "catastrophe" in Arabic, referring to the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish the state of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 out of 1.9 million Palestinians were forced to leave their homes in Palestine and become refugees. 2018 marks 70 years since the ongoing dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestine began.

Nikolas Cruz, the south Florida shooter, was enrolled in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program as a 9^th grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Army taught Cruz to shoot lethal weapons at a very young and impressionable age.