Lesson Time

And this from Tim Wise via HuffPo:

You remember, forever and forever, that moment when you first discover the cruelties and injustices of the world, and having been ill-prepared for them, your heart breaks open.

I mean really discover them, and for yourself; not because someone else told you to see the elephant standing, gigantic and unrelenting in the middle of your room, but because yousaw him, and now you know he's there, and will never go away until you attack him, and with a vengeance.

Saturday night, and I am writing it down so that I will not forget -- because I already know she will not -- my oldest daughter, who attained the age of 12 only eleven days ago, became an American. Not in the legal sense. She was already that, born here, and -- as a white child in a nation set up for people just like her -- fully entitled to all the rights and privileges thereof, without much question or drama. But now she is American in the fullest and most horrible sense of that word, by which I mean she has been truly introduced to the workings of the system of which she is both a part, and, at the same time, merely an inheritor. A system that fails -- with a near-unanimity almost incomprehensible to behold -- to render justice to black peoples, the family of Trayvon Martin being only the latest battered by the machinations of American justice, but with all certainty not the last.

And so begins the task.  It's like we have to start all over - or at least we have to back up to about 1985 and go over the whole thing again.

What makes this really hard for me is the (by now) standard pop tune coming from "the right", which goes something like this:  "We have a black guy in the White House, and we have a black guy sittin' on SCOTUS, and a black guy as AG, and black folk all over the damn place - that has to mean that we really are in Post-Racial Happy-Time, which means I'm free to turn loose all this pent up bigotry that's been festering in my soul for 30 years while I pretended not to be the complete asshole I always knew it'd be OK to revert to being once we got past all this racism talk."

Fuck me now, Jesus.