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I should be a good ally.
My favorite professor at my small, lily-white liberal arts college was Prof. Jim Miller, head of African-American studies. He introduced me to Ralph Ellison and W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. I married a Black woman and we have 2 children. I worry about them every day. I’m glad we live in the city and they don’t ever have to drive while Black. Of course, there are lots of other things you can’t do while Black.
So I should have the knowledge and motivation to get in the fight. To speak up. But I just don’t have even a fraction of the strength needed for this struggle, strength that is required of the average American Black person to get through a day, a month, a year, a life.
I mean well. But I get too angry and walk away. I have this cousin (he calls himself a “Washington insider —but he’s just a salesman with customers in DC) who told me that he voted for Clinton before trying to talk me down from my rage at Trump. Then he harrumphed that “we know Obama was incompetent, let’s wait to see if Trump is incompetent.”
I don’t know any such thing about Obama, and you just have to look at a US-vs-the-world coronavirus graph to get a quick sense of Trump’s incompetence. I started a Facebook debate on this topic with my cousin. I compared Trump’s Department of Energy…