Z. Bryant

The creative community loves to hold up ‘good design’ as a sort of cardinal virtue. An incoming tide that lifts all the boats. Increasingly though, it can seem like the adjective has become a forgone conclusion; as if design is, by its very nature, ‘good.’

It may be time to move past simplistic notions of good design and begin talking about something like moral design.

Stop cultivating deep friendships with single women if you’re not prepared to (quickly) grow that relationship as your sole jam. This will make you feel lonely. This will leave an empty place in your life. That’s by design—deal with it.

Like you, I have an imagination for Black families in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties that includes agency, equity and authority. Here, I’m using ‘authority’ to mean something like ‘the freedom to write one’s own story without coercion or interference.’ Something akin to liberty.

My own few and mostly benign encounters with police have left me fearful. By and large, they do not appear to be for me. To the extent that this is an issue of poor training, bad policy and/or the violence endemic to men’s hearts, I am a very poor source of advice. But, to the extent that this is a design problem—I have a few thoughts.

I ignorantly assumed that white has its origins in preserving and advancing the interests of light-skinned people. Perhaps the entrenched networks established by and for the Anglo-Saxon colonists sent over from England. But this origin story is not a full accounting. It would be bad enough if white were rooted in a racial purity or a supremacist movement, but the truth is even more repulsive.