Civil rights march on Washington, DC police line on August 28, 1963.
We shelter our children by censoring Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, lest they ever encounter offensive language in literature.
But Ferguson still burns.
We tip toe around ideas of race and class, forever tweaking the way we talk about these things as though some sort of semantic twist will be the key to making our problems disappear. It’s as though we believe that if we use language like “person of colour” and “economically disadvantaged” it will somehow make it less true that being a poor, Black man in America means every single odd is stacked against you.
But Ferguson still burns.
If you are a Black man in America, you only have a 54% chance of graduating high school. You have more than a 30% chance of going to jail. And you have the lowest life expectancy in the country.
If you are an unarmed Black man in America, a police officer can shoot you seven times and not even have go to trial.
