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I am a journalist and author. I've covered ugliness & injustice & hatred & death for more than 20 years. I find myself empty and speechless today. A writer with no words, I've been hollowed out by the racism that defiantly refuses to be shamed, the violence that knows no mercy.
If I had wise words or hope or context to offer, I've already expressed them dozens of times in the past, every time that the nation I loved broke my heart and the people I think of as countrymen showed no compassion for their American family writ large.
I simply have nothing more to say. If you tell me that our country that I love is the greatest in the world, all I can do is gesture mutely, draw your attention to what is happening on our streets. Nothing I say can have more impact than the truth of our current situation.
In my younger days, I might have written a passionate think piece about how the underlying hatred stems back to a Civil War that was ostensibly won by the North but in which the South was the real victor. I don't have the energy any more.
Mute and speechless, I hear Toni Morrison's voice echo in my head, that this is not something any person of color can solve. "White people have a very, very serious problem," she said, "And they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.”
I wish you guys could solve this problem and leave us out of it. I wish the rotten core of America could be cleaned without involving those who didn't contribute to its putrefaction. But whatever has gone wrong in White America is focused on black faces. We can't step away.
"Physician, heal thyself." The meaning of that ancient phrase is that you shouldn't tell others to address an ill that you are suffering from. In other words, don't tell black Americans about what's wrong with their communities when there is so much wrong with yours.
I have been returning to poetry today because I have no words left to express the devastation in my soul today. Because I need the genius of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks to articulate my anguish.
Even someone as light-skinned as I has been thinking about race and writing about race and talking about race for nearly all of my 50 years. I need my white friends to take this burden from me. I need you to take over, because my steps are faltering.
I don't know what to say, America. I thought I didn't have a heart left to break. I was wrong.
