My own awareness of racism is a long discovery. Reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower during the beginning of BlackLivesMatter and Eric Garner’s “I can’t breathe” murder. In high school, I read Malcome X and Eldrige Cleaver, not long after I became a student-teacher in Hastings, Michigan. I took my class on a scheduled field trip to the police station where on the back wall of the lobby was Eldrige Cleaver’s picture on a wanted poster! Aware of racism. In the Parable of the Sower, I was not in the “river of humanity” as she so wonderfully / horribly describes; I lived in the last houses to lose their lights, surrounded by well-armed paramilitary. The white privileged side of town. I don’t join the river until I am so overwhelmed by the world that I decided to go out in flames. Butler does give me Harry Baiter to associate with but I am not even close to the main character to feel her world, I can only read and learn. Now I can see the Jim Crow statues as the billboard of voter suppression, police killings, and cowardly lynching. I cannot look away.
Image attribution: “DUB REVOLUTIONARIES” by Dubdem • Música • Design • Sound System is licensed under CC BY 2.0
