White Antiracist Allies in Training: My Social Justice Workshop Troubles (and Yours) by: adam gussow
If we–and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like
lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others–do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
--James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I’ve waited almost two decades to tell this story. I’m not particularly eager to tell it—my wife and I have
been happily married for seventeen years; our biracial son, who just turned fifteen, is tall, strong, and beautiful—and several good friends, concerned about the unforgiving tenor of our public culture, have counseled me not to. But this isn’t about me. It’s about the country we want our children to inherit. That America--the prophetic America envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr. and kept alive by John Lewis--needs more of us to step forward and say, gently and without rancor, “We can create the beloved community. We can bring a more just and equitable world into being. But the path you have chosen is the wrong one, doomed to divide and dishearten us, and I can’t remain silent any longer.”
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