I identify completely. Whilst standing in line to check into a business class flight from Copenhagen to Amsterdam (when I was working for McKinsey many years ago), a counter attendant who was serving a white male passenger gave me a friendly look and encouraged me to come forward to check in. I was confused because she was already helping another customer, and I was simply waiting my turn. She became more insistent, encouraging me to come forward. I suppose she assumed that I was timid and unaccustomed to traveling. The white man at the counter had to explain to her that I was not his traveling companion to Tahiti. Yikes!

A Family Grapples with Its Tragic History It was May 25th when I rolled into Tulsa after being stranded overnight in Dallas by thunderstorms. I had planned to arrive on the 24th, my birthday, because I was coming home for the first time to the place that forged my paternal…

It was eerily fitting that the weekend before a mob of President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, I sat down to reread the book that my great-grandmother, Mary Jones Parrish, wrote almost 100 years ago. In it, she recounted and reported on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. …

As a Black woman in America, I’ve been watching the neck-and-neck presidential election race like everyone else. I’ve also been reading online posts, conversations and articles happening in the spaces I inhabit — spaces where Black folks speak their minds openly about the racism that stains and permeates our society…

On this World Lymphedema Day, the culmination of Lymphedema Awareness Week, I invoke the same question I asked a year ago, and will no doubt continue to ask: What am I gonna do about my legs? You see, I have primary bilateral lymphedema of the lower extremities, which means I…

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women and children from the superior power of men.” — feminist psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. Widespread fascination with the term gaslighting is enjoying a resurgence, but the behavior never really…

A series of comedy sketches on Chappelle’s Show in the early 2000s featured the inimitable Dave Chappelle portraying celebrities about whom Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie Murphy shared purportedly true Hollywood stories. One of the vignettes told the story of flamboyant, hard-living R&B singer Rick James going to Eddie’s house, stretching…

Like everybody who watched this clip, I died laughing when Jidenna, a popular Nigerian-American recording artist, told a story, during an award ceremony, of bringing his math test to his Nigerian father as a young boy. Expecting accolades for receiving 98 percent, the young Jidenna was crushed as his father…

Watching a lion pride gorge on freshly killed water buffalo was the zenith of our safari in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Game preserve. It had taken several hours to drive here from Nairobi two days before, and we spent our first afternoon in the Mara traversing roads invisible to us across…