This month The Urbanite is running an issue on “Race”. I was asked by the editor to write about the phenomenon of “self-segregation”. So rather than pen a piece about black kids deciding to sit all by themselves, I took another approach. I wrote a piece about the desirability of “black spaces”. Spaces black people can effectively “breathe” in. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. But I only had a couple of thousand words to work with. And on top of it I was able to take one of the worst days of 2008 (the first day of the Fall 2008 semester) and use it. Take a look and see what I mean.