1/22/21

A squabble has broken out somewhere in this group, in this strange place called FaceBook...

Someone believed that people who come to read here, and to write here, should feel as she does, that people should celebrate the new president and refrain from criticism. Others have pointed out that that voice comes from the luxury of privilege.

I speak from privilege. White privilege. I say this to acknowledge who I am, and to let everyone know that I am aware of it. I have become involved in the cause of mainly people of color, who are subjugated and brutally mistreated, at the border, in the prison camps, on boxcars in the sky, and in every place in this country, and in many places in the world. The way I got so involved is by doing a thing we came to call witnessing.

Because for me, and for many others, it is easy to look away, or to let our eyes blur with our desire for things to be essentially good, and to nourish ourselves with the kind of hope that even the worst of abuses are somehow on a long bending arc toward justice. I don’t know whether we are on that arc or not, to be frank. But I know this: once I started looking, I found that what I saw could not easily be unseen, and what I saw did not nourish optimism. Rather, it made it hard not to look harder, and it made me raise my voice.

I don’t begrudge those who are enjoying a sense of relief that there’s a new sheriff in town. Things may get better than they are now. But we have a long way to go for all better. People who have waited for years, and generations, for the kind of privilege I have, may not, you might suspect, be as ready to toot their horns and wave their flags.

And those of us who have taken on the humble job of watching, of witnessing, this is what we see: mass expulsions at the border, people camped in the cold on the banks of the Río Bravo, and columns of the poor and oppressed beaten gassed and dispersed on their way to the north, done at the behest of the privileged of our own country. And messages to them that tell them they should wait.

I challenge everyone to look into the faces of the victims of injustice and tell us that it’s not the time for our tears.