Dawn and Race

 

Saint Michael's College this evening.

I was reading Willa Cather's 1913 work, O Pioneers! over the weekend and loved this line:
'The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world. The colors were reflected in the globules of dew that sheathed the short gray pasture grass.'

This morning I found myself outside among trees and sun around 6:45. The brightness of the outdoors felt as if it could be 11 a.m., yet the stillness proved the time. I thought about how precious and fleeting those moments are early in the morning. The sun so low.

Although the line above describes dawn, when reading it, it reminded me of a line in Sebastian Barry's novel, A Long, Long Way. Describing the sunset, Barry writes, 'the sun was falling off the end of the world like a burned man.' A novel about Ireland declaring home rule, the imagery Barry used throughout A Long, Long Way gracefully contributed to story.

While I don't have the knowledge that others have on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case as I didn't follow it too closely, I've been touched by several Op-Eds about race as the story has progressed in the past year and a half, and feel that the ultimate issue at hand in the story is race. I felt that a selection of Attorney General Eric Holder's words earlier through The Atlantic most resonated with me:

"Yet, for all the progress we've seen, recent events demonstrate that we still have much more work to do -- and much further to go. The news of Trayvon Martin's death last year, and the discussions that have taken place since then, reminded me of my father's words so many years ago. And they brought me back to a number of experiences I had as a young man -- when I was pulled over twice and my car searched on the New Jersey Turnpike when I'm sure I wasn't speeding, or when I was stopped by a police officer while simply running to a catch a movie, at night in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.  I was at the time of that last incident a federal prosecutor." -- http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/listening-in-on-the-talk-what-eric-holder-told-his-son-about-trayvon/277861/

These words resonated in me in that I will never understand what another endures. They reminded me of the injustices that continue in the U.S. and around the world. I thought briefly earlier today, 'If the United States had never legalized and promoted slavery for the purposes of maximizing exports and trade of valuable crops, would racism exist in the U.S.?' which led me to 'If blacks had forever been equal to whites, would racism still exist?' Both answers remain unclear. Solely for the reason that we will never know these answers, or what another endures, I'm inclined to believe that Holder's experiences (and likely Trayvon Martin's) should be a concern of us all.