Summer Moon of the First Harvests
What a wonder. A black president speaking as a black man about the lived experience of young black men. Trayvon Martin, he said, could have been him 35 years ago. A young black man in hoodie, suspected of, what? WWB? Walking while black. Maybe about to do, something. And something, wrong. Bad. Hearing clicks on car door locks as you walk by. Being followed in stores. Indelible and seemingly inevitable.
Yet, of course, he is not Trayvon. No, he is the president of the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Maybe the most powerful it will ever know. And even he, with all that power at his disposal, literally at his command, can imagine himself into the life of a young man seen, paradoxically, as both powerless and invisible and all too visible and dangerous.
Racism and its even more evil progenitor, slavery, stand out as the original sin, the stain on this city on a hill, this beacon of freedom and hope. We white folk have done this and that, but not too much and now the time of our dominance is passing. This nation will become a colorful quilt with white as one shade among many rather than the shade against which all others stand inferior. May that day come soon.
There are many things I feel privileged to have witnessed. The civil rights movement. The anti-war movement. Feminism and the rise of women. A world in which the whole planet must be taken into account when making decisions. A man walking on the moon. Routine space flight. The discovery of extraterrestrial planets. The discovery of DNA. The global recognition that the people can challenge their government. And win. So many things. These and more.
But, this one, a black president speaking about the lived experience of being a young black man. This one is a miracle.
