Last weekend, while helping a couple of our friends move apartments, my friend asked me if I’d seen Lil Nas X’s new music video — the one with hell and the devil and all that. At the time, I hadn’t. I’d heard vague details, and I’d seen the notes app letter that...

In the summer of 2019, I was privileged enough to study abroad in Málaga, Spain, with the Spanish program at UMKC. At first, I honestly wasn’t sure if I was going to like Spain, because European history doesn’t interest me much. As the class travelled through Andalucía,...

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, I was devastated. I was afraid of what a Trump presidency would mean for many of my friends and fellow students. I remember calling my friend Anna, who was a freshman at KU at the time, and crying together. I stayed at my parents’ house that night...

On Saturday, Nov. 7, an arduous election cycle came to an end, resulting in President-elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. In the time since polls closed on Tuesday, voters were on edge, commiserating on Twitter about vote counts. On Friday, Nov. 6,...

I felt nauseated when the Google news notification flashed on my phone screen. It read, “Two Maine cops fired for beating porcupines to death with batons.” At that moment, the news struck me as another example of the violence that is groomed into police officers in the United...

I woke up around 2 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 2, and instinctively unlocked my phone. I had a notification for a group chat with some friends, and I opened it. In the middle of the night, about two hours after the news had dropped, I found out that Donald Trump, the mask-resistant,...

The artwork was a massive field of black, taking up an entire pane of the RE’s many windows. Two almond-shaped, mustard-yellow eyes glowed out of the top of the frame. The eyes were topped by two green eyebrows, and muted pink tears streamed down from the eyes.  The...

“I can’t breathe,” my white acquaintance told me from under her plastic face shield, “in a mask.” I, a white woman, was on campus for my job and perplexed that I actually had to have the mask conversation with someone in my real life.  “It makes me uncomfortable...