No single crisis in recent American history has so abruptly magnified the country’s racial disparities andinequities as the coronavirus.
If COVID-19 was not enough to summon a richly warranted sense of frustration at this moment, there has been another white vigilante shooting of an unarmed black man, engaged in everyday benign routine, in my home state of Georgia.
The confluence of these two tragic events raises a deeper question: What does it really mean to be free in a country that refuses to address health disparities (and its social determinants to health) and the humanity of black people or to be so singularly obsessed with claiming individual freedom that it negates empathy and enactment of justice for all?
At the 1965 debate at the University of Cambridge with William Buckley, James Baldwin said that the only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power and no one holds power forever.
Implicit in his world view is that power without wisdom only dissipates itself with time; that wisdom which bypasses the imperative to embrace justice, mercy and freedom perhaps is really only sophistry after all; and true freedom, I contend, embraces a curious balance of self-determinism and a willing interdependence of the economic, political, and spiritual.
