What’s actually occurring with Houston children?
I’ve been serious about this Texas Kids’s Hospital report for the reason that numbers dropped. In a single month, April alone, 647 children got here to the ER for behavioral well being points like melancholy, nervousness and suicidal ideas. That’s 200 greater than normal. That’s not simply alarming—it’s heartbreaking.
Psychological well being professionals say this isn’t new. It began earlier than COVID and has solely gotten worse with the state of the world.
Political unrest. Household rigidity. Social media. Educational strain.
Our children are carrying the burden of a world they didn’t ask to inherit. The information from HISD is much more sobering: 14% of scholars stated they tried suicide within the final 12 months. That’s above the nationwide common.
And whereas there was a short surge in funding for college psychological well being companies throughout the pandemic, a lot of that assist is gone now. What are we telling our youngsters? Their therapeutic has an expiration date?
As mother and father, educators and neighborhood members, we now have to cease saying “Youngsters are so emotional today” and begin asking why they really feel so unsafe inside their very own minds. Know the indicators. Ask the questions. Get the assistance. Normalize the dialog.
And to the policymakers who’re pulling funding from colleges, libraries and scholar assist, that is what your negligence prices.
Goal FAFO’d—and the Tradition is completed whispering
Effectively, nicely, nicely. Look who messed round and came upon. Goal simply reported a 2.8% drop in gross sales and missed Wall Avenue’s forecast by tons of of hundreds of thousands—sure, Black clients are a part of the rationale. After rolling again their DEI commitments earlier this 12 months, longtime loyalists stopped exhibiting up. And let’s be trustworthy: Goal spent years courting Black shoppers—Juneteenth off, Black Historical past Month collections, shelf area for Black authors and small companies. We confirmed up for them. They folded underneath strain the second it acquired inconvenient.
Now they’re shocked that we observed? Please. Help is a two-way avenue—and if Goal can’t assist us in boardrooms, don’t count on us to assist them at checkout.
Nottoway burned down. The place them followers at?
Since Could 15, Black of us have been joyfully sharing the information that Nottoway Plantation, the most important antebellum plantation within the South, burned to the bottom. And I’ll be the one to say it plainly: We’re not mourning the loss.
This plantation-turned-luxury resort erased its previous from its brochures. No point out of the enslaved individuals who constructed it. No signal of the blood terror, and exploitation it profited from. Simply curated white columns and manicured lawns for weddings and weekend getaways.
Let me say this loud for these within the again: you’ll be able to’t glamorize genocide and name it hospitality.
The ashes of Nottoway are a reminder that historical past has weight, and it received’t be prettied up for tourism perpetually. What’s gone up in flames is greater than wooden and brick—it’s the fantasy we’d ever neglect.
