America is a crime scene, a promise, and a living possibility. It is also a long conversation, an extended argument about what human beings owe each another. If we love (or want to love) America, we have to look hard and humbly at the data of where we are lest the argument prove to have been more like a long, catastrophic con. Our history, as James Baldwin teaches us, can’t be bracketed away any more than breathing can be put to the side of speech. We live in and by the fact of what happened: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.” The work of remembering is the work of awakening to our own lives, our own context. To meaningfully
Beautifully written, thank you!