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I had breakfast with my daddy this morning. We talked about what happened at the Capitol. He saw in their faces a familiar hatred. “What got you into politics,” I asked. He paused. He shook his head. “Those white boys back then tried to lynch my brother,” he said, “that did it.”
He grew up in Dillon, SC. His daddy was the pastor of a small Black rural church. “Daddy didn’t really get into politics,” he told me, as he recounted life in the 60s and 70s. “But for us, we weren’t from colored to Black.” He saw the hatred back then and now. He survived it.
It is terrible that he has had to live through what @kieselaymon calls, the worst of white folk. He has had to face them in white Christian churches. He had to face them in white schools. He has had to face them on white jobs. And now, once again, he faces them all around us.
What breaks my heart is that I have to face them too. My children will have to face them as well. I just hope in the years to come I will be able to do what my daddy did, sit down with my children, tell them what I learned, and all the ways I failed, and all the ways I loved us.
