I had a moment this morning when I found myself standing in my kitchen, rooted to one spot, my fists tightening almost painfully, my eyes burning with incipient tears, as I precipitously recalled something Id heard on the news about #MichaelBrown: Michael was meant to be heading off to his freshman year of college this coming Monday. . . I have very vivid memories of starting college -- my new friends, my intellectual excitement, and the expansive vista of my future spread out afore me, and, too, alas an alackkkady, the white students who yelled NIGGER! at me through their car windows and laughed as they sped by me while I walked from campus into town. (Yes, my first bloody day, and, too -- not at all ironic to me -- on my last day of college, like bookends of bigotry. I wondered if I was some sort of lodestone for racially invidious putzes.) Being called NIGGER! by some foolish white schoolmates too craven to face me, notwithstanding, my college experience was, for the largest part, a privilege Id not trade. Michael Brown deserved to go to college (sans, of course, being called NIGGER!), he deserves to still be alive. . . I do not imagine I can adequately conceive of what his parents are feeling. This fury -- it ebbs and flows, sometimes subsuming me. . . It is challenging even to type these few paragraphs, as I keep making typos through this sheen of tears. Again, I aptly quote: . . . American society creates around all youth (as every society does) a continual pressure of suggestion to try to live up to the accepted ideals of the country—such ordinary, traditional, taken-for-granted American ideals as to fight injustice fearlessly, to cringe to no man; to choose one’s own life work; to resist with stout-hearted self-respect affronts to decent human dignity, whether ones own or others’; to drive ahead toward honestly earned success, all sails spread to the old American wind blowing from the Declaration of Independence. But our society puts negro youth in the place of the animal in the psychological laboratory in which a neurosis is to be caused, by making it impossible for him to live up to those never-to-be-questioned national ideals, as other young Americans do. -from Dr. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Introduction to NATIVE SON (1st edition) by Richard Wright (January, 1940) #WelcomeAfter
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 20:39:56 +0000
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