Photo by Equal Justice Initiative - National Memorial for Peace and Justice

https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial

We’ve Got to Interrogate the past…

I have a deep, abided interest in the future and in order for us to really invest in the future, we have to investigate the past. And so I am using myself as a template, looking at the fissures created along the fault line of coming of age or into adulthood. For Black youth, for Black youth on the margins of poverty, for Black youth along the margins of “divergent” sexual identity that is thought to be “queer” or not the norm, there are so many nuances to what it means to come of age. It could be just focusing on the first love you ever had. It can be looking the way in which you think of yourself as labor in this country. Add to that the way in which Black women function in this society, or try to function in this society, you start seeing all kinds of things that are socialized at a very early age, and crystalized there. 

I love this idea in the Torah where it talks about why you had to be in the desert for those many generations before you could see the promised land. And it was basically - the Torah and the Old Testament are pretty mean about it - it was basically so that the old generation had died out, so that nobody who was every born under the suffering of slavery and the old systems would bring that system into the new place. 

Well, I am a little bit different than that. I believe that we’ve got to interrogate the systems, we’ve got to interrogate why the adults we are function under those systems, and then unteach that, or take those away from the folks who are coming up now. We can’t just blame them for the world that we made. We have to investigate why they were socialized to make it in the first place. - Tarell Alvin McCraney, American Masters Podcast, Nov. 20, 2019 (http://pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/podcast/playwright-and-actor-tarell-alvin-mccraney/)