Crash

We’ve reached a tough subject. Race. Is there anything that we as a society find more difficult to discuss? Or even understand?

I promise we’ll get back to Rush Limbaugh. He’s important to this discussion. But he isn’t all that important—not enough to disrespect the gravity of what is at stake here. Put simply, we can’t afford to make pronouncements about Rush and race until we have leeched out the ideologically-driven certainties and found a way to step back and think about race and racism with full acceptance of our shared humanity.

The number of people who so far “like” this page is as yet just slightly north of a hundred, but they hold a variety of opinions about politics and a variety of ways to conceptualize race and racism, and if I cannot speak effectively to both groups then I will have failed.

Where to begin? I can think of lots of people and places, and I will tell you about some of them, because if you can’t speak in your own voice and from your own experience about this stuff—if you deal in dogma—then the conversation is over before it begins.

So let me start by offering a single sentence, pronounced by James Baldwin, the American novelist, essayist, playwright and activist.

“As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

Don’t leap to conclusions about what that means. Don’t try to understand it too quickly. In fact, for the time being don’t try to understand it cognitively at all. Treat it as sort of a Zen koan. And grant me your patience as I try to share with you the best I have to offer on this fraught, tragic, infuriating, complex, and difficult, desperately important subject.

Note to friends reading this post by way of my having shared it to my personal page. Henceforth I will not be sharing very much. If you want to hear what I have to say, you know where to find me.