~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.”
So said James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, a long essay published in 1962. He was explaining what it means to be black in America.
This is what the current protest marches, new songs, trenchant signs are still about – trying to explain what it means to be a person of color in the U.S. It is a daily grind to be not white in America.
If you’re not black, you probably don’t know. And if you are white and you do know, you too carry a weight. White privilege is a dawning awareness, a gradual self-education. And it’s not easy to swallow, once you realize how callow we have been.
