Weekly Wha Dat?!

by Chris Burton

“Blow is the James Baldwin of our time. Using his gifts as a storyteller, he writes of poverty, race, bullying, gender and sexuality – the issues, struggles and process of self-discovery of our era.” 

“When we look at the life of Moses, we see humility isn’t bashfulness. It isn’t self-deprecation. It isn’t about ignoring your strengths (or weaknesses). Humility doesn’t mean you can’t be confident. True humility is understanding where your confidence comes from—and that confidence should come from your identity in God.”

“I never thought anything like this would ever happen to someone like me,” Erika Schoonover said. Schoonover and her fiance Josh Wilberger have had to put off their wedding for years. Schoonover has lupus, and she’s already lived past the life expectancy for someone with her disease. 

” I do not relate these experiences to gain sympathy. I broke the law knowing there would be consequences. I tell my story because this is the side of the system we didn’t get to see where I grew up. In the wealthy suburbs of Massachusetts, our shared narrative told us that people who didn’t live where we lived, or have what we had, weren’t working as hard as we were. We avoided inner city streets because they were dangerous, and we relied on the police to keep people from those places out of our neighborhoods. Whatever they got, we figured they deserved. My total, unquestioning belief in this narrative was the reason I arrived in Roxbury, fresh out of law school, eager to incarcerate everything in sight.”