Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – There is a reason why the last week has been dominated by coverage of two very different individuals who share arbitrary characteristics that can define the fate of people in our country’s hierarchy. Two Black women — one at the very top of society’s power structure, running to be the country’s first woman president and evoking the coarsest attacks on her intelligence and private life, and the other at the opposite end, a mother of two in Springfield, Illinois, who called 911 for help and was instead killed point blank by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home, caught on body cam for the world to see.
These two women are bookends of our country’s unaddressed history and persistent inequalities. It seems a karmic confluence of events, to challenge our vision of who belongs where in our society at this singular moment, to force us to see the centuries-old stereotypes and reckless disregard of those who have been assigned to the lowest rung of perceived deservedness and worthiness on the basis of the arbitrary characteristics of being born a woman of color in this country.
In this time of both stark juxtaposition and connection, Vice President Kamala Harris, from the campaign trail, called the grieving family of Sonya Massey. “She gave us her heartfelt condolences,” Massey’s father James Wilburn told the news site The Shade Room, “and she let us know that she is with us 100 percent, that this senseless killing must stop.”
The circumstances of these two people, subordinated historically by gender and race, could not be more different. Yet the response to what catapulted them to the headlines has been swift and extraordinary — from the record-setting fundraisers and rallies for Harris to the near immediate arrest and homicide charge against the sheriff’s deputy shown shooting Massey on the body cam, a rarity in such cases.
The response speaks to the wisdom of Albert Einstein’s words about overcoming racial injustice, words which became the epigraph to Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Einstein said: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.” | Posted on 31/Jul/2024 19:41:10
