No One Ever Asked

by Katie Ganshert

On May 17, 1954, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which legalized state-sponsored segregation, was overturned. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court stated that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. At the turn of the twenty-first century, education for black students was more segregated than in 1968.

She wondered if her feathers were going to get ruffled. My goodness, white people and their easily ruffled feathers. Well, she was tired of tiptoeing. She was tired of handling their egos with care when they hardly thought twice about her heart.

I helped her understand that we don’t learn about our past to feel bad about it. We learn about the past so we can learn from our mistakes.”

Three years since the smell of peach cobbler became forever tainted by grief. Three years since an entire church community stuffed itself inside Anaya’s childhood home to eat that peach cobbler and reminisce about a man who’d been taken much too young. Three years since Granny’s lament—an unbroken wail that joined the birds as she beat the ground with its insatiable appetite for black bodies.

Proof that everyone had struggles. Significant struggles. Somehow the realization made her own feel less…isolating. Less…daunting.

“It ain’t easy. Choosing to see the image of God in people who don’t see the image of God in us? I think it’s one of the bitterest pills I’ll ever have to swallow. But, baby, those people? They aren’t the real enemy. The minute we start believing they are, the real enemy wins, and our hearts turn hard.”

“And forgiveness isn’t pardon for them. It’s freedom for you. ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.’ That don’t mean we’re silent for justice. That don’t mean we aren’t called to fight against all forms of oppression. But sin has a death grip on this world, Anaya. It is broken, with broken systems and broken people. And Jesus died for it all. The oppressor and the oppressed.”

establishing healthy neurological pathways. That last one was done largely by something called the do-over. Let’s try that again. What’s another way to say that? How can we do that differently?