TANGLED IN THE STRIPES features an all-black American flag stitched with a line drawing of a black panther and a bear locked in an ambiguous encounter—caught between conflict and intimacy. Inspired by The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2016) and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the piece explores the panther as a symbol of resilience and retaliation—an animal that only strikes when provoked. The bear, omnipresent in my Ohio surroundings, stands as a marker of dominance and power, embodied in the Upper Arlington Golden Bear mascot. But the bear was never mine. It loomed as a reminder that I was a Black Panther in a land of Bears, navigating the quiet tensions of belonging and exclusion.