quote of the month...

I just finished a wonderful book I’m ashamed I haven’t read sooner. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” is his 1945 autobiography of growing up in a spiritually abusive home in a racially abusive south trying to venture to a politically abusive Chicago. Please read this book. My favorite quote or thought was on page 272-273.

“for the anti-negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part—though a symbolically significant one—of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of process, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.”

Haunting words. And in 60+ years I realize we have moved forward in ways my 25 year old life cannot remember or understand, but I also know we have a long way to go. Hearing the terms and catch-phrases of our coming election while watching the world react to us as we seek to spread our “rightness” of living shows that we still “salve our conscience with self draped cloak(s) or righteousness…”

And like Wright, I notice too often that I have the same faults at the core of my character.