Christine Stoddard

I was shivering and sweating. What if the procedure didn't work? What if I had serious complications? What if I had to come back?

I recently spent some time in Freddie Gray's West Baltimore neighborhood asking local women for their thoughts on police reform. I was curious because, as the Freddie Gray trials drag on, I can't help but feel that city and state officials are failing to ask everyday people what needs to change.

Immigrants are pushed out of their home countries due to social, political, or economic forces beyond their control — poverty, genocide, wartime.... I doubt many Salvadorans of my mother's generation fled El Salvador to go “find themselves.”

Indigenous people throughout the world already face so many challenges; they don’t need non-Indigenous people appropriating their cultures and championing family lore as fact. The genocide of Indigenous people is an ongoing travesty throughout the world