in his Thursday New York Times column, titled This Is Your Moment
It a column about generational differences, starting with the distance between the experience of his parents and his own:
I was born in 1970, on the heels of the civil rights movement. I didn’t witness my parents’ struggles and their parents’ struggles before them. What I knew of darker days I learned in school, read in books or saw on television. Therefore, as a matter of circumstance, there existed a space between that reality and me. It was more pedagogical than experiential.
He talks about his own consciousness, and how his understanding was only in the mind, lacking the kinds of experience people older than him had experienced
so that the mind and spirit could unite in moral outrage and the voice lift in anguished outcry.
For him, things began to change with specific events - Rodney King, James Byrd. He reminds us of both. In the Rodney King case he recites the text earlier that day by one of the officers involved in the beating with its racist reference to "Gorillas in the Mist" and connects it with the Grand Jury Testimony of Darren Wilson.
He quotes DuBois on the
“double consciousness”:
“One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Here I stopped, remember how when I first read those words a half century ago I realized how different my experience was, even as the grandchild of Jewish immigrants. It broadened my understanding of the push for Civil Rights, and evoked in me a passion for equal justice that is not yet burnt out.
But Blow is just getting started.
He talks about how recent events have increasing numbers of people think race relations and relations between police and minority communities are worsening, even as he reminds us that they are still better than in historic times. Yet he acknowledges the "nagging frustration" that things are not going faster, and that we measure change more by comparison to the recent past.
Then in his final four paragraphs he presents us with an argument that makes this column as worthy of Pulitzer consideration as any of his recent powerful columns.
For late adolescents and young adults, the apparent racial retrenchment is clearly jarring - after all, for many their first presidential memory was the jubilation of the election of a young Black President.
I have described the first of those four paragraphs.
I will now push fair use, after making a few additional observations. That is because the final three paragraphs are that superb.
It is about young people, like his children, who fall into the age group he had described, and makes clear that his title is addressed to them.
And despite possible shock and disillusionment at recent events including more police killings of black males and grand jury non-indictments, it is a message of hope and affirmation.
With that, I offer those words by the magnificent Charles. M. Blow:
This is their experiential moment, that moment when the weight becomes too much, when the abstract becomes real, when expectations of continual, inexorable progress slam into the back of a slow-moving reality, plagued by fits and starts and sometimes prone to occasional regressions.
It is that moment when consciousness is raised and unwavering optimism falters, when the jagged slope of truth replaces the soft slope of fantasy, when the natural recalcitrance of youth gathers onto itself the force of purpose and righteousness, when we realize that fighting is the only way forward, that equality must be won — by every generation — because it will never be freely granted.
This is a moment of civic awakening and moral maturing for a generation, and they are stepping boldly into their moment. Yes, they are struggling to divine the most effective way forward, but they will not accept being dragged backward. It is a profound moment to which we should gladly bear witness.