The News from Manhattan: Thursday, June 18, 2020

I’m the whitest white man you will know,

White since a long time ago,

But Jesus my brother

Said to love one another.

Was he white? I do not think so.

I’m a writer and I write alone

About people and places I’ve known.

I can’t change that

But we need to work at

Making the Other our own.

I’m in quarantine and not about to march in the street, so what’s to be done? Listen, read, pay attention, and send money to places where it’ll do good. Friends of mine have done heroic things in establishing and supporting charter schools in hard-up neighborhoods. With the money I’ve lost in truly stupid real estate deals, I could’ve done something good. I hope to get another chance. The big task is to uproot a corrupt government in Washington and elect people more inclined to see the realities of inequality. It’s amazing to see Mr. Floyd’s picture everywhere — how one man, driving along Lake & Chicago in Minneapolis, a corner I know very well, caught in a terrible vise and executed while people on the sidewalk yelled at the cops and filmed it with their phones, now becomes the inspiration of a powerful movement. How the President of the United States, using tear gas to clear a peaceful protest so that he and his sycophants walk across the street and he can stand in front of a church and hold up a Bible like the alien object it is to him — it’s the dumbest show he ever put on. Anybody who looks at that picture can see that the man is a 10cent phony. Anybody. He lost his re-election by walking across the street.

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