Author Archives: Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead

By Karsonya Whitehead, Special to the AFRO I was raised by baby boomers: the last Jim Crow generation whose lives were shaped by the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the words of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Vietnam War. They had been raised to believe that White people were not only better […]

By Karsonya Whitehead I am almost certain that my Nana came and visited me in my dreams last night. She told me that I needed to imagine a world where justice exists and then fight like hell to make it happen. She said that Baltimore was on fire and was in desperate need of a burnout. […]

By Karsonya Whitehead As a Black woman and as a mother in America, every breath that I take is an open act of revolution and rebellion. It is a conscious decision to step into, rather than away from, the light. It requires me to stand and not be moved, to exist in a space between […]

By Karsonya Wise Whitehead For 400 years, we have tried to appeal to White America’s humanity. We preached love and practiced non-violence even in the face of hatred and terror. We worked within their system, played by their rules, colored within their lines while desperately trying to prove our worth and convince them that we […]

By Karsonya Wise Whitehead It was twenty-five years ago this week that I stood outside of the Elmina Castle in Ghana with a small group of friends and made a joint commitment to fight to help to co-create the type of world that we believe that we needed to live in. I was committed to […]

By Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead It’s 4:20a.m.: it is quiet outside, and this is my daily soul check time. I slowly open my eyes, without getting up, and ask myself the same question: do I remember who I used to be before I became the person that I am now? I remind myself to be […]

By Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, Special to the AFRO The reality that after four hundred years, we still have to prove to both the world and to some within our community that our lives, black lives, matter is both a toxic reality and a painful realization. It is a burden that is made more onerous by […]

By Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in response to the violent racial attacks that were happening throughout the country, stated that the problem this country was facing was neither a Negro problem nor a Southern problem; it was an American problem. Speaking before a Joint Session of Congress, Johnson argued […]

By Karsonya Wise Whitehead Growing up, I spent every summer on my grandmother’s farm in South Carolina, and she would often use farming metaphors to teach me lessons. Every time a boy broke my heart, or I dealt with racism, she would tell me that it was time to do some threshing, which is the […]