As I look at the
many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I
wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to
be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature,
good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching
and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an
impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They
ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the
books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many
different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The
hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is
the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I
know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.
My favorite
question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on
this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know
whether someone was black or white?” I
love that I have no answer.
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