In the pantheon of slain Americans who have furthered the civil rights of a marginalized group is Rita Hester, an African American transgender woman.

When Boston Pride was dismantled last July, a coalition of LGBTQ+ community activists and groups stepped up and got busy. They reimagined a new Boston Pride organization in which long-ignored marginalized groups – especially communities of Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color – become essential actors in its new chapter.

By now, everyone has seen or heard about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars for joking about his wife’s short hair – the result of alopecia, an autoimmune disease. As shocking as Smith’s slap was, so too are the mixed reactions to the assault within the Black female community, who either praised or condemned his violence.

While many African American women today wear their hair in afros, cornrows, locks, braids, Senegalese twists, wraps, or bald, our hair continues to be a battlefield in this country’s politics of hair and beauty aesthetics.

Russia’s Ukraine invasion helps the world see what our inhumanity toward each other looks like, and highlights the persistence of a global racist social order even in a humanitarian crisis.

Conversations about race in America are our third rail. It trips us all up. Whoopi Goldberg proved it when she empathically stated the Holocaust was not about race on the television talk show “The View.”

Antisemitism is so pervasive as to be invisible and normalized. We don’t see it until something awful happens.

Bell hooks, the prominent feminist scholars and author, died Wednesday at 69 in Kentucky. “Heartbreaking” doesn’t fully depict the enormity of her passing. 

The belief that the scales of justice were blind and balanced in the case against Ahmaud Arbery’s killers confuses accountability with justice, especially when compared with the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. In truth, the trials were opposite sides of the same coin, displaying the fragility of whiteness.

As Americans, we should focus on creating this nation as a solid rock that rests on a multicultural and democratic foundation. This way, we’d recognize marginalized groups, especially our Native American brothers’ and sisters’ ongoing struggle every day, particularly on Thanksgiving.