© Marcus Ramberg
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.Black Boy traces Wright's development from a troubled youth who encountered bigotry daily in the Jim Crow-era American South to a self-educated man whose reading shaped his understanding of society. I think about Wright's words often, these and others. Especially now, as cries from black men and women demanding agency reverberate across the nation and the world. It feels like the summer of our discontent is only just beginning.
Comment: Bigotry of the Jim Crow-era is not the bigotry of today. Today, just as then, there is segregation and bigotry. However, this time around the actors have switched and it's the minorities demanding they be separated from the evil white people because of how racist they are. My, oh my, how things change yet still remain the same.
Books, when people come to them early enough or at the right time, have the power to be transformative. And for a lot of readers, this is the right time — witness the many anti-racist book lists circulating on social media. We must recognize the inherent value that good literature has, and the ability of language to strike an emotional chord. But someone, at some point, has to get down to the business of reading — as Lauren Michele Jackson writes at Vulture. Simply handing someone a book cannot automatically make them care. This is something I remind myself whenever anti-racist lists start to make the rounds online.
Comment: One can scream, burn buildings, and shame people for not getting on their knees, but it's impossible to force everyone to change their hearts and minds.
Comment: These ladies have the right response to this author's pathological thinking: