Opinion: When I look at America torn apart, I see my own family and Australia's history of racism, writes Stan Grant
These are hard times. Times when it feels like we are forced to choose sides. Times when race matters and I wish it didn’t.
Sometimes Coates’ words seem too bleak, yet this week his words sound like prophesy to black Americans. This week, George Floyd is every black person in America who has died under a whip, lynched from a tree, or perished in a building set on fire by racists in white hoods. History hangs so heavy in our world – on the streets of America, across the Middle East. It hangs heavy in the borderlands of Europe and behind the wall of China.
How I wish we did not have to choose sides. How I wish we could slip the yoke of history. How I wish this was not about race.But this week, it is hard to not see race when race is all we see. When people who have been branded by race seek the solidarity of race.Yet the violence can blind us to those people black and white marching together peacefully, those who still cling to what the greatest American president, Abraham Lincoln, called the better angels of our nature.
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