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January 17, 2003
Not something you see every day
Well, maybe that depends on where you spend the day. From Walter Mosley's An African-American Appeal for Peace:
All this is our responsibility. Every child wasting away under his mother's powerless gaze. Every Muslim burned by a Hindu. Every innocent citizen blown up by a suicide bomber or crushed by an onrushing, revenge-drunk tank. I know we are responsible because US dollars have found their way into, and out of, every battlefield, every hospital bed and every pocket of every terrorist in the world.We--black men and women in every stratum of American society--live in and are part of an ecosystem of terror. We, descendants of human suffering, are living in a fine mansion at the edge of a precipice. And the ground is caving in under the weight of our wealth and privilege.
The piece appears in the January 27, 2003 issue of The Nation, but has been up on their site for a while; think I saw it linked at BlackElectorate.com, but they're not so much about the archives from what I can tell. . .
What's not seen often are references to the "wealth and privilege" of black people living in the U.S. Well, if you discount the odd conservative/libertarian insistence that we're the richest, most bestest well-off black people on the planet, which is always in the context of telling us to shut the hell up. So, yes, discount.
Something else rarely seen (again, depending on how you spend your time) are references to "we" by black authors. Or maybe I just got used to the McWhorter-style third person technique of black folks writing about black folks for a clearly-presumed white audience.
Or maybe I need more coffee, as this seems particularly half-developed a notion. . .
Posted by Aaron at January 17, 2003 08:34 AM
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