We want to hear from you: What do you think the March for Science should do next? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

By Deborah Netburn

The March for Science has come and gone, but the team that sparked the movement still hasn’t taken a breather.

“We were crazy before the march, and we’ve been crazy after it,” said Caroline Weinberg, a public health educator, writer and advocate in New York who was one of the primary organizers of the main march in Washington. “It’s been pretty non-stop since April 22.”

She’s not kidding.

The day after the march, which drew 40,000 people and inspired satellite marches in more than 600 cities around the world, Weinberg and her co-leaders began planning their next steps. They met with representatives from some of the march’s more than 300 partner organizations — including the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, the Nature Conservancy and the Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology — at Washington’s Carnegie Institution for Science to discuss ways to channel the pro-science momentum they had collectively created.

“I thought that after the march I would get back to my day job, but that’s not what happened,” said Ayana Johnson, a marine biologist and ocean conservation consultant also based in New York who served as co-director of partnerships for the event. “We don’t want to squander the interest and goodwill that came out of the march.”

What should the March for Science do next? Tell us below. »

Johnson, Weinberg and their compatriots hope that the vast network of scientists and science supporters that came together for the march will become a force for assuring the role of science in public policy and society. But they still need to figure out what that will look like.

Weinberg and Johnson talked with The Times about how they plan to determine what’s next for the March for Science.

What have you been doing since the march? Did you take a break?

Weinberg: Going into the march, the party line was that the march is the start of a larger movement. So there wasn’t a break afterward — we kind of hit the ground running.

There were hundreds of satellite marches around the world and more than 300 organizations that signed on as partners. That’s a pretty big network.

Weinberg: We hit on this untapped resource of people who were just waiting to be mobilized to defend science and its role in society and policy.

Of the individuals who registered to attend the March for Science, 30.6% self-reported as scientists or science teachers. That means almost 70% were just science supporters or in a field that involves science, but aren’t scientists. That’s an amazing statistic.

How will you reach out to the people and groups that supported the march now that it’s over?

Weinberg: We have a mailing list and nearly 1 million social media followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined. That is a huge reach. But the point of the march going forward has to be engaging communities, and to do that we can’t just send emails and tweets.

We have to find a way to make communities invested in what we are doing. That is something we are going to have to figure out.

Do you have any specific next steps in mind?

Johnson: We have this overarching mission of championing science for the common good, and there are four themes under that — policy, outreach, education and diversity.

How L.A.’s March for Science came to be »

This week we’re having listening sessions with our partners around each of those key areas to figure what is the unique thing that March for Science can bring to the table. How do we use this platform for something that is not already happening?

Are you going to become a nonprofit?

Weinberg: One of the first things we did when we set up the march was start putting together the paperwork. That was filed in February, but there doesn’t seem to be a firm timeline anyone can offer us for how long that will take.

Until that time, Science Debate generously offered to be our fiscal sponsor. Basically, that means tax-deductible donations to the march go through them, and then they pass the money on to us. We function independently as an organization.

Do you have the money to continue to move forward?

Johnson: Yes, which we are very excited about! So the question is how to use the remaining funds — after paying for the march — to transition into a lasting and effective organization.

What kind of infrastructure do you have now? Is anyone doing this as their full-time job?

Weinberg: Nobody was paid for the entire three months before the march. It was entirely a volunteer operation. There were about 70 people working closely with us and thousands of people around the world working on the satellite marches. Everyone just did it for the love of science, so to speak.

PHOTOS: Thousands march to support science »

But it is not practical to permanently ask people to work as a volunteer. We are putting together advisors to help us determine how to structure the organization in the future, and the best way to move forward with it.

What kind of relationship do you hope to maintain with the satellite groups?

Weinberg: This is a global movement, and the strength of it is going to rely on our relationship with the satellites. Some of them plan on becoming their own organizations that we are really excited to partner and work with however we can. Some of them plan on coming on with us as part of the March for Science organization.

Final question: How do you turn a march into a movement?

Weinberg: With a lot of help.

Johnson: At that first meeting the day after the march, the partners came to us and said, “Yesterday was amazing, and now we have work to do.”

That made me think this was something that was going to last.

deborah.netburn@latimes.com

What do you think the March for Science should do next? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Originally published at www.latimes.com on May 4, 2017.

He spends his day on his knees, reverently arranging and rearranging his books on the plastic sheets that serve as his sidewalk shop on a downtown bridge, as thoughtful as a fortuneteller turning over cards.

To Sandile Mavimbela, the books have more mystical pull than any deck of cards, and he believes in their power to change futures — including his own if he sells enough of them.

But they can also alter the lives of his readers. The span over a rail yard links two sides of a crowded, crime-racked city, but to him this place is a bridge from curiosity to knowledge.

“The concept is books are a bridge to a better life. I think you’re selling the knowledge, being a middle person between the customer and the book,” Mavimbela, 27, says.

The titles smile at the sky, willing readers to come. “Unfair Dismissal” by Andrew Levy, “Nedbank’s Money Making Made Simple” by Noel Whittaker, “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, “Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No” by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien, “Heat” by George Monbiot, “Name Your Baby” by Lareina Rule, “The Art of Negotiation” by Michael Wheeler and “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad.

Customers bend over, browsing under the hot afternoon sun. Someone asks for a book about Thabo Mbeki, a former South African president.

“Orders can be difficult,” Mavimbela says, but he notes the title and customer’s name and phone number carefully in a large book. If he’s lucky, he might stumble across something the next time he visits one of the thrift shops he prowls for cheap books .

“One thing you almost always understand is that doing business on the street is never easy,” he says. “You have to do it your way so you get things right.”

An avid reader, he keeps back the best books to take home to read before he lays them out on the sidewalk to sell.

Today has not been lucky. There was the letdown at his favorite library, usually a good place to pick up cheap books, but barren after a recent clean-out of old titles. All he got was one out-of-print medical textbook, a good find, but not the usual treasure-trove.

“It’s hard to get good books,” he says.

He visits three thrift shops, where the white volunteers meet him with patronizing indifference or prickly hostility.

In the silence of a thrift shop in a wealthy suburb north of the city, Mavimbela groans in frustration as he peers through the titles.

His customers are always bugging him for dictionaries. Easy enough to find for wealthy buyers in new-book stores, they are hard to find secondhand.

He finally unearths two of the beauties, with “Oxford” in big shiny letters, from a box in the back. A friendly white woman named Judy always sells him good books for a few cents at this shop. But she’s away, and the elderly man in charge today is being, well, not so nice.

“Those books are for someone else,” the man snaps.

“Judy should have been here,” Mavimbela whispers, his face taut with disappointment. He leaves empty-handed.

At his next stop, classical music tinkles in the background as a row of murmuring black women sort through the secondhand clothing, surrounded by cricket bats, tennis rackets, suitcases, games, plates, curtains and shoes. Mavimbela runs a finger along the books, his eyes wistful. There’s not much here.

He asks the manager whether she has anything by American Christian novelist Francine Rivers.

“No, because they’re donated books,” she says with a patronizing laugh. “We don’t have a buyer.”

At another shop, where he has to pay 30 cents each for books people discard for recycling at 2 cents a pound, he hesitates over a thick tome on civil engineering hydraulics.

Will it sell? He ends up buying the book.

“Sometimes you get a nice book like this,” he says, picking up “The Naked Chef” by Jamie Oliver, like a fisherman hauling out a particularly fat trout. He’ll charge $2.50, a handsome profit.

Whenever the bookseller sees a book he likes, he taps the cover excitedly with his fingers and unconsciously huffs with exhilaration, tossing the book carefully onto a growing pile at his feet.

When the manager harangues him for searching through the boxes of discards, Mavimbela, studiously polite, avoids eye contact and flips through more.

Flip, flip flip. Tap, tap, huff.

Mavimbela pays $8.25 for his haul, careful to depart on good terms.

“They still have that mentality about blacks,” he says, “but I know what I’m looking for. I just choose to be quiet.”

He ends the day outside the thrift shop, as African street entrepreneurs sometimes do, sifting through the trash. “They always throw the good books out.” he says.

He pulls out book after book, flipping through the pages with slender fingers.

If it weren’t for books, Mavimbela’s life would have been an orphan’s path of crime, violence, alcohol and drugs.

His mother taught him: “Get up early, get a bath, look smart, be positive, do unto others as you would have them do to you.” By the time he was 6, he was selling steel wool pads in their small rural village on the border of Swaziland, where she was born.

“I knew I could sell things.”

But when he was 9, his father died of AIDS. His mother was ejected from the family home and returned to her homeland, leaving him to live with an aunt.

Mavimbela spent his days lying on his narrow bed, under which he had a pile of books and magazines he’d been given by the guards at a nearby border post.

“I guess I was depressed. I would not even go out to play,” he says. “I was so bored, I’d read anything.”

He went back to school the next year, but he was lonely and alienated and would drink several beers before class. He was drawn into cross-border drug smuggling, the area’s only real trade, and wound up in Soweto selling drugs to dealers.

“I didn’t have parents. It was only my own rule. I did what I wanted. Most of the time I’d hang out with the guys outside at night. Then the next morning, somebody was injured, somebody was stabbed, somebody was arrested.

“I realized I was the one destroying myself.”

He was sleeping rough on boxes in downtown Johannesburg before he met a man by chance who taught him the secondhand book trade. It reminded him of the childhood days. He found he had a talent for finding and selling the books people wanted to read.

“One thing you almost always understand is that doing business on the street is never easy “

— Sandile Mavimbela

He invests his earnings back into buying more books. Though he struggles financially, he makes enough for food and rent, and his customers promise to keep supporting his endeavor.

Buying a book is an act of hope, and Mavimbela understands his customers’ dreams: The school mothers looking for cheap textbooks for their children. The serious young people looking for motivational books on how to get rich. The older people seeking uplifting religious works. All his readers crave the one thing he has very little of: books by African authors.

Two young women wander by sheltering from the sun under an umbrella. Not far away, a team of shoe cleaners does a brisk trade. A man trundles past with a shopping cart, selling stuff he has “found.” A beggar, who smells as though he hasn’t washed in weeks, approaches Mavimbela, hand extended, and the book man reaches into his pocket for a bank note.

An old man leafs through one of Mavimbela’s books. A white tourist wanders by, taking photos of the skyline with his phone. Mavimbela purses his lips, afraid the visitor will fall victim to thieves. Locals typically stop such naive passersby, gently warning that there are “bad people” around and they’ll steal your camera or your phone for sure.

“Have you got dictionaries?” an earnest-looking mother of schoolchildren asks. A young woman with painted, pouty lips, tight jeans and blank dark glasses drifts up. She wants a nice book to read. She pronounces nice as “nahs,” breathing the word slowly from her lips. Mavimbela hops nimbly from one end of his pavement shop to the other, grabbing books, proffering suggestions.

“The way I do it, I have to persuade, not in a persuading manner but a convincing manner,” he says. “I say this is just like what you are looking for. He wasn’t intending to buy that book, but he buys it anyway.”

The young woman buys several, looking pleased. Two other women find the textbooks they need.

There’s a thud nearby and a sudden silence. People freeze. A young man has been hit by a small truck, his body hurled into a shop window. The victim crawls to the side of the road, in slow motion. Women scream and clutch their heads. Men shout, “No!”

The young man is curled by the road, but no one calls an ambulance. “It will take too long,” an old woman says. Someone helps the man to his feet and he limps painfully to the truck that hit him, to go to a hospital.

Mavimbela thinks there must be a bad spirit haunting the bridge, reaping souls. Someone gets hit on the road every few weeks.

For a while, no one talks about anything but the accident. Slowly, people move on. Commerce starts back up. The shoe-cleaning guys tout for customers. Mavimbela arranges his books. And arranges them again. He strikes up conversations with customers, probing to find out what they like, and always producing something tempting.

Flip, flip flip. Tap, tap, huff.

The harsh percussion of the traffic, the whisper of flipping pages. This is the music of his days.

Originally published at www.latimes.com on September 12, 2016.

From a bridge in South Africa, sidewalk bookseller believes in the power to change lives was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The cop wanted her car keys. Kelli Peters handed them over. She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys.

They were outside Plaza Vista School in Irvine, where she had watched her daughter go from kindergarten to fifth grade, where any minute now the girl would be getting out of class to look for her. Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program.

Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. Watched as the cop emerged from her car holding a Ziploc bag of marijuana, 17 grams worth, plus a ceramic pot pipe, plus two smaller EZY Dose Pill Pouch baggies, one with 11 Percocet pills, another with 29 Vicodin. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name.

Her legs buckled and she was on her knees, shaking violently and sobbing and insisting the drugs were not hers.

The cop, a 22-year veteran, had found drugs on many people, in many settings. When caught, they always lied.

Peters had been doing what she always did on a Wednesday afternoon, trying to stay on top of a hundred small emergencies.

She was 49, with short blond hair and a slightly bohemian air. As the volunteer director of the Afterschool Classroom Enrichment program at Plaza Vista, she was a constant presence on campus, whirling down the halls in flip-flops and bright sundresses, a peace-sign pendant hanging from her neck.

If she had time between tasks, she might slip into the cartooning class to watch her 10-year-old daughter, Sydnie, as she drew. Her daughter had been her excuse to quit a high-pressure job in the mortgage industry peddling loans, which she had come to associate with the burn of acid reflux.

No matter how frenetic the pace became at school, the worst day was better than that, and often afternoons ended with a rush of kids throwing their arms around her. At 5 feet tall, she watched many of them outgrow her.

Peters had spent her childhood in horse country at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. She tossed pizzas, turned a wrench in a skate shop, flew to Hawaii on impulse and stayed for two years. She mixed mai tais at a Newport Beach rib joint. She waited tables at a rock-n-roll-themed pasta house. A married lawyer — one of the regulars — grew infatuated with her and showed up at her house one night. He went away, but a sense of vulnerability lingered.

In her mid-30s she married Bill, a towering, soft-spoken blues musician and restaurateur who made her feel calm. She spent years trying to get pregnant, and when it happened her priorities narrowed.

“I became afraid of spontaneity and surprises,” she said. “I just wanted to be safe.”

In Irvine, she found a master-planned city where bars and liquor stores, pawnshops and homeless shelters had been methodically purged, where neighborhoods were regulated by noise ordinances, lawn-length requirements and mailbox-uniformity rules. For its size, Irvine consistently ranked as America’s safest city. It was 66 square miles, with big fake lakes, 54 parks, 219,000 people, and 62,912 trees. Anxiety about crime was poured into the very curve of the streets and the layout of the parks, all conceived on drawing boards to deter lawbreaking.

For all that outsiders mocked Irvine as a place of sterile uniformity, she had become comfortable in its embrace. She had been beguiled by the reputation of the schools, which boasted a 97% college-admission rate.

The muted beige strip malls teemed with tutoring centers. If neighboring Newport Beach had more conspicuous flourishes of wealth, like mega-yachts and ocean-cliff mansions, the status competition in Irvine — where so many of the big houses looked pretty much alike — centered on education.

Plaza Vista was a year-round public school in a coveted neighborhood, and after six years she knew the layout as well as her own kitchen. The trim campus buildings, painted to harmonize with the neighborhood earth tones, suggested a medical office-park; out back were an organic garden, a climbing wall and a well-kept athletic field fringed by big peach-colored homes.

Around campus, she was the mom everyone knew. She had a natural rapport with children. She could double them over with her impression of Applejack, the plucky country gal from the “My Little Pony” TV series. She would wait with them until their parents came to pick them up from the after-school program, but she couldn’t bring herself to enforce the dollar-a-minute late fines.

The school had given her a desk at the front office, which provided an up-close view of countless parental melodramas. The moms who wanted the 7th-grade math teacher fired because their kids got Bs. Or the mom who demanded a network of giant umbrellas and awnings to shield her kids from the playground sun.

Smile, Peters had learned. Be polite.

That afternoon — Feb. 16, 2011 — the karate teacher had texted her to say he was stuck in traffic, and would she please watch the class till he arrived? She was in the multi-purpose room, leading a cluster of tiny martial artists through their warm-up exercises, when a school administrator came in to find her. A policeman was at the front desk, asking for her by name.

She ran down the hall, seized by panic. She thought it must be about her husband, who was now working as a traveling wine salesman. He was on the road all the time, and she thought he’d been in an accident, maybe killed.

Officer Charles Shaver tried to calm her down. He was not here about her husband.

On a normal shift, Shaver could expect to handle barking-dog calls, noisy-neighbor calls, shoplifters and car burglaries, maybe a car wreck or two. He was a sniper on the Irvine Police SWAT team, armed with cutting-edge equipment that was the envy of other departments, but had never needed to pull the trigger. He was 40, a former NCIS investigator with the Marines.

He had been seven hours into an unmemorable shift when, at 1:15 p.m., a man called police to report a dangerous driver in a school parking lot.

“I was calling because, uh, my daughter’s a student at Plaza Vista Elementary School,” said the caller. “And uh, I’m concerned one of the parent volunteers there may be under, uh, under the influence or, uh, using drugs. I was, I just had to go over to the school and, uh, I was, I saw a car driving very erratically.”

The caller said he had seen drugs in the car. He knew the name of the driver — Kelli. He knew the type of car — a PT Cruiser. He even knew the license plate, and what was written on the frame — “Only 4 the Groovy.”

People were drifting in and out of the school with their kids, watching, as the policeman led Peters into the parking lot. His patrol car was blocking her PT Cruiser.

He told her about the caller’s claim that she had been driving erratically around 1:15 p.m.

That’s impossible, she said. She had parked her car and was inside the school by then.

Did she have anything in her car she shouldn’t have?

No.

Could he search her car?

Absolutely.

The drugs were easy to find. They were sticking out of the pouch behind the driver’s seat.

He put them on his hood, and she begged him to put them somewhere else. Her daughter might see. Anyone might see.

Someone must have planted them, she said. Sometimes, she left her car unlocked.

Shaver put the drugs in his trunk and led Peters back inside the school to a conference room. He peered into her pupils and checked her pulse. He made her touch her nose. He made her walk and turn. He made her close her eyes, tilt her head up and count silently to 30. She passed all the tests.

At some point her daughter arrived, as did her husband. She did not know what to tell them.

Shaver could have arrested Peters. Possessing pot on school grounds was a misdemeanor. Possessing narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet without a prescription was a felony. She could do time.

He could take her to the station, clock out by the end of his shift and be home in time for dinner. Instead, he kept asking questions.

He was patient and alert to detail, qualities ingrained in a sharpshooter trained to lie atop a building for hours, studying a window through a rifle scope.

He interviewed school administrators, who confirmed what Peters had said. She had arrived at the school office around 12:40. This meant the caller, who claimed to have just seen her at 1:15 p.m., had waited 35 minutes to report her, a gap that puzzled Shaver.

He tried to reach the number the caller had given. It was fake.

Shaver asked Peters if he could search her apartment. She agreed, reluctantly. If someone could plant drugs in her car, why couldn’t they do the same at her apartment?

She drove her PT Cruiser to her apartment about a block away, while Shaver and another officer followed. The apartment had a Jimi Hendrix print above the living room couch, and her daughter’s art hung on many of the walls.

They had lived here since moving to Irvine, more than a decade back. They had found themselves consistently outbid in their attempt to buy a home. Money had been tight since she quit her job. She ran a small business called “Only 4 the Groovy,” painting tie-dyed jeans, but it didn’t pay the bills.

Now they were permanent renters, a condition she didn’t much mind, though she noticed how embarrassed neighbors became when acknowledging they were apartment dwellers, not owners. “This is only temporary,” they insisted. In affluent Irvine, your relation to the real estate you inhabited was one of the invisible class lines.

She watched as Shaver searched the kitchen cabinets, the bedrooms, the drawers, the couches, the patio. He was looking not just for drugs and drug paraphernalia, but for baggies that said EZY Dose Pill Pouch. He found nothing to link her to the drugs in her car.

By now, the case had lost its open-and-shut feel. In Shaver’s experience, no one left a bag of pot halfway out of a seat pouch, as if begging for it to be discovered. People typically hid their drugs in the glove box, or under the car seat. And for some reason — he didn’t know why — pot smokers didn’t typically keep their pipes inside the stash bag itself.

Peters was convinced she would be spending the night in jail. But after he had finished searching the apartment, Shaver told her that he was not going to take her in. The forensics team would be coming with the long Q-tips to take cheek swabs from her and her daughter, to take their prints and to scour the Cruiser for evidence.

If her DNA turned up on the drugs, she could still be charged.

The next morning, Shaver sat in the police chief’s conference room surrounded by department brass and detectives, walking them through a case that had quickly seized the interest of the command staff.

It seemed a much stranger scenario than a suburban mom with a pot-and-pill habit.

He had asked Kelli Peters:

If the drugs aren’t yours, how did they get in your car?

“I have an enemy,” she said.

This article appeared in print and online on August 28, 2016. Chapters 2 through 6 are available at latimes.com/framed.

Contact the reporter: Email | Twitter

How this series was reported

Times staff writer Christopher Goffard reviewed thousands of pages of records, including police reports, court exhibits, transcripts of the grand jury proceeding that led to the indictments of Kent and Jill Easter and transcripts of Kent Easter’s two criminal trials.

Goffard also examined testimony in the civil trial resulting from Kelli Peters’ lawsuit and court records of the Easters’ divorce.

In addition, he conducted numerous interviews with Peters, Kent Easter, prosecutor Christopher Duff and members of the Irvine Police Department, including Officer Charles Shaver and Mark Andreozzi, the lead detective on the case. Jill Easter declined to be interviewed.

Credits: Lily Mihalik and Evan Wagstaff. Animations by Eben McCue.

Originally published at www.latimes.com.

Framed was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bill Tuchscher had been riding dirt bikes in the desert for more than two decades when he and a group of friends set out for a weekend ride near Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Late in the afternoon, far from their camp, the riders became tired. It was well over 100 degrees, and their water bottles were drained dry.

Tuchscher, seeming disoriented, fell. Then he fell again. He pushed his bike into a bit of shade, took the group’s only map out of his pocket and gave it to one of the other riders. He told them to head back to the camp while he rested up.

He never followed. Hours later, a search party came upon his body — not far from a running stream filled with fresh water.

“It looked like he had just slowed down and fallen over,” remembered Paul Ralph, then 15, who was with the group that found Tuchscher. “They told us later he had some kind of heat stroke.”

That was May 1977. Tuchscher, who ran a motorcycle shop in San Diego, was buried at Glen Abbey Memorial Park in the nearby community of Bonita. Hundreds attended the service. The procession from church to cemetery was escorted by 100 motorcycle cops.

Late last year, his family traveled to a remote location in the Mojave Desert to add Tuchscher’s name to a little-known shrine dedicated to fallen motorcyclists — to honor him, and his love of motorcycles.

The shrine is known as the Husky Memorial or Husky Monument. It cradles testamentary stones and statues honoring dozens of riders — men and women. Circular and 60 feet across at its widest point, with a tattered American flag snapping in the wind, it’s sacred to Southern California motorcyclists, especially those who ride in the desert. It’s not marked on any map, and it’s 15 miles from the nearest paved road and 30 from the nearest town, but serious riders always find a way to make a pilgrimage there.

The original monument dates from 1987, when the Desert Zebras Motorcycle Club decided to memorialize a friend, Jim Erickson. The 46-year-old veteran desert racer had killed himself. His friends, grief-stricken, chose to honor him by taking his motorcycle to the desert and burying it up to the hubs in concrete.

The bike was a race model made by the Swedish company Husqvarna, familiarly known as a “Husky.” Every weekend for several years Erickson’s friends would ride out to the monument and pay their respects.

Over time, additional memorials began appearing — a pair of boots fixed in concrete, a helmet and goggles set on a post, a headstone or a plaque planted in the sand.

Within 10 years, there were at least a dozen other riders memorialized there.

Douglas Anthony Clark — “Son, brother, friend” — was commemorated in 1999 at age 18. Little Jimmy “Bitchin’” Lewis, a fellow Desert Zebra, got his plaque in 2002. Other Zebras were nearby, like father and son Bob Lamar (died 1999) and Jim Lamar (died 1996). In 2005, Ron “Ogre” Griewe, a Zebra who rode with Erickson and whose son Donnie welded Erickson’s original Husky memorial, joined them.

Today, there are close to 100 plaques, stones and markers, each honoring a fallen rider. Some died riding in the desert, some of accidents they had riding elsewhere, and still others from illness or old age. Many had visited the monument and expressed a wish to be similarly memorialized

The first few honorees were all friends. Those who came later might never have known the owner of the original Husky. But they all shared his love of riding in remote places.

On a cool, blustery winter morning last November, Stephen Marks and Fernando Garcia chopped at the dry desert soil with shovels and picks.

Television literary manager Marks, who married Tuchscher’s daughter, Michelle, many years after her father’s death, was helping motorcycle shop owner Garcia pick a spot for the memorial they’d made — metal angel wings welded to the front end of a vintage bike. Garcia used a plastic tub to mix cement, which Marks shoveled into the ground.

Standing back to check their work, Marks remembered that when he first visited, a decade earlier, there had been about 20 markers. “Now look,” he said. “Every year, the circle gets a little wider.”

Husky Memorial sits in the middle of a massive swath of land controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

For years, rumors have swirled that the BLM wanted to tear down the monument, fearful that leaving it alone would create a legal precedent for unsanctioned building in the desert.

Stephen Razo, external affairs officer for the BLM’s California Desert District, said the agency has no plans to disturb it, so long as it involves no danger to people or the environment.

Across the circle from Marks and Garcia, a family had come to honor Trevor Neiman, who had grown up in nearby Phelan and spent his childhood riding in the desert. After three tours of duty with the Marines, he returned to California and worked with his father as a cable technician, got married and bought a home.

In 2009, six months after leaving the Marines, he was attacked and beaten to death with a hammer while installing cable at a private home. He was 25.

A friend put up a marker for him at the Husky site. When his family found out about it, they began making twice-a-year pilgrimages, planting Neiman’s motorcycle forks in a bed of cement, and adding a red tool box full of family photos.

Neiman’s father Neal, mother Lorale and sister Casie placed six coins on the tool box, to mark the years since his death, and put new photos in the box.

Marks and Garcia, tidying up, tied a tarp over their monument. The following morning they would return, with Tuchscher’s widow and three children, for the official unveiling.

Sunday morning, the convoy drove in from Randsburg, a former mining community 27 miles away, the closest town to the Husky memorial.

Marks, Garcia and several friends led the way on off-road motorcycles specially designed for desert riding. Behind, in four-wheel-drive Jeeps and trucks, came the large and extended Tuchscher family.

His widow Olga Krasnoff, 76, rode with her son Billy, 53, and his two adult daughters. Tuchscher’s daughter Rene chased Marks and Garcia on a dirt bike. Her sister Michelle rode behind with friends from San Diego. It took an hour and a half to reach the memorial.

The family gathered in a wide semi-circle around the monument, several of them stunned at the number of other riders honored there.

Marks remembered learning about Tuchscher, the father-in-law he never met.

“I always felt like Bill was with me, when I was riding,” Marks said. “Then, when I found this place, I told Michelle, ‘I want to do something for your dad here.’”

He asked Tuchscher’s granddaughters to pull away the tarp. Olga gasped and put her hand over her mouth, then said to Garcia, “Te lucistes! You did it!”

The angel-winged motorcycle bore a metal number plate, inscribed with part of a poem often attributed to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson but actually written by American essayist Bessie Anderson Stanley.

“Lived well, laughed often and loved much,” the words read. “William Cory Tuchscher, June 26, 1936 — May 22, 1977.”

“That’s the truth,” Olga said. “He lived well, he laughed often and he loved everybody.”

The children spoke. Billy, who was 14 when his father died, said, “The biggest thing he left me with was to value experiences — like this one.”

Michelle, who had handed out T-shirts bearing the logo of her late father’s motorcycle shop, stepped up next. While crying, she said, “I was only 10, but I remember so much of him. He used to ride me to school on his motorcycle. He’d zip my books into his jacket and put me behind him. I loved it.”

Her older sister Rene, passing around cans of Coors, her father’s preferred brew, said, “My dad was about bringing people together. This cast of characters is something he would be proud of.”

In pairs, or alone, Tuchscher’s family members stood in front of the monument and had their pictures taken.

Olga hugged Garcia, and thanked him again for his elegant work, and for spelling her husband’s last name correctly.

A few stray bikers, who had ridden in on their own Husky pilgrimage, asked about the fallen man, and told stories about riding friends who’d passed away. Billy gave them beers, and together they toasted Tuchscher’s angel wings.

Originally published at www.latimes.com on July 29, 2016.

Deep in the Mojave Desert, a secret memorial to fallen riders was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gillian Spence plunges her hand into a shallow tray of 10,000 writhing mealworms. She comes up with a handful of the inch-long, beige-colored grubs, which squirm over and between her fingers.

Most are destined to become bait for fish or food for reptilian pets. But not all of them.

“A lot of orders now are going to restaurants,” she says.

Spence’s Compton company, Rainbow Mealworms, supplies the mealworms and their larger, feistier cousins, called superworms, to a number of edible-insect businesses across the country. One, called Hotlix, puts them inside lollipops.

Mealworms and superworms aren’t actually worms at all — they’re the larval forms of two species of darkling beetles. They’re also two of the roughly 1,900 insect species that are good for people to eat, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Two billion people around the world consider insects a dietary staple, but they’ve been in the American food supply for just a few years.

Mealworms and superworms are rich in protein, amino acids and vitamins and minerals like potassium and iron. Plus, they have less fat and cholesterol than beef.

These and other insects are also considered an environmentally friendly source of protein because they can be raised on a fraction of the land and water required for traditional livestock, like cattle.

That’s clear at Rainbow Mealworms. At its complex of small houses, millions of beetles — in all life stages from larvae to adults — live in trays stacked on 8-foot-tall racks that look like they belong in a bakery. Each tray teems with thousands of insects nestled in a bed of whole wheat bran, which they eat, and fresh baby carrots, which they nibble on for water.

Their flavor, when toasted, is often described as being nutty and crispy, akin to roasted pecans or fried pork rinds. And despite the obvious “yuck” factor, the demand to eat them is growing.

“I probably get an email a day asking about it,” Spence said.

Although 2 billion people around the world consider insects a dietary staple, they’ve been in the American food supply for just a few years.

It started in earnest with Chapul, an energy bar company that makes its product with cricket powder. In 2011, Pat Crowley, one of the company’s founders, had finished his training in hydrology and was working on long-term water planning for the Western U.S. The forecast didn’t look good to him.

With so much of the region’s water going to agriculture, it was clear to Crowley: “We need some large-scale changes to our food supply if we want to have enough water in the future.”

When he heard a TED talk about the benefits of edible insects, he latched on to it as a possible solution. The health and environmental benefits were clear.

But Crowley didn’t think mainstream Americans were ready to eat cricket legs or wings. So he toasted the critters and ground them up, mixing the resulting powder with fruit, nuts and chocolate into a familiar energy bar. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the first batch of Chapul bars hit the market in 2012.

“No one was doing anything like it,” he said. “It was definitely blowing people’s minds.”

He received a measure of validation the following year when the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a hefty report [pdf] that concluded: “The consumption of insects … contributes positively to the environment and to health and livelihoods.”

Compared with cattle, cultivated insects emit far fewer greenhouse gases, require less water, can be grown in a smaller space, can eat foods like vegetable scraps that would otherwise be considered waste, and can grow more protein from less feed, according to the report. For instance, growing mealworms for food requires about one-tenth as much space as raising an equivalent amount of beef protein, the report says.

After the publication, a handful of other businesses sprung up to sell ground crickets in familiar foods like chips and cookies.

Even U.S. government agencies got interested. Since 2013, the Department of Agriculture has invested $550,000 in research projects that aim to develop a shelf-stable insect protein powder. The resulting cricket powder, made from a pasteurized, dehydrated slurry of frozen insects, is now widely used in edible bug snacks.

But as the industry grows, questions arise.

How environmentally friendly are edible insects, really?

A study published in 2015 in the scientific journal PLOS One found that crickets raised on poultry feed required nearly as much food as conventionally raised chickens per unit of protein produced. If crickets aren’t able to convert feed into protein more efficiently than chickens, they really aren’t that much more sustainable, the researchers concluded.

But chickens have been bred for decades to grow big on as little food as possible, said study leader Mark Lundy, an agronomist at the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. A similar program to breed edible insects that thrive on food scraps and other waste products could provide the biggest opportunities for sustainability gains, he said.

And compared with cows, crickets are way more efficient eaters. Feedlot cattle require at least 6 pounds of food to put on 1 pound of weight, and only about half of that weight is actual meat, said Dan Shike, an animal sciences researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In contrast, crickets in the 2015 PLOS One study required about 2 pounds of food to put on 1 pound of weight collectively, and the whole insect is edible.

Insects also beat traditional livestock in other measures of sustainability.

Another PLOS One study from 2012 found that the greenhouse gas emissions that result from raising mealworms were up to four times lower than those created in the production of milk, pork or chicken, and up to 12 times lower than the emissions from raising beef.

In general, insect farming is a meticulously clean practice.

Edible insects are quite sensitive to chemicals, so they can’t be exposed to artificial food additives. Spence, at Rainbow Mealworms, says she can’t even put flea collars on her cats because any trace of pesticide could wipe out her stock.

But there aren’t any specific insect-farming rules that U.S. producers must follow, said Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

“There are some regulations that are needed,” he said.

For now, edible insects fall under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration, which says insects destined for human consumption must be grown and processed according to the same standards as other foods. FDA spokeswoman Lauren Sucher says food manufacturers are responsible for making that happen.

Spence got an FDA-approved nutritional label in July, clearing the way for her to officially advertise her mealworms as people food and sell them directly to consumers. It also means her customers can feel assured that the wriggly ingredients are grown according to federal food production standards.

The bugs arrive from Rainbow Mealworms in 20 cardboard boxes: 40,000 mealworms and 40,000 superworms, live and packaged in clean, unbleached muslin cloth.

Monica Martinez unwraps the packages and carefully rinses the wriggling grubs, checking them over to make sure they’re all healthy. Then she puts the insects in the fridge to cool off. Once they’re lethargic, she pops them on a baking tray and slides them into the oven to roast. No extra oil needed.

Martinez owns Don Bugito, a San Francisco-based eatery that aims to revive the ancient Mexican culinary tradition of eating insects. She caramelizes the mealworms in toffee, coats them in chocolate for a sweet treat, and dips the superworms into a chile-lime seasoning to make spicy snacks.

“They have more flavor than crickets,” Martinez said.

Don Bugito’s snacks are a consistent bestseller at a kiosk in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, a foodie mecca. One of the main selling points is that they are made with a sustainable protein source.

A lot of people say the first bite is the hardest.

“It’s a little tricky to convince people to taste them,” Martinez said. “But people respond really amazingly once they try it.”

Now Martinez is working on a new, more appetizing name for her main ingredient.

So is Eli Cadesky, founder of a new company called C-fu Foods that isolates mealworm proteins to make a tofu-like substance. He’s thinking of rebranding mealworms as “baby beetles,” akin to other trendy foods like “baby carrots” or “baby beets.”

“Worm,” he said, “is the word that turns everybody off.”

This article was written by Sasha Harris-Lovett and previously posted on latimes.com.

For more great reads and in-depth news coverage of space exploration, medical science, climate change, technological breakthroughs and more, check out the Science section on the Los Angeles Times.

This farm in Compton wants you to eat bugs was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Should black people boycott the presidential elections?

On Jan. 13, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, delivered a boastful State of the Union rooted in American exceptionalism, the importance of political cooperation and predictably, what we have, will, and can do to our enemies with our big American guns. Eight days earlier, Obama had held a press conference during which he cried over the murders of 30 American children and countless others victims of citizens wielding small American guns.

I watched both political spectacles, knowing that while the violent, often racist American weight on President’s Obama’s back has been so terrifyingly heavy, the violent, exceptional American weight that he and all American presidents must abusively wield is heavier.

In “Democracy in Black,” one of the most imaginative, daring books of the 21st century, author Eddie S. Glaude Jr. effectively argues that this weight — rooted in American exceptionalism — impedes a national reckoning of how the racial “value gap” in our nation sanctions black Americans terror while providing systemic unearned value to white Americans.

The book asks us to reconsider not simply what presidential tears for systemic violence initiated and condoned by our nation might look like, but what can a revolution fueled by politically active black Americans wholly disinterested in presidential tears, speeches or “post-racial” policy actually accomplish. In this way, the book is not just post-Obama; it is post-presidential.

Early in the book, Glaude anticipates the question of why might we need a revolution of the imagination now, in the last year of our first black president’s term. It makes sense that a book demanding more courage, more imagination and more impactful organizing starts with young people in Ferguson, Mo., who are already doing the work. The book begins with Glaude sitting down with Alexis Templeton, Brittany Ferrell and Ashley Yates, three dynamic grass-roots activists and cofounders of Millennial Activists United. Glaude astutely calls these young black women and their generation of young black activists “unprecedented.” He pivots from their model of impactful imaginative courageous to a terrifying account of where we are in 2016.

We are, Glaude argues, in the midst of “The Great Black Depression” — not simply a financial crisis.

For the first time in recorded American history there are more poor black children than there are poor white children even though there are three times more white children than black children in the nation. Thirty-eight percent of black children live in poverty, yet these black children, and the conditions in which these black children live, were not valued enough to be talked about in either Obama’s State of the Union speech or the Republican debate the next day.

While Obama is a consistent culprit in “Democracy in Black,” Glaude eviscerates the abusive power of Bill O’Reilly, Republicans, Ben Stein and “white folks” generally while asking and really answering the most revealing of all 21st century American questions: “Are we a nation of monsters?”

“We laud our democratic virtues to others and represent ourselves to the world as a place of freedom and equality… all while our way of life makes possible choices that reproduce so much evil, and we don’t see it happening — or worse, we don’t want to know about it.” — Eddie Glaude, in “Democracy in Black”

In his most tightly argued chapter, Glaude holds Obama (a “post-black liberal”), Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (“traditional black liberals”) partly responsible for black Americans’ political and economic disappearance. The black political classes have been “accomplices in the demise of black America,” he argues. “Our entrée into American society is not only contingent on the eradication of racism, but also on the disappearance of black people altogether,” Glaude writes. “Black people must lose their blackness if America is to be transformed. But — of course — white people get to stay white.”

DON’T VOTE FOR PRESIDENT: THE “BLANK OUT CAMPAIGN”

The book’s most controversial idea is Glaude’s call for a “blank-out campaign,” where he argues that black voters should participate in showing up to polls on Nov. 2 in the same record numbers we showed up in the Obama elections and cast votes for local races but refuse to cast a vote for president.

Far from politically or intellectually naive, Glaude anticipates criticism from the black political class that such a blank-out campaign “amounts to no more than electoral nihilism.” Glaude maintains that this critique is a scare tactic designed to cloud our imagination. “An electoral blank-out undermines, at least for an election cycle, the assumption that black voters are captured and silent” while disrupting business as usual for a Democratic party content with being the lesser of two evils and “the racial advocacy hustle of a black political class leveraging its ability to deliver black voters for crumbs and/or selfish gain.”

Glaude convincingly asserts that a blank-out, particularly within a system where both parties have devalued the lives of black voters, might reboot politics, embolden already existing grass roots organizing, and create more webs of resistance and possibility.

WHAT ARE WE WILLING TO RISK?

But because every chapter in “Democracy in Black” is a revelation, and every paragraph a ripe possibility, I wish Glaude, a professor at Princeton, would have used part of his book to contend with what it means for one with more access to more second chances than most black Americans to ask other black Americans to forego voting for “a lesser of two evils” presidential candidate who might use their executive power to extend unemployment benefits, appoint the federal judges who might restore voting rights, or strengthen existing laws that make it harder for employers to discriminate against folks because of their race, gender and sexual orientation. While “Democracy in Black” is in many ways wholly persuasive as an effortless balance of memoir, journalism and analysis, it’s also conveniently clean in places where political, communal and personal messiness might advance and complicate Glaude’s calls to action.

I left “Democracy in Black” wondering what might it mean for a “revolution of value” if black professors — including myself — committed to valuing the black communities that made us, gave up jobs at white, so-called elite, neo-liberal private institutions (many of which are responsible for educating the “monsters” who eventually becomes president, vice president, speaker of the House), and actually committed to educating, living and learning at black colleges, universities, junior colleges and high schools if they would have us? Why is that a choice Glaude and so many of us committed to a “revolution of value” have yet to make?

I am not at all arguing that Glaude should give up anything. But a text that tells us, “There are those among us willing to turn their backs on democracy to safeguard their privilege” and “No one can be comfortable” must, at some point, courageously reckon with the author’s relationships to privilege, poverty, familial responsibility, and comfort.

The risks of a chapter like this are great. But risk, Glaude argues, we must. In such a chapter, Glaude might have forced the reader to really grapple with the imaginative, economic and psychological consequences of black American intergenerational poverty while giving real legs, heart and hope to this revolution of value.

Yet even without such considerations, Glaude has given us a book for the ages and a reminder, as he writes, that black Americans have changed the course of this nation before, and we must, with courage, imagination and new strategies, change this nation again.

Laymon is professor of English at Vassar College and the author of “A Fat Black Memoir” coming in fall 2016 from Scribner. For more great book reviews, news, interviews and features, check out the Books section on LA Times.

Should black people boycott the 2016 elections? was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is morning and young men sit slumped in front of the general store, looking slightly dazed. Tall sunflowers in a field seem to sway to music blasting from a huge, ancient speaker. One man is dancing. Business is slow.

A brown cow was stolen this morning from Gwakiongo.

A man fixes a balcony in front of a small shop, hammering nails noisily into timber. A woman chases her cows into the red dust road. A mother rakes rubbish into a heap to burn.

A child recovered aged 5 yr named Wangui.

A man passes on a bicycle, the tires swishing in the dust. Two boys standing on a cart pulled by three donkeys round the corner of a dirt track, and the driver’s tinny cellphone blares out, garish against the gentler sounds of twittering birds.

Parent reunited with the child Wangui.

In this sleepy village in central Kenya, sheep wander off, bicycles get stolen, houses burn down, thieves come in the night. And there’s always a fundraiser to pay for someone’s hospital bill. (And sometimes their burial.)

Everyone has a cheap, made-in-China cellphone, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. Chief Francis Kariuki, the head of the Lanet-Umoja community, makes sure of that with a nonstop Twitter feed on the events of the day.

A child in Umoja had fallen into an open hole but was rescued.

Thanks to the chief, everyone in Lanet-Umoja knows about Twitter. They pronounce it “Too-weeter,” and to them, it’s the chief’s personal messaging system, delivered right to their phones, many times a day.

Anyone with an open hole to make sure is covered, if anything the owner will be held responsible.

In the West, tweeting politicians and public officials are banal, tolerated by followers and watched hawkishly by gaffe-trawling opponents. But Kariuki — @Chiefkariuki — has become celebrated in Kenya as the “tweeting chief,” sending out a steady stream of 140-character (or fewer) missives.

All the village news, good and bad, trickles across his Twitter feed. He passes on messages from distressed villagers and telegraphs their calls for help.

“My boy Joe gave a strange boy his bike and he ran away with it…”

Kariuki’s office is built of stone and bears the sign: “Office of the President Chief’s Office.” There’s a waiting room with seven long benches arrayed like pews in a church. It’s a busy day for the chief. There are two burials, a ceremony handing out free water filters to the community, people arriving to visit a clinic offering free medical care.

Telephone lost in the morning by Mother Kairu is found. Thank you…

It’s difficult to imagine anyone with shinier black patent leather shoes than Kariuki, who was appointed by the government as chief of this 29,000-member community five years ago. The former school principal sits ramrod stiff at his small wooden desk, wearing his uniform beige trousers and sweater with epaulets bearing the words Kenya Administration, and his large Samsung watch on his wrist.

On the desk is a black beret and his scepter, his symbol of state power: a black leather baton with a gleaming silver top bearing the Kenyan coat of arms. Oh, and his smartphone — the latest-model Samsung. (He also keeps a cheap Chinese cellphone in case the Samsung runs low on battery.)

Amid the minutiae of village life, he inserts hearty daily homilies, morsels of encouragement and exhortations to keep religious faith.

Too often, we get frustrated by the difficulties. But you have to realize, you can’t have a harvest without a few weeds.

And, at times, homespun advice.

If an animal can swallow you, don’t try to kiss it.

Kariuki endeavors to live a simple, humble life, but can’t disguise his enthusiasm for his smartphone. He sighs with pleasure, remembering the first cellphone he ever got, a Siemens, back in 1999, as a schoolteacher. He was one of the first people in the community to own one, and even though it was “a small, funny phone” that didn’t even send text messages, people were in awe.

“It was like a luxury. Whenever I used it, people would surround me to see how it worked. Even the other teachers didn’t know how it worked,” he says.

“Generally, I have a passion for technology. Whenever new technology comes along, I want to be the first to get it and find out how it works. I used to get my father’s radio and try to look inside it, or create my own radio.”

John Njoroge age 5 years found Kiondo area. Now staying with Ann Wangari, a maize roaster at Kiondo area.

It wasn’t so much cellphones that he saw as revolutionary, but the capacity, beginning in about 2000, to send text messages, a system that helped Africans stay in touch.

The chief joined Twitter in 2011 and hasn’t looked back. He tweets day and night.

A few months ago, he got word that old Mrs. Gicharu’s house was alight, the flames shooting into the air. The chief’s Twitter message went out and people ran to help. But the building burned swiftly. The house, and everything in it, was lost.

So he tweeted about the fundraiser to help her rebuild.

“I’m only doing my work,” he says. “They depend on me for almost everything.”

I have lost a sheep and lamb near the transformer. Mama Junior. Plis help in tweeting. Thankyou.

Occasionally, he takes on giants that are far beyond the reach of villagers, like the big cellphone companies or the state electricity provider.

Kenya Power we have no power since morning at Lanet-Umoja area. Kindly do something.

Kariuki denies an interest in politics, despite the national publicity his tweeting has gained him.

But at times, his handsome face thoughtful, he sounds as smooth as the silkiest politician.

“I try to fight conflict with my work,” he says. “Mine is to focus on my people. My main mandate is to keep the people safe so they can do their business and go to school and their environment is clean.”

He says he has enemies and critics, though he’s vague about who they are: “Of course we have some haters. There are some people who are beneficiaries of crime. Even some police thought I was taking their job.”

But the tweets have made him extremely popular with locals.

“I lost my cow two months ago and it was found,” says Jane Owori, 74. “It’s helping us, because he informs us what is happening.”

“I know many people who have lost things and got them back,” says another villager, Jane Kerubo, 49. “Now everyone has a phone and sometimes we lose a phone, and with the Twitter these phones are always found, even if it is very far away, because once he sends out a message, people respond. Nothing has been lost since that Twitter.

“Even the petty criminals run away because they have phones and they’re following him.”

Lately, the most social-media savvy of Kenya’s chiefs has been training other chiefs in the art. Or trying to.

“They may not be at my level,” he says. “But they’re trying very hard.”

By Robyn Dixon // Originally posted on latimes.com

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A Kenyan chief’s Twitter feed helps round up stolen cows and lost phones was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Dexter Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Is your school a safe place for people like you?

That may be a hard question to answer, especially if you’re a minority. Your life may not be in danger, but there may be signs that your wellbeing is not as important as that of others.

Last week, I posted a question on LATimes.com, asking students about microaggressions — slights that may not even be intentional, but make you feel unwelcome, or unsafe.

I got a lot of different responses.

Here’s one story from a student that was made to feel like she doesn’t belong on campus:

A girl made a comment to me about how “people like me” only get in to [our college] because of the color of our skin and how we take all of the financial aid and she is left paying full tuition. However, what she didn’t know was that I am on academic scholarship and worked very hard throughout high school so that I could receive a scholarship.

Another from a student who is worried about freedom of speech:

I feel as though my and every student’s academic freedom is being threatened. As a white student from the Valley, I represent everything that is wrong with the world; Told to check my privilege, or that my experiences, opinions or positions are only offensive and “hurtful,” but that they have no place in higher education. […] It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s freedom to engage in academic discourse is a thing of the past.

And one from a student that says that microaggressions don’t stop when class is over:

I am a 21-year-old woman of East Asian descent. During my freshman year in college, a young man approached me at a party and asked me if it was true that Asian women had horizontal vaginas. I was so caught off guard and appalled that I walked away without responding.

But everyone’s experience is different.

So, I thought we should have a conversation about your campus climate. What has your experience been?

I want to hear your story.

Post a Response below, and use the SafeOnCampus tag. I’ll use the Recommend function to highlight posts that are especially thoughtful, and may contact individual writers to ask if they’d like their work featured back on latimes.com.

Do you feel safe on campus? was originally published in Los Angeles Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.