Whether 100 days on — or a full-year on, or 42 years on, we were alerted by an erstwhile long time commenter to a sad story about the transcendent moment at right.
When a person of color makes any public statement, it is often at a price — to their privacy at a minimum, and it seems, in many cases, to their very safety. Here is that story:
…I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn’t get vaccinated yet. Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite.
I didn’t know then that I’d become famous, but I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you’re Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service.
It didn’t help that I was getting DMs from friends telling me [to buy a bullet-proff vest and wear it]….
Like Anon., this saddens me. Just as it saddens me to this day that Dr. King had to endure much the same, over many years — and this cancerous hate ultimately took him from us.
But in the same breath, I am also terribly proud of her… and her courage. She is the embodiment of our… better days ahead, our undiscovered country… our… shared “out of many, one…” future. Onward, twice at 9:08 AM, smiling. ….
नमस्ते
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