Racism

So I do not pity my seven-year-old self for identifying racially as Black. I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by

A world that relies on social inequality to keep its machinery running can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves “gifted.”

The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city

if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?

After all, it is only in anticipation of sorrow that joy seems frivolous. We become so used to bracing for the next devastation, we don’t have time or emotional energy to rejoice. For some of us, this moves us to a permanent seriousness, always on guard against the evils of this world. Some of us even begin to believe we are not worthy of pleasure

And I understand that after white people begin to get it, it’s even more uncomfortable for them to think about how their whiteness has silently aided them in life.

But ever and again, we look toward the east and discover that there is another light which shines even in the darkness, and “the spear of frustration” is transformed “into a shaft of light.”