hope is in the mourning

 
 The hope is in the mourning and the screams [.... Only if these screams and tears and protests shake the very conscience of this nation — and until there is real political and judicial repentance — can we hope for a better society on the other side of this.*



[...]your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.**


*Rev. William J. Barber II 
**Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me