Brown Women Don't Cry Part II

A White Thanksgiving

It is a long coddled myth that racism appears primarily in the words that are said. The explicit and the uttered may have been the primary weapons of the racists of the past but they are not the tools of denigration today. Exclusion and derision happens in far more pernicious and delicate ways to day, the syringe so to speak has replaced the axe and hatchet. This is particularly true of our inner spaces, within families and marriages where we imagine love to have washed us clean of the muck and mud of such derisions. Specifically, this is the story of spending Thanksgiving 2014 with my white in-laws days after having been in Ferguson, Missouri for the Grand Jury verdict in the Michael Brown case.