“What narratives is the United States, under the ‘leadership’ of Donald Trump generating now? Separated immigrant families, children in cages, unarmed people killed by a militarized police force, a proliferation of weapons that turns any lone gunman with hurt feelings into an instant mass murderer. The policies and products of an administration that leverages congressionally unchecked power to make miserable the lives of the many, in service of one very large, frail, white male ego.
If she hadn’t left us this past Monday morning, how would Morrison have written about the latest 2019 appearance of the ‘dark, psychic force,’ that Marianne Williamson identified as underpinning America’s failure as a cultural melting pot?
While we’ll never have new words from the Nobel Laureate, we can be grateful for those she left to help us confront the racism corroding our national soul. In December 1993, she warned a Stockholm, Sweden audience of ‘infantile heads of state’ who speak only ‘to those who obey, or in order to force obedience…Oppressive language does more than represent violence…It is violence.’
We still have an opportunity to do as Morrison did, to move the lives of the asylum-seeking immigrant, the impoverished, imprisoned and powerless away from the margins and toward the center of the story of Donald Trump’s cruel, racist America. Though we’ve collectively lacked the author’s urgent persistence to tell the truth about who we are, it’s never too late to start.”
becky sarwate 