Author: Clio

I have a strong opinion on the word “Caucasian.” Short version: If you’re white, stop using it immediately. I simply don’t think it’s possible to claim to want to tear down racism while actively using one of its keystones. There is one reason alone why white people of European descent got to be called “Caucasian.” Scientific racists…

Earlier this year, an 11-year-old student testified that her teacher confronted her after she chose to kneel during the Pledge of Allegiance. As children return to school, and as athletes continue to kneel for the National Anthem, it seems like a good time to look at the question: What rights do students have with regards to…

Donald Trump, a conservative 72-year-old American businessman, has said some things that have stretched the limits of credulity in his career. Here’s one of his latest, regarding Omarosa Manigault Newman’s claim that she has a tape of him saying the n-word: “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Now, to be…

Recently, Akron Public Schools announced that it had created a partnership with basketball great LeBron James. Working with the LeBron James Family Foundation (LJFF), the district will be opening a school this year for at-risk youth. This is not the first time a celebrity has been involved in the opening of a school, but in…

I am writing this on the fiftieth anniversary of a significant cultural event. Fifty years ago today, a white cartoonist responded to a request from a white woman who was concerned about the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., by a white man. Like Jane Elliot, another white woman, Harriet Glickman used her response to…

My father liked to travel. When I was a child, it was his goal to take his family to every state in the nation, and as many Canadian provinces as possible. Some of these states, we lingered in. I had grandparents in Virginia and Florida. My father had been born and raised in Utah; my…

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has been called “uncivil,” and there’s at least one call for her censure. More on that later. First, I want to tell you a story. ◊♦◊ The year was 1776. The month was December. The winter in Virginia was unusually cold, and the Continental Army was struggling. Soldiers lacked food, shelter,…

I’m a white man. I have about the whitest pedigree around: The twelfth descendant of Miles Standish and John Alden, with a family tree to prove it. I have plantation owners in my background. Just about any sentence that begins “White people in this country …” applies to something my ancestors did. I spent most…

My nine-year-old son did something really brave today. We were at a tourist attraction, and there was a rope climbing course. For $11, anyone over the height of 48 inches would be strapped into a full harness system, and then they be allowed to wander a four-story-tall gridwork of steel supports and rope bridges. Neither…

I remember the first time my father showed me GAMES Magazine. I must have been around ten years old, because it was shortly after the magazine premiered in 1977. We’d seen puzzle magazines before, but this was a new kind of thing: It had a slim section of traditional puzzle magazine-type puzzles surrounded by news…