An Excerpt

As I was cleaning my apartment today, I came across an excerpt from 'Black Boy'.  I had forgotten completely that I had taken the time to write this down.

I think this excerpt is important, because it still applies to our nation today.  Whether you are Black, Asian, Hispanic, Latino, Gay, Straight, or even White... this applies to you, because we are all getting so used to finding faults in others and then using that against them.  By doing so we create a space, a great distance between us and others.  We lose out on connections.  We miss out on many great opportunities that would be there, if we could just look beyond a skin color or sexual orientation.

So, here is to making new friends, and forging the path of love... no matter who you are, what you look like, or what your sexual preferences are.

An excerpt from 'Black Boy' by Richard Wright

"... As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for White America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known.  I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task.  Culturally the Negro represents a paradox:  Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture.  Frankly, it is felt right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely.  Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion.  If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part- though a symbolically significant one- of the moral attitude of the nation.  Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity.  It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it saves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.  Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs."

Can't we all just get along?  I feel like we should have figured this out by now, I mean it is 2014 after all!  But, it isn't just fashion trends that come back throughout the years.  Unfortunately, our lack of understanding is also something that comes back, over and over.  Hopefully, we will find a way to embrace others for who they are sooner, rather than later.