Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Those early college years were the first time I understood what it means to be a black man in America. Part of this meant realizing how my childhood had given me misguided impressions about my own people. I had been fed the same stereotypical stuff about black people as the white kids around me, and I hadn’t been immune: they had me under the impression that the only real way to be black was to be Nelly circa 2002, minus the Band-Aid under the eye.

“The ultimate logic of racism,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “is genocide.”

I bet some people are surprised he said something like that .

A country in which the simple declaration that people who look like me are worth saving has become controversial.

I believe an important part of the cure, maybe the most crucial part of it, is to talk to each other.

The problem with this is that every Black person would have to have 10 discussions in order to cover every white person. Why should a conversation be neeeded to show white people that everyone has equal value and worth?

getting uncomfortable is the whole idea. Everything great is birthed through discomfort.

So true.

“O, let America be America Again / The land that never has been yet.”

This line always makes me sad and angry.

I believe the majority of white Americans are now ready to help America become the land it dreamed for itself.

I think he's being almost childishly naive here. There is a significant portion of the population that thinks the Proud Boys and other similar groups are heroes after January 6.