The Emergent Self

Questioning what we're told it means to be human

Topic

Dignity & Humiliation

Is dignity something we are born with, or something we make together? Writing on humiliation, recognition, and the making of worth.

We Won. Now Comes the Harder Part.

Democrats won big on Tuesday, and I celebrated. Then I thought about my friends who voted the other way. What we do with this win will matter more than the win itself.
An open wooden garden gate in a stone wall with a bicycle, old novels, a rotary telephone and a tablet leaning beside it

First They Laugh: The Stigma That Greets Every New Technology

My friends laugh at me for talking to my computers. They laughed at the bicycle, the novel, the test tube, and the dating site too. The stigma that greets every new technology is never really about the tool.
A hand-drawn family tree on aged paper, with one faint, unfinished branch set apart from the rest

The Cousin We Were Afraid to Call: Racial Hatred in One Family Tree

For fifty years my family has traded records and old photos, but one branch we left alone: a third cousin who became a Klan leader. What a family tree can and cannot explain about racial hatred.
Sunlit empty classroom doorway seen from the hallway

Who Can I Become Here?

Violence came into a classroom on East 38th Street. Years later I am still asking what brought those men there, and what it would take for a different life to emerge.
A folded American flag resting on an empty rocking chair on a small-town front porch at sunset, with the mailbox flag raised

Dear America, Part 1: I’ve Done Everything You Told Me

A veteran who kept his end of the bargain writes home to ask what happened.
Growth through suffering: a young tree growing from a crack in a stone wall

Growth Through Suffering, and What It Costs

For years I've called my dark years a gift. Here I put that claim to the test: suffering can become a place of growth, but growth never makes the harm good.
A coastal map on a wooden desk with a black marker line drawn across it, a marker beside it, and a calm ocean through the window

The Sharpie and the Ocean: Reading Donald Trump, and Ourselves, from Four Directions

A marker on a hurricane map, a plan to rename an ocean: what Donald Trump’s strangest moments reveal about him, about the culture that cheers, and about the rest of us.
Painting of a Black boy gazing through a window at a fenced public swimming pool on a summer afternoon

I’m White, and I Don’t Have to See Color

"I don't see color" is usually offered as a promise of fairness. For many White people, it may really be a description of privilege.

The Weight of a Cloud

A fair-weather cloud weighs over a million pounds and looks like nothing at all. We make the same mistake about the people around us.
Painting of an empty public swimming pool behind a chain-link fence on a summer afternoon, with flowering trees and a diving board

Who Decided What Our Skin Would Mean?

In 1977, a student in my rural Georgia classroom told me he wasn't allowed in the city pool. That moment raised a question I still carry: who decided what our skin would mean, and who gains from the answer?
Why flatterers turn on you: an illustration of a conference table where employees hold smiling masks in front of wary faces as they turn toward the boss at the head of the table.

Why Flatterers Turn on You

The person who flatters you most may be the one most likely to turn on you. A meeting I came to dread, the research behind it, and why the truth people can’t tell you goes somewhere else.
Illustration of the systems we build: many hands of different skin tones assembling an open scaffold in sage green, pink and blue, with people inside it and others watching from its edges.

The Systems We Build, and the People They Make of Us

People build systems, and then those systems quietly build us. What the research on corporate leaders reveals about privilege, who pays the price, and why what we built we can also rebuild.