Neither blacks nor whites know accurately why. The answer can be found only in the distant past, a past as deliberately obscured as the Capitol's secrets. Solutions to our racial problems are possible, but only if our society can be brought to face up to the massive crime of slavery and all that it has wrought. Now never begins yesterday. To set afoot the new and whole black woman and man, we must first tell the victims what happened to them-before and after America was new.
Insights crystallize often under the oddest circumstances.
Like a melodic idea to a composer, a light pops on for no apparent reason, allowing understanding where one has been well trained not to have it. In a small village in western Turkey, a while back, I watched a dervish whirl in his mesmerizing dance, performing a ritual a thousand years old. Seeing disparate peoples in far-flung cultures held safely above the abyss by the stout rope of their traditions, I have always been left, as I keenly was in the case of the whirling dervish, with a feeling of sweet sadness, perhaps envy even. For the armaments of culture and history that have protected the tender interiors of peoples from the dawn of time have been premeditatedly stripped from the black victims of American slavery. No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefited, with the connivance of the United States government, from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it.