written by Deesha Philyaw, Anti-Racist Parent columnist
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in one of his early sermons as an associate pastor at his father’s church, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, said the following: “I am [ashamed] and appalled that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America.”
I’ve heard Dr. […]

by Deesha Philyaw, anti-Racist Parent columnist
The other morning, just after breakfast, my almost-5-year-old daughter Peyton excused herself from the table and began to peruse the bookshelves in our family room. Never one to settle for “kid” foods (at 3, she told the pediatrician that her favorite food was “spicy Pad Thai”) or “kid” clothes (she’s […]

by ARP columnist Deesha Philyaw
One of my least proud mama-moments occurred a few years ago when my oldest daughter, Taylor, was about to enter kindergarten.  That summer, her new school invited all the incoming kindergarteners to meet their new teachers and classmates, play on the playground, and have some popsicles.
We met at the playground adjacent to […]

by ARP columnist Deesha Philyaw
A few years ago, I wrote the following column at LiteraryMama.  I did so in hopes of sparking constructive dialogue.  Instead, crickets chirped, mostly.  Well, ARP readers aren’t known to hold their tongues, so I’m reprinting here in hopes of getting that dialogue going.
A black comedian riffs on the subject of […]

by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Deesha Philyaw
As the mother of two girls who do not live under rocks, I have not been able to escape the whole princess thing. A few years back, when my oldest was in kindergarten and my youngest was an infant, I wrote a column (for another site) about how, as I […]

Below is a double entry of sorts. The first is a slightly revised recent blog entry. The latter is an unpublished piece that another parenting website found “too partisan” to publish back around the time of the 2004 election. It’s important to me that my children are informed and active participants […]

by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Deesha Philyaw
Like a lot of Gen-Xers, I lived and breathed Sesame Street back in the day. By first grade, I’d been identified by my school as “a smart kid,” and adult friends of the family regularly asked me, probably rhetorically, “How’d you get so smart?” I had a proud […]

I wrote this piece a few years ago when I was a monthly columnist for a parenting-related site sponsored by a child advocacy organization. Disclaimer: I really enjoyed writing for that site, and my editor there was the best. However, this particular column was nixed because what they were looking for was more […]

by columnist Deesha Philyaw
The question Jan, a local poet, asked me should not have caught me off guard, but it did. She wanted to know if I would be reading later that evening at an open mic she was hosting as part of a 4-day conference on adoption and culture being held here at […]

by columnist Deesha Philyaw
I like to talk about race. I joke that, as a black woman, particularly as a daughter of the American South, I was born to do it.
I was born and raised in Florida by my mother who remembered drinking from “colored” water fountains, and by my grandmother, one of many women […]