Has the past anything to do with us now? Where we are?
You ask ‘where is that question coming from’ and ‘what exactly are you trying to get at?’
Yesterday I talked with my sister about something that happened recently, an accident, in her business. In her account it’s pretty clear that the offending party is absolutely at fault for the accident. Something is owed to the injured party, something that the offender could make right.
If, and now I am stepping into strictly hypothetical land … if nothing is done to right the wrong, how does this non action affect the future? Those times the two meet, attempt to have conversation, relationship, work together, exist together in the same community?
Now we shall leave that hypothetical land I have created out of my sister’s story, and travel to a non hypothetical place called 21st century America.
“Unless one increases their conscious awareness of U.S. racist history and connects the historical dots to the continued, present-day effects of our societal order, one cannot even begin to understand, much less address, the issues of racism in America” so writes Kimberly Norwood of Washington University here in my town. Ms. Norwood, a professor of law and African-American studies shared this with John Eligon writing in this morning’s New York Times about what we can learn from the story of Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam.
The stories help us. The hypothetical and the real. From the past to what’s going on right now. If we remember, if we tell them.
We have to, if we are going to resolve those matters of wrongs done, justice we call this, which the human creature seems to require. It’s connecting those dots.
Intersections 