Author Archives: Morkeh Blay-Tofey

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard the case of Abigail Fisher, a 22-year-old woman, who believes she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin on the basis that she was discriminated against because she was white. I cannot help but feel a multitude of emotions toward this specific case and college admissions »

Politics is a game. That’s understandable: Opposing parties must try to convince us that their candidate is best — and that other candidate is the worst menace to society since some bad event a long time ago that no one actually remembers. It’s ridiculous what our political sphere has become. Candidates produce so many words »

There comes a time every few years when teachers’ unions and school districts perform an elaborate waltz for favorable contract terms. We are witnessing this in Chicago — with the fates of thousands of students in the balance. Issues of teacher-school district relations are personal for me, as they should be for the roughly 57 »

A lot of noise always surrounds controversial events such as the death of Trayvon Martin and what allegedly happened on the fateful night he was shot. Within weeks, media personalities had begun spouting their opinions based on what they thought happened, whether it was calling for the head of shooter George Zimmerman or claiming that »

“Hey, are you waiting for the CT Limo?” I asked the person next to me as I just put down my overstuffed suitcase and backpack in the waiting area of Bradley International Airport. I followed the signs that most people in my situation would use to profile a potential Yalie. Young: check. Suitcase stuffed to »

Since 1981, AIDS has caused some of the most heart-wrenching moments for our society. Unlike some diseases that snatch life in an instant, AIDS causes our loved ones’ bodies to deteriorate slowly, finally reducing them to memories. Elements of bigotry, blame and ostracism plagued the disease and people living with it from the beginning, but »

Ever since September, when Herman Cain said African-Americans were “brainwashed” not to consider conservative views, I have thought seriously about my own views and biases as an African-American man in college and how they have evolved up to this point in my life. Cain is right — not necessarily about policy, but about the misinformation »

“HIV-positive. It should have been a death sentence for her,” a good friend of mine recalled during lunch on a recent medical trip abroad to South Africa. Hearing those words during a prenatal appointment, the young mother-to-be felt as if her world had come to a sudden stop. She found this news particularly hard because »

Troy Davis is dead. Gone from the Earth forever for the alleged murder of police officer Mark MacPhail in a Savannah, Ga., parking lot, Aug. 19, 1989. In a death nearly 22 years in the making, many questions remain: Was he innocent? Was he culpable for the crime? Nobody knows. However, one thing we do »