Quietly has enjoyed some thoughtful, enlightening, and engaging pieces this year, and I thought it was past time to thank everyone who has written in and everyone who has read the column. As we reach the last few weeks of this year, it’s about time to examine the promise I made at the beginning: that this would be your column. Well, it still is, and it can be even more so.

I have tried to make this a kind of alternative space-whereas the rest of The Mac Weekly provides you with quality news and opinion and follows a tradition of journalistic writing, and it doesn’t matter what color you are to write there, Quietly is a place where being a person of color deliberately, consciously matters. It’s also a space where, honestly, I don’t think about the quality of the writing compared to the rest of the paper-what you have to say is great, even better than most of the news you read, even if your professors, counselors, peers don’t know it, if you write it the way you think is most appropriate for what you have to say. Quietly reaches everyone, and that gives us all an opportunity to flout conventions and make our own standards for at least a few hundred words a week. It’s very important though, that we as people of color recognize the opportunity we have in a space like this to reach each other as well. That said, I wanted to make a special statement-and everyone is special-to reach out to prospective writers. Being a person of color is very complicated, but it can be explained very simply around the world: it means you’re not white. Color doesn’t care where you come from, what languages you speak, how much money you have, what your gender or sexual identity is or what people think it is, or who your parents are. Neither does racism. This is why it continues to be important for us as people of color, worldwide, to claim and in some cases reclaim space in order to make the world more fair and more just along all those lines-take your space as a person of color to let people know there’s more to you than that. We all come from somewhere, but by no means the same place, and we shouldn’t let racism cause us to end up at the same place. You should feel free to write in Quietly because you are a person of color, and you should feel free to let it take you where you want to go, or tell other people where they can go. There are few opportuinities like that in the printed world.

This is all getting to one point: it’s important that we find another editor for next year. At the end of last year, the previous editor of Quietly asked me if I wanted to take over and I said yes. I think she made a good decision based on having known me personally and through my writing, and I also feel that one year is probably enough of my editorial choices. We could all learn by having someone else encourage people to write and decide what gets printed, and I might not know the best person out there to make those decisions personally. So if you’re out there, whoever you are and wherever you come from, write to me and let me know what you want to see. It’s your column.