…that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

That wisdom is not unique to our people but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in a particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels in dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribed this love in its sacred texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, hold her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world – which is really the only world she can ever know – ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me.

I’m not sure what more to say about Between the World and Me except that this book is about how dangerous it is to grow up black in the United States, especially for boys becoming men. The conceit of the book is that it is a letter to Ta-Nehisi”s son on that son’s becoming a man but the book is really a polemic against the fiction of the American Dream. The book is an easy book to read even if it is uncomfortable at times. Do I think every thinking  white American should read Between The World and Me? Yes.

They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.Donald Trump

I’ve been reading comments, from all my friends on facebook, that the people who like Donald Trump are stupid and I don’t agree. In a New Yorker article, about a week or two ago, they described a typical Trump follower, She worked at a furniture company, she said. “But the industry went down the tubes.” Her husband, Charlie, used to build household electricity meters at a General Electric plant, until the job moved to Mexico. Now he parks cars at a hospital. They weren’t exactly living the American Dream, but they had good jobs and now they don’t.

These are the kind of people who – 25 to 50 years ago – could have reasonably expected their kids to go to a good state college and move up to a white-collar job. Now they get paid way less and that once inexpensive college costs way more. These are the kind of people who could have reasonably expected to have a decent retirement from their company pension and are now worried about being homeless. They have voted for Democrats and Republicans and it doesn’t make much difference, their lives just keep getting worse. They played by the rules and they got poorer while the rich – who seem to have a different set of rules – just get richer.

Now, Donald Trump comes along, and he doesn’t fit any stereotype, he is that rare bird, a Republican populist. Somehow, that gives hope to alot of people. They think that in influx of Mexicans who are willing to work cheap has lowered their wages and they think that the various trade deals have made the rich richer but left them poorer and they are – at least partially – right.

It doesn’t mean that they are stupid, it just means that they don’t think the usual suspects give a damn about them.