Author: Reggie Jackson

“You’ve got the words to change a nation, but you’re biting your tongue, you’ve spent a lifetime stuck in silence, afraid you’ll say something wrong.” – Emeli Sande Hollywood is finally getting over its fear of telling the story of black America honestly. I sat in the majestic Oriental Theater on October 10 as part of a multi-racial, multi-generational audience, to see a film about race. It was surreal. “The Hate U Give” was an extraordinary film that took the audience on a journey into the lives of African Americans and our fraught relationship with the criminal justice system....

Common Sense: the ability to use good judgment in making decisions and to live in a reasonable and safe way. As Americans we take pride in being very sensible people and think that most of us are in the same boat as everyone else when it comes to common sense. Those lacking common sense are see, as oddballs. I have proposed for years that common sense is not very common. My contention is that we make many decisions based on our sense of belonging to a specific group. We try our best to do what benefits the group we...

As a first year teacher I was unprepared for something that my students would ask continuously. For everything I asked them to do, they would ask the same question. Why? For a while it really irritated me because I did not have an answer other than, “because I told you so.” After a while I began to think about the inquisitive nature I had as a young person. For me and those I grew up with, questioning authority figures was not something we were allowed to do. The teacher and all other adults pretty much ruled over us and...

“The greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As I have explored the ways in which Milwaukee’s metropolitan area has become the most segregated in the nation, I have grown to understand segregation as something much more than what people think of it as. Segregation is much more...

On a hot summer day, dedicated to the “boys of summer,” Major League Baseball (MLB) celebrated its brightest stars in its annual All-Star game. Our local team, the Milwaukee Brewers, was well represented at the game in a season that has been without controversy. On that glorious night, the spotlight would shine on a young southpaw, All-Star Josh Hader of the Milwaukee Brewers. Unfortunately, the light did not shine on his exploits as one of the more dominant, exciting young pitchers in the league. Instead, Major League Baseball would get caught in the trajectory of a social media firestorm...

“In just the past month, the following incidents have made the news: a black mother and her 5-year-old daughter were harassed by a white man in California who was worried about diseases in a hotel pool; a white woman assaulted a black teen at a community pool in South Carolina; a white man was fired from his job after a video of him questioning whether a black woman had the right to use a private North Carolina neighborhood pool even though she did; a Tennessee woman was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks...