Let’s Selflessly Build a Better America Together
When My Vanishing Country was released, I never intended for my memoirs to offer evergreen accounts of Black pain and struggle. Yet, here are – bearing the brunt of a global pandemic and coping with the killing of another black American by the police. These recent events have illuminated racial disparities that have plagued our country for generations. So, if the fervent cries and uprisings across cable news come as a shock, you probably haven’t been paying much attention.
To be black in America is to live a life bookended by trauma, yet our experiences are often overlooked and disregarded. But if we want America to be the best version of itself, we must deconstruct the damaging systems of oppression that hold us back. But to heal the old racial wounds that linger, we must first acknowledge that the wounds exist.
Achieving this is a tall task that requires a team effort, so we can no longer afford being selfish with our own struggles.
For example, you will be hard pressed to find a bigger proponent for women’s rights than I. But when I am marching for women’s rights or LGBTQ rights, I give each effort my whole heart. I am fighting for friends who I have yet to meet but deserve a country that values their existence. We must back others with that same energy when it comes to Black liberation.
One day, I want my children–Kai, Stokely, and Sadie–to read My Vanishing Country and perceive it a work of fiction, knowing wholeheartedly that the injustice revealed is impossible in the America they know. That there is freedom from discrimination and violence, and all Americans have access to good schools, clean drinking water and breathable air.
This is the legacy that I want to leave all our children, but we will only accomplish this by working together in good faith, bound by empathy and compassion. But most important, we must confront persisting racial disparities.
Failure to do so is not only perpetuating racism, but a surefire way for history to repeat itself years from now. And our children deserve a better nation than the one that their grandparents had.
